Hello From Los Angeles/Kansas City!!!

[DaCaNoWiSe]

Hello From the Miner Family. We are David and Caroline. We have 3 children, Nora, William and Seeley.

We have been following this site for years in anticipation of doing a bus conversion.

On Oct. 12 we finally found and bought our bus. It is a 1991 65 passenger Carpenter body on a Ford B700 with a 7.8L Diesel Ford/New Holland inline 6 engine.

We found her in Springfield, MO from a responsible owner named Pat. He and his buddies have been using her for the last 14 years as their mobile hunting cabin. They took excellent care of her and were sad to see her go. They were cautious of who they were selling her to, wanting her to go to a good family who would continue to keep her healthy and happy. We apparently passed their inspection, as she did ours.

We decided on a skoolie because our 3 children (whom we adopted) are all special needs children and flying with them is very difficult. Our families are spread out throughout the US. We will now be able to visit all family and other destinations free of stress(ish).

We have named her the Mobile Miner Manor, eMMMy for short. She currently resides in Kansas City on the property of our dear friends (Ry and Anna), who will also be doing the majority of the conversion work. One of us will be flying back and forth from LA to KC once a month until the conversion is complete (except for the month of January when it will be too cold to do much so we will be joining you at Skoolie Palooza in AZ to pick brains and get inspiration).

We are in the very early stages of stripping the interior, floor planning, plotting electrical and plumbing paths, undercarriage boxes and researching A Ton.

From rear to front we are planning our bedroom at the rear, bunk room for the kids, followed by a toilet and shower room on opposites sides, storage and fridge (passenger side), kitchen (driver side) and U shaped booth adjacent the door for the car seats (will also be able to fold down to a spare bed).

A lot of the work will be fabricated on site as Ry, Dave and Anna have build experience (Caroline is just there for moral support and to boss people around. P.s. Caroline is writing this.).

We hope to complete the project by August 2019.

Looking forward to FINALLY being able to interact with the skoolie community and welcome any advice you have to give. You have already been so helpful.

Thank you,

Dave and Caroline

[milkmania]

Looks great as is.
So, you’re just modifying a few things to better fit your needs?

Would like to see more pictures of that back porch... (underneath mostly)
as it looks, you could add some overhead roof racks and a ladder on the porch for easier access to the roof items. (Bicycles, toys, totes, etc)
Could even hold a mini-split a/c unit and generator on that porch.

[DaCaNoWiSe]

Dave will return to KC in November to help with the demo. We are stripping the inside to rebuild a more home-like RV feel.

He can take pictures of the underside of the deck then. The former owner was also the owner of a shop. The team there (hunting buddies that used the bus as a mobile hunting cabin) built the deck in place. The cantilever supports run inside the frame of the bus and are pinned in like a trailer hitch. It is 3' deep and obviously runs the width of the bus.

We plan to use it as an RV, not a permanent residence.

We are also planning on a 3 zone LG mini split underneath the chassis. And solar panels, eventually.

We probably wont do roof top storage since we won't be full time living there. We are building the majority of the furniture and cabinets ourselves, so we plan on incorporating storage into all the furniture and all the little nooks and crannies.

We are going to modify the back deck so there is an entrance on the passenger side (curb side) and a ramp to load a small motorcycle that we own. That can be for quick store runs or whatever we need while we are parked.