Hellow, after 8 years of wanting I am now on the road to getting into a skoolie.
I discovered the alternative to mortgage servitude during a session of YouTube surfing in 2011. In the related videos pane, I clicked on a video showcasing a Tumbleweed tiny house dwelled in by a CEO. I was 17, and pondering moving out. I watched it, as the video ended I was introduced to a world of housing where you can live freely in a tiny house on wheels & save thousands of dollars a month by not having a mortgage. I would go on to spend countless YouTube sessions on all things alternative dwelling.
I explored everything. Tiny Homes on Wheels to Shipping Containers, box trucks, moving trucks, semi-trailer dry van / reefer conversions, house trucks, truck camper builds, box truck conversions, step van conversions, Converted cargo trailers, vans, coach buses, shuttle buses, city buses to school buses. In search of dirt cheap build costs & an unconventional look. I even looked at alt. lifestyles, homesteading, permaculture, farming, desert hermitage, hyper-frugalite, urban hermit, war tax resistance through extreme frugality etc. I consumed Kirksten Dirksten, Tiny House Talk & Tiny House Blog. I made many designs in Sketchup and on paper. I talked ad-nausem about alt dwellings, their the nuts and bolts, how I'll live in it etc.
I settled on a skoolie, but had to shrink to a van because a bus was beyond my means. I did everything to shrink my life into a van and trained my mind to enjoy vandwelling. I part time vandwelled in a base model high-top Contempo van conversion built on a 1986 Dodge ram extended cab. I never felt fully at home in the van as I didn't have the desktop computer workstation, push button climate control, integrated greywater tank, and the ability to fully stand up inside (I wanted to raise the high top by at least 6" with a self fabricated lip riser). My goal was to turn the low-end campervan interior into a roadtrek interior, and the stock drivetrain more like a sportsmobile van.
After conteplating the drivetrain maintence cost thinking skoolie mechanical upkeep was out of reach (see
http://www.skoolie.net/forums/f18/ye...r-18811-7.html), I decided
life is too short to not have what you want because of incremental cost and that I will
find a way to pay whatever the additional drivetrain maintence is for the big bus.
This year, 2019 is the year I move into the bus, and make it reality.
I will go places of distance with the skoolie, with the goal to be able to take it at least 10,000 miles per year, and most years more than 15,000 miles per year exploring everywhere from the Drive-in to the Dalton. I will build it out to comfortably boondock in the extremes, so I can really experience life. From securing a prime viewing location for a mid-July SpaceX launch by boondocking in direct Florida sun a week before anybody else shows up, to experiencing the northern lights in the Yukon wilderness on a moonless night in the deepest dephts of winter.
I will be contributing many thoughts, questions & ideas in the months to come.