VANLIFE |Tiny House Shuttle Bus Conversion: Take a tour!

Hi, this is Patrick, an outdoor adventure YouTube channel in New Jersey, here at a cape state park. I'm camping here for the night and I just met up with Rita and Rita has this beautiful I guess it's a

shuttle

bus well she's going to tell us all about it she's going to give us a

tour

of the interior hi Rita welcome to New Jersey outdoor. I would like to show you my

shuttle

bus. It is an e450 Super Duty 7.3 diesel engine from 1999. It is very powerful. It's a shuttle bus that you can see. I don't know if you can see that it used to have residents from the Cape n alone Cape Henlopen Senior Center and the reason it's so important is because that's why we bought the shuttle, it was our favorite place to go camping in Delaware Cape Henlopen and As soon as we saw that we knew the bus was for us even though we had already been to the market by bus so if you want I would like to show you the inside so this is what we call the area from the kitchen to the living room here.

I have a suburban stove, three burners, it has an oven and a grill. I love that this is our vent for our propane heater. Propane tanks are in the rear. I'll show you in a minute, but it's cool. I'm not saying you don't need the aisle around a toaster because I can use the grill in here. I have my control switches for the lights, switches to turn off the lights and well, the switches for the lights and I have a USB port here, everything on the bus is 12 volts and then I put these clean shelves here, we usually keep water bottles here and just to keep the counters clean and everything so just these two are my only upper cabinets and as you can see it has a lot of space but the knees were store bullets or just someone filmed no I had everything here Nate Wagner from my friend Wagner he heats up Wagner's woodwork he's a friend of mine and he said I love a challenge and I said well boy I got you one so what he did was he helped me I designed it and he made it come to life, so we have these cabinets and he also did this, this kitchen counter and the cabinets.

I guess you could say we have two drawers. They are quite large and contain many things. This is our pantry and then we have a nice area underneath here. This is a backflow, so when we drive, the water in the tank does not return and does not. I don't let any steam escape and this is my Revati sink. I love it and the reason I love it is because it's big enough to hold my largest frying pan and we can also wash our hair in here and

take

bats as sponges. Up here this also opens up and out, so if we want to

take

an outdoor shower, we have an outdoor shower that's pretty clever.

Thank you and then let's see, here is our bench, this is where we sit to eat. We were going to have a table and we actually had a table here, but we found out we didn't need the table so we just sat with the benches and the benches come up and hold our systems, hold our mechanics and junk, so it's like you had a hamburger system, I have one and I have an inverter that controls an outlet because I wanted an inverter to charge my computer if I needed to bring my computer, but the pump, the accumulator tank and here's our fresh water tank, fill it up. from the outside it's about 40 gallons okay that's a good size yeah yeah some kind of 12 volt demand pump yeah you're cooler yeah we have a 12 volt pump and then hooked up to her, there's the accumulator type because we discovered that our water was pulsating and it turns out that we needed accumulator tanks and it's very easy to install, so as you can see, the pumps don't make much noise and where does this wastewater go?

Well, I have a five gallon tank under the bus here and I have another one there for urine. I should say well, I'll get to that in a minute, but then what happens is I can attach a hose to it and drain it where necessary, but this. It's actually just water with like dr. Bonners and I could really throw it anywhere and I just take it home and throw it away or if there's a sanitary landfill then we can throw it in there so when I showed them the principle, these switches operated our lighting system and each light.

It is controlled by touch, not only that, but you can also dim them. I don't know if it shows them and then they will also become brighter. These are the regular lights oh wow these are 12 volt marine lights so I love this because I can control what I want the lights to turn on but it's very very bright so up on the bench here we have the board and this is a magnetic whiteboard and the reason we do this is because we wanted to make sure that we didn't have pieces of paper everywhere, so when we write shopping notes, we just put it here to help keep the clutter on the board. bus, but being magnetic we can put our parking passes and whatever we need up here and say thank you. you for removing the fan trim ring because I really wanted to explain to us about this roof system because most people would use it as a padded roof or part of the bar, but this is plywood, yes, the reason why we did is because if we wanted to add something later, we wanted to make sure that we could screw it in and it was real, we have an inch, I think it's an inch of insulation and then actually, yeah, this is just an inch up here and then we have the 1/8 board and then we have these purchases that just for looks nothing you really painted this is all white and we just painted it all white yeah so back here is our bedroom area and well there's four of us I . and my three daughters and I didn't want to convert anything.

I really didn't want things to be converted and torn down. That was my goal, not to convert anything, so the only thing we have that is converted is this trundle bed and that's why. I call it a raised trundle bed, I mean, you pull it out and once it sticks in, okay, something anyway, these are twin size mattresses, they're ten by six feet. I did that so we would have space and none of us are taller than six. feet, so we're kind of a snake that way. These were all pieces of tochka cut to size and on this one we rounded the edges so they fit, you know, so it wouldn't block the path or make it look more open. a lot of people put the hallway in the middle and we couldn't, I just couldn't make it work that way, so yeah, that was said by the same person, Nate Wagner, who made all these bunk beds and when we just stained them and this is a ladder , but it actually supports the point, I will tell you they did a really good job, yeah, above and then below these beds is the emergency room, so underneath the beds that we have were there on purpose. in this size because they are just Ikea containers so when we go out we just take them to our

house

in our closets and carry them many times they will have hangers because we can just pull the Take out the hangers and put them on.

