When a Master Carpenter Builds a No Budget Bus Conversion

so I worked a lot with sapele on the beach where I had my house and I had all kinds of leftovers in the store and sapele is great for ocean water and for outdoor work and I've also done interior work on boats. That combined, I thought, hey, I'm going to try to make this look like maybe a yacht or something, it turned out really well, this is a 1985 Crown, it used to be a school bus

when

I bought it, it had no windows. It has a 14 inch raised roof, it has 2600 watts of solar on the roof with a solar maintenance platform, what used to be two headlights, I changed it to forehead lights and put a couple of flashing lights on top if You see my mosquito cemetery.

I think we maybe saved a couple people from being bitten on this trip. All the body work and sanding was done by the previous owner so I got it in this condition except for a bit of the Bondo I was trying to fill a pair of. of things, but I don't know if I'm going to paint it. I wish, who knows, this is my side of the 855 Cummins engine, big pancake cam, so they left it flat, everything that would normally be on top. of an engine that I can access right here. I actually extended the door 14 inches and also the port for the diesel heater.

I have a diesel heater in the trunk that heats the back of the bus

when

we need overflow water and then I chose to do a pressure feed system where I can switch this to my tank or I can go to city pressure this metal was all struck. I replaced all this powder coating, the bumper has the Road

master

tow hitch here and the trunk, oh. boy this is like a wall, so crowned with style, he did all the solar work on this bus, crowned with style, he is the man when it comes to solar energy, he does a great job.

I did all this after connecting the power from my panel and wired up the entire bus. but he did all these cable runs here, all the Victron put everything together, all the cables go to the transformer and I tell you what the SLK batteries are, everything he did. Top-notch, it's a top-notch marine water heater on top of these two. The boxes here contain two 55 gallon fresh water tanks, pumping systems there, that's the diesel heater, it's up on the shelf, next to the water heater, there's Elon Musk sitting there, which is, you know, its satellite drive, so I don't know if anyone could. go without it and not have it on the road nowadays because it works great as soon as we plug it in, we have a great instant internet connection, six 24 volt batteries, 100 amp hours, lots of batteries.

I want to put my tools. load everything up here and possibly do some mobile work on people's buses too at some point, but that's after we had a bit of fun six cameras, one in the front and one in the back, it's really nice to have that system of cameras he gave me. additional doors I just loaded this up and built a storage compartment, this is more of a maintenance side, so both oil filters, fuel filter, boom, boom, if we come this way, hopefully, eventually it will be my wife in an outdoor kitchen, it is used.

To be the spare tire area, I have the outdoor unit for my air conditioner mounted below the 18,000 BTU outdoor unit with two 12,000 BTU roof cassettes. You'll see that on the inside I built the door myself from the original bus door. The original bus door comes and has about a two inch hinge here so the door can be opened or in an emergency the door can be pushed open. I took that hinge, cut it off, tapped it on the side and soldered it back on. She placed it in the existing frame, so the frame came back here.

He extended the frame, pressed the buttons and pressed the code and it opens and closes all right and it's like a song, it's like my whole life I've been working with tools. with my hands I started as a roof waterproofer and moved into plumbing for years with a guy who did all the work of going in and out chasing In and Out Burgers. I worked with electricians and everyone, so I have had all the trades in my hands. I went to a general hire, most of the work I do myself, I hired my son for a while and he's great, he's just amazing, he's helped me immensely on the bus.

This is an Eaton Fuller 13-speed manual transmission, so it has its ups and downs. and in full gear and drives like a beast right now fully loaded pulling our Jeep was no slower than 45 50 uphill and other than that any flat terrain I'm doing 70 75 having to back up a little oh those They're going a little bit fast right now I think I'm getting six or seven miles per gallon. I was hoping to get nine or ten, but with the toad back there and everything I've done to the bus and all the weight I put on it. On it, I think he's probably there around six or seven.

We tried to incorporate things from our house and things we really love into the build. This here used to actually be our coffee table in our house. The extremes of this. Now they are the nightstands that you will see in the bedroom. Both are real trucker air travel seats. We're probably 95 percent done with the bus so you can see there are things that just aren't done, but this eventually goes away. be a folding desk and not to mention now you can face everyone in the living room and use it as another seat to hang out and it's also nice and comfortable so here in the living room we wanted to make We sure We had enough space for our family, two children, both married and soon to be five grandchildren, so we wanted to make sure we had an open concept.

This can be converted into a full size bed. We have a hidden table back here that comes out. You can fit our entire family here and have many good times and create good memories. All the finishing work you see on the bus. All this red wood that you see is also an African redwood similar to mahogany, but it has a little bit more texture in the grain, it's more wavy and it actually has more shine to it, like it just stands out when you see it, sometimes it has different colors and effervescence. I just love the sapele, all the kicks have drawers. so we didn't waste any space down there instead of baby locks we put in these twist locks so when we go out we can lock all the doors.

This is my domain. I love cooking. It wasn't always like this. I burned water the first time I tried to make food for my boyfriend, who is now my husband, but now I love to cook, so one of the things I really wanted when we built this was a lot of counter space and a lot of cabinet space. This is my favorite. The extra deep drawer holds my entire set plus a food processor and my Vitamix, which I use almost every day. First time building your own drawers, I'm so proud of these, they come out completely and definitely hold a lot of things I probably need.

