Why the skoolie life?

We decided to live the skoolie life for many reasons: building our own home, minimizing our belongings, having fewer bills, and having no debt but mostly so we can travel! We both love to travel, learning about others, meeting new people, trying different foods, and seeing parts of the world not everyone gets to see!! We are hoping to be able to work for ourselves making enough to support our lifestyle. We document every step of our build and attempt to put it into a tutorial format so others can learn from it; whether it be how to do something or how not to do it, haha. We have done the entire build ourselves so setting an example for others doing the same with limited tools, money, and resources is important. After we finish, we hope to continue with helpful and fun videos of traveling. We want to continue to set an example of how this lifestyle is possible for anyone if you work hard enough!

Finding and building the bus

We found our bus through a local school auction. Doing our research and checking the vehicle out ahead of time, we did our best to make sure it was the correct one for us. Lucky for us we had some family members with space for us to work on the bus. As we started building we didn’t have a plan we just started taking the things we knew wouldn’t stay: seats, metal walls, etc. I ( Meredith) am a planner so spending most of my free time on YouTube university started laying out some steps and decided on a floor plan. Taping it out early helped us get a feel for it: how much space we would need for each thing and if it would work for us. It has been a long process for us, and although we are still not done we have come a long way. We are learning so many new skills and realizing how capable we are. It has not been easy at all but well worth it knowing what it will mean in the end!

We believe that our build is unique in the way we use what we have. We do our best to be resourceful and creative when we don’t have or can’t afford something. If you are on a budget this will be a huge asset and has been one of my favorite parts of our build. My least favorite part is how long it has taken. Every step takes twice maybe three times the amount of time you think but hey, your building a house!! This is all brand new for both of us and neither one of us has done anything like this before. Working at the same time, we only have a couple of days a week to work. But learning to work together and getting this time to grow and bond has been so important.