Family Of 8 Downsizes To A DIY Bus Conversion For A More Fulfilling Life On The Road

alright, we are eight people, three dogs and a toilet on a bus, this is our bus, it is a 1986 MCI, so this is our living room, craft room/dining room, home school space, we have two tables that fold out to the sides that are actually just the back of the sofa and the storage space inside. We have all the kids' games, toys and art supplies, sewing supplies, as well as home school supplies down here, so we have plenty of storage space on our couches, which has been really nice and a nice thing. . What we do a lot when we drive is put one side of the table up so the kids can do art projects or work on homework or whatever while we drive, we have four seat belts on each side of the couch and it's actually one of my favorite features, a space on the table for the sewing machine or the kids' art supplies or whatever is going on at the time, that's Hudson, he's so excited to show you his room, like I said, here It's where we do all our school work.

Family meals are held here, we are very much a table eating

family

and that was part of our

family

culture. We didn't want to sacrifice ourselves for a small

life

. We knew we wouldn't always have a picnic table or maybe. On rainy days or whatever, we wouldn't always be able to eat outside, although we do a lot, so it was very important to us to have a table that we could all fit at. In fact, many people requested the plans. for those who are building buses and we are happy to share them with whoever thinks could make something like this work because it doesn't need to be on this larger scale, it can be a smaller table, something you know only for a couple of the same people, but it is still a table that stores very easily and does not take up much space, so we are a quite musical family, that was another part of our family culture that we wanted to take along the way, our daughter writes a lot. music and he plays the ukulele and my husband plays the guitar so we have it on the wall and then my son plays the drums and obviously we couldn't fit a drum set on the bus so we got on this little snare drum and it really works . as an extra seat or a stool, so we found it really multipurpose, yeah, the rides, Trump, we've been traveling for seven months, the first few weeks were really tough, we had sold everything and we took this leap, and so when are we going to get these?

The first few weeks were really difficult, we would just stare at everyone in the room, wondering what we did, so the only thing I would say to people who are starting out is that the first part is difficult and somehow catches us. . by surprise, so we had watched a lot of videos and talked to a lot of people and we had flown to a little festival back home and we had done a lot of homework and we felt well prepared, but then there were still some things that surprised us, you know, how to deal with the water, finding a place to stay, or the composting toilet, or just having us all in such a small space, on top of each other, yeah, you know, there was just a learning curve, but now I feel like we're over that. and obviously there are still tough days like any

life

style, but where it's good, yeah, roots of our choice, you know the dog likes to rest here so you can look out the window while we.

When we are parked we put all our backpacks or hiking gear, jackets, dog leashes, yoga mats, some vacuum cleaners, it's our utility closet, actually when we drive we just take all the jackets, backpacks and stuff down, we We lay down on a bed or something and then hit the

road

. with this floor it's just an adhesive vinyl tile and it worked pretty well, it worked pretty well, but the good thing is that if any tile gets damaged at any time, then we can easily remove one and replace it. I get a lot of compliments on the floor, you know, there's a lot of platforms you go on and they're very, very thin walls, very thin glass, but I really like the noise reduction that happens when we close the windows on our bus. makes it easier to sleep in areas that may have a little

more

traffic or you know things going on around you, like here at school, Palooza, there's a lot of activity even at night, we wanted to make sure we had a lot of light, so We put quite a few LED lights on the ceiling and they worked very well, so there's always light in here if we want it and I think it helps a lot because, like we said, we spend a lot of time playing board games or, you know, eating or whatever. be it, so it works very well.

We knew we wanted a lot of white to open up the space and make it feel a little big and light and airy, but we also wanted some color, so we brought that in on the cabinets and then the warmth of the wood countertops, which we really loved, so we choose full size appliances in the kitchen just because we have so many mouths to feed and we cook a lot of it from scratch etc. We opted for a full size gas oven and cooked on the stove and an oven, both powered by propane. We can usually fit about two weeks worth of food and between our cabinets and our refrigerator for a family of eight, that's a lot of food, our solar has been running.

There's a lot to handle and that hasn't been a problem at all, our cabinets are quite spacious and we've just used a lot of vertical storage in them to be able to fit all of our baking sheets and all that stuff. of stuff and these drawers also close when we're on the move oh yeah we have a locking feature underneath it's actually a patio door lock that I installed underneath and it goes up the bottom of the drawer to keep it closed so when we're away Moving, we chose our dinnerware in advance looking for something that was really durable but also took up a lot less space, so it's ten plates and they don't take up much space, so we just chose enameled dinnerware and then once we had the dinnerware we were able to design this drawer Custom made to fit all our tableware for 10 people.

This is the only oven on the bus. It's down here. Keeps the front of the bus quite warm. The back of the bus. Yes. We have had a couple of pretty cold nights with temperatures up to 20 degrees or so and we found that things get a little chilly in the back of the bus so we only have a few extra blankets there, but if we ever have a stay prolonged. In colder weather like that, then we'll probably have to come up with a heating solution for the back of the bus. It also doubles as extra cutting boards, which is really nice because someone can be making dinner here while someone else is doing it. chopping vegetables or whatever on this side, one feature we have yet to take advantage of is our outside shower.

