Why Choose Skoolie Life?

When we first brought the bus home and started talking about our plans to live in it full time, there were a few people who raised the question “Why a school bus? Why not just buy an RV?”

It’s a totally fair question and one we asked ourselves many times during the process of getting the bus ready to live in. Buying an RV would’ve saved us so much time and frustration and buying a new one would guarantee us a spot at any park with availability (some campgrounds don’t accept self-made campers). Overall, buying an RV to live in would’ve been a lot less risky.

Now that we live in our conversion full time and are loving every second, I’m finally taking the time to sit down and answer the question “why choose skoolie life?”

The idea for converting our own camper came up in 2019 when we first started dating. We talked a lot about how we both loved to travel and what trips we wanted to take together. One day, we threw around the idea of converting a sprinter van after seeing one on social media and even drew up floor plans just for fun.

We kinda just let the idea sit and had vague plans about making it happen maybe sometime after college. Then, after we got engaged in 2022, we started apartment hunting for our first place together. It was so much of a nightmare that one night while we were looking at listings I said we should just buy an RV and live at a trailer park.

I then actually looked at the cost of renting a camping spot at an RV park monthly and it was beautifully below what what we were looking at paying for an apartment. Another benefit of this now quickly forming plan was that we would own an RV at the end of our payments instead of just paying thousands a month into the void of a landlord’s wallet.

Just running with the general idea I suggested we should buy a school bus and convert it to save even more money. We’d wanted to do a van anyway, this would just be a step up from that. After joking about it a little we looked at each other and realized it actually wasn’t that bad of an idea.

That same night we went on Facebook Marketplace (don’t do that if you want a working bus) and found one half converted only 30 minutes from us. We sent the guy a message the next day and within like a week Cole had gone to look at it and put in an offer. We really didn’t spend a lot of time thinking over options or exactly why we were buying a school bus over an RV. We kinda just went for it.

After we bought it and people started asking us why, our answers were usually that it was cheaper than an RV, we wanted to build it exactly the way we wanted, or that we wanted to be able to boondock.

All of those things are totally true but the effort that goes into building the skoolie and then the commitment to tiny home living afterwards showed us we had a lot of other motivations for choosing a school bus home as well. The sense of accomplishment you feel when you’re using all of the things you worked so hard to build (even just the shower or kitchen table) is unmatched. We also learned so many skills not just like carpentry and plumbing but also figuring out how to work together, freshly married, usually hangry and tired, and still hold hands walking into Home Depot for the 9th time at the end of the day.

Lastly, there’s just this little extra sense of adventure that comes with the whole school bus thing. We’ve met other skoolie owners on our travels and there always seems to be something that connects us (maybe trauma from the building process). When other campers comment on our school bus its always something like “I wish we had done that!” or “That was always our dream too!” So maybe that’s what connects skoolie people, we’re the ones dumb enough to do what a lot of people wouldn’t.

So, we chose skoolie life because it saved us money and gave us the freedom to go off grid in a home we made just how we wanted it. But we also chose it for that extra little sense of adventure that we will be chasing forever.