I'm everywhere. I apologize, we can only hang them on those hooks so we have our clothes hanging outside, but then they just slide around here. We also have a tent underneath. like a 12 to 10 by 10 10 canopy so it would always stay there in case we needed it somewhere now this is a sentimental piece. Carpenter Nate did this for me. I have a box like this from my ancestors in At My House and Me, he loved it so he created the same red box too, he imitated it on the bus, but it contains everything that contained our blankets or nightgowns, socks, the curtains, whatever, it's a pretty big space and he likes it.

We know we can, we can sit down and put our pants on or things like that. It's really very useful. Now, this down here is our kind of wildcard, so I've got my tools back here. I'll put extra things in the pantry here. the long trip and then this is my bag that keeps it is a big basket that stores everything it will sort dirty clothes backpacks extra blankets sometimes or winter coats when we go out and all I do is I just have a hook here and there and then I just stick it there like this and it'll hold everything up nicely for our beach chairs and umbrellas in the back and this door actually sorry, this door opens so we can access the same thing from the back, so these two windows, these two doors open and we have the advantage of getting a shuttle bus.

I assume this would have been the handicapped door and yes, that was a feat. Yeah, to get rid of that, there was an elevator or something, there's the elevator, yeah, it was very, very, very heavy, so one interesting thing is to gut the whole bus and get rid of the fiberglass, the bolts and All that, the seats cost me. eighteen dollars, so when I took the lift I put it in my truck and took it to a junkyard and they gave me eighteen dollars for it, so I took the bus down to nothing. They liked everything at Brookhaven, so there was an escape. hatch here and of course it leaks like nobody's business so we bought a sea hatch and just Oh guys look at that, balloon festivals, fireworks, you'll find this up here and it's easy to access so just we get in this bed and it's supposed to stay open, but I wish I had that in my truck.

Oh, this is very nice. This is actually very nice. So we weren't sure what we were going to do with this. I wasn't sure, but. it actually ended up being a good place for all these big things so I put them in that sea hatch for a sunny day so it doesn't become an oven in here and then just for my little shelf and you know. If I have to crawl under the bus that kind of thing my chair this chair so I'm not talking about Sun, what do you do? I mean, if you want to look around you, there are windows around you, so how do you address privacy well? we think we just dress in the back here we have these during the day we have this like it looks really terrible now but it's just taking the plastic off so they can't see and the way it works is when you're there, you can't see nothing through these anyway, it's dark, they're darkened windows at night, we took the curtains off and we just hooked them on these little magnets and I put straps along this edge and there's actually magnetic paint, paint it under this white sill so my curtains will stick here and the bottom has magnets and then they will stick to the ledge because this is actually like an inch or two from this so if they were hanging, they would.

I actually hung out and thought, "You know every inch, like that, you need every inch, so I made sure to put them back, so here's our thermostat that runs that heater in the front of the bus, oh, it's like propane, yes, it is." the propane heater and like I said it's in the back we have the propane works too the water heater is just the water heater and this is a ventless one which is hard to find but we have amazing hot water the reason why I did it. That's because on cold nights we use water bottles, hot water bottles when it's going to be really cold and because there are four of us and it's like, um, I think two liters would take forever to boil on the stove, so I'm pretty lazy. , so I decided to buy one of these and when we fill our hot water bottles, if you turn it on to maximum, it gets very hot, so we don't have to boil the water, that's it, it's hot. long enough to stay in our beds at night we hope to stay warm so now this is what we call this is a refrigerator oh and by the way this is the best invention ever put magnets in your hairbrush and then with three girls and then they never lose it so this is a winter cooler I just think it's the sixty two sides and this is 12 volts and/or AC so if we're at someone's

house

we can just run a wire through the window and plug it in that way. otherwise it's 12 volts and it's actually quite efficient and holds quite a few things so each side can have its own temperature so this could be 50 degrees if I just have fruit or whatever and then this can freeze it . it goes from negative 70 I think 250 what type of batteries are solar?

Yeah, so I didn't want to go solar, it just never felt right to me and that's the thing, if it doesn't feel right, there's a reason, so I just didn't. I didn't and me and solar never felt right to me, so What I do is have two batteries that are dedicated only to starting the bus and running the bus. There is another 200 AGM battery that is on the next bench. those batteries, the alternator charges them, but I have an isolator, so the 208 GM just turns on the lights in my house, the fan that is under repair right now turns on the fan, the inverter, the pump cooler, like that Don't do it later, basically, if I do this right, if you leave everything on.

These lights on the rear are not draining the engine battery properly, but they allow the