We were studying the life of Abraham Lincoln and we didn't even connect the dots, realizing that we are actually in Illinois. a little helpful our greeting so we literally went to his house we went to the courthouse where he worked we went to you know where they had his funeral and it was like suddenly all we've been reading is that my children are stepping in those footsteps, you know, and

more

for them than something they read in a book, tomorrow it would be more for all of us, not just them, to know that it's not just something they read about, it's something they walked, we have a storage closet here. where we have some storage to hang some clothes, it is also a kind of command center for all the technical things, water heater, battery levels, inverter, also at the bottom of this closet is the access to the storage room my oldest son, so this being a tour bus, there's some big storage base underneath and that middle storage compartment that we were actually going to turn into our kids bedroom and he loves that you know it's his cave , he loves it and you can access it from here or you can access it from the storage compartment door. outside he can't open it from the inside, but sometimes he just opens it and stays in his room, which is also where our snake lives because that is our 13 year old snake, such an important part of the eight people, three dogs and one snake in a bus and then as we come back we have the four bunk beds that we made so these two on this side are two six foot bunk beds and these are two five foot bunk beds because we have some younger kids that we just don't need that amount of space and as the older kids grow and move out, we can rotate people to the larger bunk beds so we have our 16 year old son, our 10 year old boy here, our 10 year old girl downstairs. here and then our 4 year old son decided to live this lifestyle, obviously we talked to our kids and got their feedback but a lot of it was out of their control, it's what we felt was best for our family but this was completely under their control, it gave them something to say, okay, this is my space, it's my decision and I can control what happens here even though it was a difficult transition and they still had this thing that was theirs, this is kind.

In our closet area we have a washer dryer and we don't really use it much when we are in the desert because it requires a lot of water, so if we have close access to water, we will use it and air dry or if we are plugged into the outlet current, it will use the dryer function and it actually worked very well for us on our bus. We really wanted to separate all types of bathroom facilities, so we have the sink separate from the toilet. separate from the shower so again it was our number of people it all comes back to how many people we have on the bus and how we had to design around that specific theme but it worked out really well so we can do what everyone can do their thing and what they need to do, so this is a stool that we designed for Hudson, our youngest son, he's four years old and it challenged him vertically.

He folds up and you can stand there and brush your teeth or wash your hands after using it. the bathroom or whatever, so it really helps us because we don't have to lift it up to the sink all the time. This is also where our water heater is. Here we have cleaning supplies, rags and some paint supplies so we can do paint touch ups and then our water heater is underneath. I wanted it to be as close to the bathroom, washing machine and shower as possible. You know, we had a big house with four bedrooms and four bathrooms.

You know, in the historic center. district, you know, beautiful historic house, yes, work, yes, great neighbors. I had a fantastic job and you know it was all very, very good, as long as you know what you're supposed to do. It really opened up our time, not just for spending. with our kids but the rest of our family we spend a lot more time as a family with your parents with my parents with my brother with your siblings with the extended family that we haven't seen in years it's kind of a wall from our command center to the kids they like to know where we're coming from and we have our calendar, we like to know where we've been so we have our map and then just to do lists and we spend a lot of our time in national parks, museums, things like that, etc.

We kind of let our kids make this wish list every quarter that they can choose just for fun, the kind of thing that's in the whipped cream fight for this month, so that's this month, yeah, okay, I I will prepare for the whipped cream plan. This is a composting toilet that we just made ourselves, it's essentially a five gallon bucket with a year and a diverter. A very good friend of ours just 3D printed a urine diverter with some of the dimensions and what we needed and it worked. Great, I lined the whole inside with something like a rubberized plastic bath so it's completely sealed so that if there's a spill or something, it can be easily cleaned and sanitized and it worked well, so there we have it and then just Next, we have peat, which is what we have been using to cover the solids.

My wife says to me, hey, can you make a bathtub out of a whiskey barrel? I said, sure, why not, so we really like the idea. From the exposed copper we were looking at shower heads and we really wanted a shower head that had a pause button so you could set the temperature and then press the pause button to stop it, you know, and take a military shower. You know, soap up and then turn it back on to rinse, but they were a lot more expensive so we just built in a pause button. I just put in a third valve for hot and cold and then this is our pause button. valve and it works very, very well, this is a cool feature that we actually brought from our house, this is the measuring chart for all of our children, you know even our oldest children, when they were about a year old, and this is in our realityfamily. motto our family motto is have fun be good learn a lot this is the master bedroom and the hangout place and the tv room the movie room my office this is where I work I do graphic design and instructional design to make a living while we are on the

road

, which is good because we can do it from anywhere we have service.

This is nice because then when we have the family here for a family movie night on the computer, it's like a sectional couch and they all fit in and this is the bed folds down into kind of a queen size futon, so your style, yes, it takes up the entire area, so the whole thing becomes our bed at night. This bus has a pretty big engine, it has what is called a Detroit Diesel 8v 92. and it is a big boy when we bought the bus. It had 225k miles on it, so we're really wearing out three storage compartments underneath.

The first one is just storage, it's just direct storage. We keep sports equipment of all that type. of stuff, the middle bay is our oldest son's room, so in this third bay we have all of our mechanical stuff, we have our water, a hundred gallons of fresh water, a 100 gallon gray tank, we have our battery bank, which is six and six volt batteries connected in parallel and in series so we have a 12 volt system and then down here I have all of our charge controllers, our 330 pound inverter propane tanks and then we start the generator at front and in the other bay we decided we wanted to be off. -grid as much as we could and a big part of that is finding a solution for power, obviously, so I used all the space I could and put six three hundred watt panels in there so we have 1800 watts of solar power. turn it on there and really, as long as we don't have a couple of cloudy days in a row, I will never have to run this generator, it keeps up with everything you can find on Instagram, YouTube or Facebook, eight people, three dogs and a snake . a bus, one word, no spaces and the numbers, the numbers, yes, fill in the numbers if you're asking yourself the question: can I do that?

Can I live like this? The answer is absolutely yes, go ahead, good luck everyone, thanks for watching.