We have some big news!
Today, we bought a bus.
This beauty (ignore the love bugs- ’tis the season) was delivered to our driveway this evening. For all you people who know things about buses, she’s a 40 foot Bluebird tour bus made in 2001 with a Cummings ISC 6 Engine and an Allison Transmission with only 59,000 miles!
I have always dreamed of a day when we could buy a school bus and convert it to an RV to travel with our family. I would Pinterest ideas and hope that maybe one day we would make this dream a reality. I finally got JP hooked on the idea and once he saw some of the RV and Bus Conversion Families that I follow on Instagram, he couldn’t let it go! With my vision and JP’s laser focus, we found this bus for sale last weekend, Friday to be exact. We checked with some diesel mechanics and they confirmed that it was too good to pass up. We negotiated and ended up on a steal of a price and the owner drove it down from Tallahassee and delivered it to us! It all happened SO fast, I’m still in shock.
It fits perfectly in our long driveway with plenty of room to spare!
We’ve got big plans to gut the inside and create our own custom Skoolie, but for now, we’ve got 53 extra car seats
I know it’s not technically a school bus, but after some more research, we learned that most school bus ceiling heights are shorter than us (I’m 6’1″ and JP is 6’3″) so we settled our search on city or tour buses with higher ceilings.
We will be working with Skoolie Homes, a company based in Tennessee who specializes in Skoolie renovations. They are working with us on our custom floorpan, finishes and they have helped us so far every step of the way as we searched for the perfect bus. Follow along on our instagram for updates on our home renovations: the one on rock and the one on wheels!
And if you’re interested in the RV/Skoolie lifestyle, check out these snapshots! These are some of the families that I follow on instagram that helped me convince JP what a good idea this was. They are all living the dream, living small and spending time focusing extra hard on their sweet families! These people are so inspirational you guys.
@Arrowsandbow
This adorable quirky family of 5 is currently living in their self-renovated RV while building their dream home- they’ve been RV living for over a year now!
This sweet family of 5 is living full-time and traveling in their self-renovated 1999 Bluebird Skoolie.
This cool family of 6 is living full-time in their modern makeover Skoolie, made by the same company who is going to be working on ours- Skoolie Homes.
It’s a funny coincidence that I had been following The Mayes Team on Instagram dreaming up all the creative and design things about our future Skoolie, while JP was researching away on how to find someone else to do it for us. He came across Skoolie Homes and then we realized that Skoolie Homes had renovated the Mayes Team Skoolie and felt like it was just too good to be true! This sweet family posted a photo a couple days back with a quote that resonated with me hard in this season of change:
“Be willing to go all out in pursuit of your dream. You are more powerful than you think.”
We are chasing babies and chasing dreams and soon, we’ll be chasing highways in our Skoolie!