I edit a little more, but I love to cook, I love the big sink, we could probably wash both grandkids here in the pull out trash can. I mean, everything flows when we think a lot about the design, well, I guess my second favorite. The drawer would be this, so I guess it doesn't show that I like to cook. I have never traveled. I have been a hard worker my entire life. Heck, my kids have been to Hawaii. My son has been to Italy. I've been. to Baja Mexico and I have never been to Canada. I've been to maybe 10 states and flown over the others.

I want to travel. I want to see the states. I want to drive this. I want to get to Yosemite, Niagara Falls and New York. York City and that's important to me, as long as I still have a little bit of life left and I'm not limping, you know, I definitely don't regret selling the house, this is a lot more manageable and gives us a lot more time to be out doing things. things we want to do, which is get out into nature and meet people and this is the kind of community we were looking for yeah, oh yeah, definitely the people, the people in this community, everyone we've met, everyone's been so welcoming. , I am totally excited to be able to hit the road and have fun and enjoy what we have done with all our hearts, yes, we say we are not here for long, we are here to have a good time. that's it, everything on the bus is electric, electric stove, induction stove, electric stove, we chose to go propane-free because we have so much solar on the roof that we didn't really have a floor plan when I put these six windows up.

I figured I should have plenty of space for my bedroom and bathroom. Back there we will have a lot of space for the kitchen and here in the living room there is a feeling of openness. I'm serious, you know, I mean, there's nothing better than this opening. feeling like both sides are really open and the Airy Max fan is only a 14 inch fan, well this hiking rig is 11 inch so a 14 inch would have left the trim up to here and I don't think it would would have opened. Under my solar panels, 700 CFM, normal Max fan is like 900.

So this actually blows some air out. If you have it in a range hood, you have a huge range hood, we have an RO system which is the automatic water drop system. It is a reverse osmosis system with electric pressure, so it does not leak from your tank pressure. It actually has an electric motor that pushes water out over your reverse osmosis filter. 600 parts per million in and only 60 out, so for me it's a good system of gray water coming out of your Ro, which is not actually dirty water going back into my clean tank. I'm hardly going to increase the dirtiness of the water in my main tank if I just run this RO water back into my main tank oh hi, I'm Justin from mobile homes and I'm going to reluctantly drink this glass of water from this lake and drink Water from lakes and streams is actually the reason we spent over $350 on this great Berkey water filter, but in the time we have lived in our bus, we have always had access to drinking water which we store in our tank. of 100 gallon water and we have never considered putting lake or stream water in this Berkey water filter, it is big. in our way and is very slow to filter the water enters the water droplet ed01 on-demand countertop water filter that runs on batteries that holds 15 cups of water and still filters 30 contaminants let me show you how it works everything you have to do is to press this a small button and it starts filtering water in just a second when the battery runs out you can recharge it with this included USBC charger and whether you are traveling full time or camping clean, safe, filtered water is a must , whether for your Family is the mission of Water Drop.

Now Water Drop has many other purification products like the reverse osmosis system that Brad just showed you and if you want this one, you can have it for a small fraction of the price of Berkey at the link in the description. Greetings. I'm just kidding, this is watered down coffee, thanks to the water store for sponsoring this video, back to the show, nice big refrigerator, big pull out pantry on top, another pull out here, that kind of thing more for the bathroom, washer and dryer combo unit, all of these. panels that I can remove, I remove a couple of screws, I remove these things, all these panels can come down and expose everything inside this Chase to get to my air conditioning units to run new electricity, do whatever I want in this Chase, this It is a granite bowl.

It's not very functional, but I love the way it looks. We chose the Nature's Head toilet instead of putting it outside my bus and having a hole outside my bus. I took a 3M carbon filter and hot glued it in here and that keeps the stench out of my bathroom works great. I like the charcoal filters inside the shower. We have made a lightweight combination fan. I like it. It's a little noisy. The Max fans seem to be noisy. That little walk, that thing is real. Nice little simulated wood tile fan. I see wood inside the showers and it scares me to be a general contractor.

I just make what you have wood on the shower paver on the terrace and I even made a small drainage with the stones. We didn't have a low flow like that kind of thing they do sir, now we went with Hans cultivation. He has an on and off valve that works very well. It comes down to just a small squirt, my wife. takes a shower she moves it down to here she is down here I take a shower I can move it up here oh look I'm getting wet we like that one and down under my stairs here those are the cables for the heated floors the the heated floors are not still connected, everything you see coming and going on this bus is all tied up under these chains and goes all the way.

I can access these chains from front to back, this is my water heater, now it turns off. at 10 o'clock it turns on again at six in the morning. I opted for marine style level indicators, okay, they're not like those little dots one third two thirdsthree-thirds, you know, those RV things are just the worst I have. The ACs on right now front and back is my 1100 AC charging but the PV chargers are getting to 1968 so I got 2600 watts almost down almost 2000 charging my batteries running my AC yeah I should probably get to 100 again at the end of the day. with the batteries and built that door, extended it and reused the hardware so it closed very well and it sealed very well as well.

It worked great again. I just tried to create that boat and yacht look. The metal on the back just happened to come out, I say that word a lot with this bus because it was all junk from when I did the outside of the bus, all these pieces are just junk, they just fell into place and it just happened. I tried to keep the grain moving down. Domino put them together and then made that radius flow. I have drawers under all the nightstands. I did it so I could open the window and we would have something like this right now.

You can hear the stream running by there, so normally we'll sleep like this in this place, but last night we slept here and we were able to lie here in our own bed and hang out in the green. We're all out there. this is this is what it's all about this is what I work so hard I'll be able to go places and just relax take a break eh