We Bought a Bus

Hello world! If you’re new here—which you probably are since we just started this blog—I’m Rachel. My husband (Levi) and I recently bought a school bus and are planning on turning it into a tiny home on wheels and living in it for a handful of years.

I guess the first question I should answer is why we bought a school bus. The answer is pretty simple: we wanted to. Levi and I were high school sweethearts, and ever since we started dating almost 10 years ago, we dreamed of living on the road. A van, a car, an ambulance—we considered a lot of options, but decided that it would be too expensive and difficult for our lifestyle.

But cut to 2020, we’re stuck at home in the middle of a global pandemic, struggling to pay our expensive Denver rent and trying to figure out our next step. We didn’t have a lot of family in Colorado and were considering moving to another state to save money, but we weren’t exactly sure where we wanted to go. We thought about Idaho and Utah, going so far as to looking into flights to see apartments. But then, on one hot August afternoon, Levi came home with a crazy idea. “What about a school bus?” he asked me. I immediately shook my head. “There’s no way we could afford that.” Thinking it would cost just as much as a full size home. But after some research, we realized that we could, in fact, actually afford it and that it would be way cheaper than putting a down payment on a house in Colorado. Two weeks later we bought a school bus for $5,000.

We live in an apartment Denver, which means that we don’t really have any land to put a 40-foot school bus on. Plus, we definitely wouldn’t be able to afford high Denver rent prices and spend hundreds of dollars a month converting the bus. That meant only one thing: we’d have to move.

Our families live in a smaller town in Illinois: Peoria. It’s about 14 hours from Denver and flat as a board. It definitely wasn’t our first choice of place to live. But, Levi’s parents happen to own a lot of land there, which they were happy to let us keep our bus on. So, the afternoon we purchased our bus we immediately gassed him up and drove him across the country to park him on my in-laws lawn.

That was in September of 2020. Unfortunately, our lease in our Denver apartment doesn’t end until March, 2021. That means we’ve been biding our time here, working, saving money and packing up our things to move to Illinois in mid-March. But it has given us some time to downsize. Because the bus will be about 250 square feet of living space once we’re finished, we’ll have to get rid of about 90% of our things.

Right now, we have exactly two months until we make the move to Illinois. We did find an apartment (yay!) so that’s all settled. All we have to do is pack and get it going!

Because we’ll still be a while, I won’t have much to blog about until then. If you’re interested in hearing more about our move/our new apartment or just want to know more about us, let me know! I’m so excited to get involved in this awesome community.

Thank you for reading! Please drop a comment down below so we know people are actually reading this. And, feel free to hit that follow button to keep up with all our latest bus news.

Just between bus, we’re happy you’re here!