Before beginning our build, we found that planning school bus conversion ideas before buying any materials could save time and money while reducing waste. Unlike being chained to a home mortgage for the next 20-30 years, our vision was that we could reduce our debt by living in a tiny home on wheels. I think we’re on to something!

Today’s article is about how we took our school bus conversion ideas and planned them out to save money.

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Roughing Out A Skoolie Floor Plan

In our School Bus Conversion Guide article, we talk about the different areas that we’re building on our school bus. Part of the bus conversion ideas that have popped up revolves around the floor plan.

What’s drawn on paper doesn’t always work out in real life. Before buying our bus, we had drawn out a half dozen skoolie floor plan ideas, and most of them didn’t work in real life.

We didn’t know the exact dimensions of the interior, the location of wheel wells, the height of the ceiling, or even the curve from the walls to the roof. Although sketching out ideas is helpful, we didn’t finalize our skoolie floor plan until we bought our bus in Phoenix, Arizona.

Once we bought our bus, we could take the conversion ideas from our preliminary sketches and see which parts would work and which ideas we needed to ditch.

Little did we know that as we were building, the floor plan would continue to evolve into something that would indeed be unique.

If we were to do this all over again, we would start with deciding where the drains would be in the floor because that alone will change where things like the sinks, composting toilet, and shower would end up. Regardless, everything is figure-out-able!

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Skoolie Plumbing – Water flows downhill

Now that we have come up with a particular floor plan that seems to check all the boxes on ergonomics, utility, and comfort, now we start looking at other systems such as plumbing.

Considering we were not going to have a bucket under the sink for the gray water catchment as we did in our pre-conversion for our title loophole, all the drains needed to find their way under the bus and into the gray water tanks, somehow.

We are not planning on having a black water tank, eliminating the need for a big diameter pipe required for moving turds & TP through plumbing systems.

Gray water tanks only need 1 ½” ABS drain pipes. What’s cool is that the space we allotted in the walls is more than enough to run lines behind. We chose to use ABS drain pipes because ABS can handle more shock without cracking than PVC.

In residential plumbing, the standard for drainage in most places worldwide is ¼” drop for every 12” run, which equates to 1” every 4’.

Now that we have the drains sorted out, water lines are a consideration too! There are many sizes of water pumps. First, we figured out the maximum amount of gallons per minute (GPM) we would be running if someone was in the shower and someone else was washing dishes. Most faucets have those specifications available. All we did was add up the total GPM to determine the water pump size we would need at a minimum to prevent low pressure while two faucets were running at once.

The next consideration for plumbing was what type and size of water lines would be best. There are numerous sizes of waterlines, and the bigger the line, the more water it can carry. Waterline size is important because we have a limited amount of freshwater to use.

When calculating water line size, consider the total volume of water that can be carried by the waterline’s different diameters along with your maximum GPM the water pump can produce. After running some calculations, we figured out that using ½” water lines for both cold and hot water would be best as it was a nice size for our total flow and the pump we went with.

Cell Signal & Internet Connectivity In A Skoolie

Part of the planning process that can be easily missed is cell signal and internet connectivity in a skoolie. We take for granted that we always can pick up our phone to make a call or Google a question to get an answer.

However, while we were traveling, before we started our skoolie project, often, we were left with a brick of a smartphone in our hands as there was not a cell phone or internet connection available. If you’re anything like us, we still have to work to earn an income. Our work is usually done online producing films or building websites, which requires an internet connection.

Times we’re creating art pieces for sale don’t require an internet connection, but might once we need to publish pictures or put up a product listing of the piece.

There are ways to combat this lack of cell signal and internet connectivity in a skoolie.

The most obvious way is to drive to a location where a signal can be picked up.

Another way is to install signal boosters on your rig. Cell phone signal boosters like this one, use a directional antenna to capture a faint signal in the distance and boost it so that it’s useable. However, with all signal boosters, if there is no signal present, then there will be nothing to boost.

Dreamy Dreams (Needs vs. Wants)

While planning our school bus conversion ideas, we went a step further by labeling if an idea is a need or a want. By putting every idea on a big whiteboard, both Erin and I went on a jam session with organizing all the components that would make our lives easier in one way or another.

Some of the items on our whiteboard we would label a need, like a kitchen countertop, for instance. However, a want would be for us to build it out of live edge wood. We could probably go out and find a really inexpensive countertop that would work fine in the kitchen, but if the opportunity arose to find some live edge wood, we would prefer taking the extra time to build the countertop to our exact specifications.

It’s good to dream of the best-case scenario when toying with bus conversion ideas because that lends to increasing creativity to build the space exactly how we want it. Even though we wanted to finish our skoolie build super-fast, we wanted to make sure that it was built sturdy so that it would last.

Upcycling Materials To Save Money

Being that the idea of building a skoolie is to save money, although, at times it’s unavoidable to buy new components, we work our best to upcycle what’s old and make new. Using materials that have been either tossed out on the side of the road or re-using materials that we found in online classifieds, we’re doing our part to breathe new life into old stuff.

An example of upcycling materials is our reclaimed barn wood floor. When we were researching wood floors, all we found was manufactured or engineered wood floor material. That wasn’t going to cut it for us. So we found some available century-old barn wood that was going to be torn down and carefully procured it to turn into what is now our floor.

Other materials we’ve upcycled are the majority of the 2x4s that we used for our furring strips and framing walls. We were able to take apart some old barn platforms, remove the old nails and screws, followed by re-using the boards for part of our construction.

To upcycle materials, we frequently search on the various online marketplaces or head out to a Goodwill ReStore to see what is available. Often, we find the stuff we didn’t know we needed or get ideas about what we could use for various projects.

Realistic Bus Conversion Timeline

We bought our school bus in September of 2019. Right out of the gate I had this grandiose idea that we’d be done in about three months. As of this writing in January 2021, we are now almost a year and a half into our build with no end in sight.

That begs for the question, “What is a realistic bus conversion timeline?”

The answer is different for everyone because it goes back to needs vs. wants as well as bare necessities. Even though whipping out our bus conversion sounded like a great idea, once we started doing demolition and changing plans for what we wanted to do, the timeline began changing.

Inevitably, projects will take longer to do because they might be more challenging to complete or they take longer because we had to learn new skills. Another reason our build is taking as long as it has is that we are filming and editing the videos as we go for our YouTube channel. That alone is a full-time job and we’re packing the time it takes to complete a bus conversion on top of it!

So, could we have finished in three month? Yeah, probably.

But would we have built the bus exactly how we wanted it? No, probably not.

It’s a give and take.

In Conclusion

Planning school bus conversion ideas can save a lot of time, money, and headache. Instead of viewing our entire conversion as one big project, mentally it helps to break the entire project up into smaller projects. Doing this produces a definite starting and stopping point for each project, which gives us benchmarks to view along the way.

What things do you think would help to make planning a school bus conversion more efficient? We’d love to know in the comments below.

Read more: The School Bus Conversion Guide | Building a Tiny Home On Wheels »

Hey, we're Brian + Erin. Currently, we're workin' on our bug out bus. Lucky the proverbial $hit hadn't hit the fan yet when we picked up this 40-foot beauty in Phoenix AZ and drove it up to Canada to convert it. Hopefully, we all still have time...

Honestly, this bus conversion has been the only sane thing in this insane world lately. We can't tell you how good it feels to BE working on something that lights our souls up and has such potential for a life that is entwined with nature, love, and happiness.

Our main goal is to inspire people to get off-grid and become self-reliant. We are well on our way and are super excited to talk about solutions with others who are shooting for a similar way of living.

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