Tiny Thoughts About A Large House

Since we came to the unlikely decision to move into a tiny house (and I'm just beginning to feel comfortable referring to the bus in this way. It's a bus...that we're turning into a house...that's just over 200 square feet. I guess it's a "Tiny House"), I've begun to recognize the feelings of dissatisfaction I'm harboring with the amount of stuff we have.

It's not that I want more.

It's that I want so much less.

Some stuff....

Don't get me wrong; we have some very nice things. And it's not that I want No Things. And it's certainly not going to be easy for me to give away or sell many of these things. Like I've said before, I attach sentimental value to just about everything. You can see from these pictures that my decorating style could be described as "Three Dimensional Collage".

But I've come to realize just how much all this stuff consumes my time. So much of my week is structured around the care and keeping of this stuff. These photos show a whimsical side of too many possessions; I'm purposely not showing the mountains of laundry (dirty and clean...but mostly dirty), stacks of used dishes in need of a wash, ever-expanding toy corners, and the fine dust that settles over everything the day after I clean.

...And more stuff...

I've started to wonder what our lives will look like without it all. How much more free time will we have when we reduce our possessions to the essentials and only those things that hold real meaning for us? What will the kids and I get to do when it's not necessary to stay inside nearly every day so Mama can catch up on laundry?

Yet when I look around, I know this is going to be hard for me.

Hard, not just because of the amount of work that's going to go into downsizing, but because I'm going to have to let go of things that I treasure for one [silly] reason or another. Hard, because I happen to like many of my Three Dimensional Collages. Hard, because the sooner I do this, the longer I'm going to live in a house that feels empty by comparison.

I'm aware it sounds more than a little contradictory to say in one breath, "I can't wait to have less stuff!" and, "What will my house feel like with less stuff?" But there you have it. It's hard.

...And still more STUFF!

Moving will be hard, too, because I love where we live now. 

It's huge for an apartment: 2,501 square feet, to be precise. There is more than enough room for both of us adults, our three small kids, and our black Labrador retriever. There's ample closet space. We have cathedral ceilings in our living room. I've got a studio, Nate's got a studio; we have a balcony that's as big as a studio apartment. We live above the place where Nathaniel, my mom, and stepdad all work, so we can get by with only one vehicle; I can ask my mom to run up and visit or watch the kids for short periods during the days she works. We even have a yard (with trees!). Not only all of this, but the rent is totally amazing. Like, "we can support our family on one income while living here" kind of amazing. No doubt, God totally blessed us when he brought us here.

I have told people - and myself - over and over that this is the place we're staying until we can finally afford to buy land. In this line of thinking, I reasoned that our family would be just fine in this house (apartment, whatever) for another decade or more. Actually, as I write this it occurs to me that we've just hit our fifth anniversary in this place; we moved here when I was super pregnant with our first daughter. Time flies. Anyway. We've got a lot of memories here; it's the first place I've lived since moving out of my parents' place at age nineteen that has honestly felt like Home with a capital H. And for all the quirks (drafts, mice, fake wood paneling, ugly carpeting, general disrepair that comes with an aging home), it's still a warm and inviting place.

It's funny how things change.

Like my aversion to tiny houses. I used to look at them and think, "I like the aesthetics. I like the storage. I like how people can build one themselves. I hate the lack of space."

And that's still kinda true, I guess. But since we'd begun talking about downsizing (tinysizing?), I began to realize how this enormous space impacted our daily lives. One, it's a lot to clean, so much of my week revolves around simply keeping all this space tidy (to varying degrees of success). Two, with all this space, it's simply too easy to justify bringing in more stuff without taking out a corresponding amount. Even after getting rid of a lot this past summer, there's still a shocking amount of stuff to go through. Three, all the shouting.

Parents of young kids can relate, I'm sure. It's not that I'm shouting at them, it's that they're shouting at me. If we happen to be in different rooms, my girls see nothing wrong with shouting across the house to talk to me. No matter how many times I stress that they should come close when they want to say something, it rarely occurs to them to do so. And how silly is it to shout back, "Quit yelling! Come here when you want to talk to me!"

Now, when contemplating living in less than a tenth of the space we currently occupy, I think, "How great; a place for everything and everything in its place."

"How lovely, to simply go outside when the space feels just too small."

"How manageable, to only keep what we truly want."

There's nothing inherently better about a tiny house. It's just a different way to live. A way that I think would suit Nathaniel, myself, and the girls. So we can take the focus off of our space, our stuff, and all that goes into both, and begin focusing more on the things that truly matter to us. Our faith, our family, our friends, our goals, and the world around us.

Sounds good to me.

So Long, Seats

Every day or so, one of us will look at the other and say, "Babe! Guess what?"

"What?"

"We got a bus!" 

Cue the happy dance.

How you doin'?

Seriously, though, we're super psyched about starting this skoolie conversion. Nathaniel particularly so, because he confessed to me a few months ago that he really missed having a hobby to work on. With the bus, he can work on something he truly enjoys without feeling like it's time misspent; after all, he's technically working on our future house. So it's enjoyable and productive. Win win!

Since the bus arrived, he's been heading down to the backyard to work on the bus whenever it fits into our schedule. He's had some help from a friend, but is figuring out that certain things he thought needed two people to get done, could actually be done by him alone. Whatever work gets done on this bus will be documented in this blog, in the hopes that others looking to convert a bus to a skoolie will find some valuable resources here.

I will note that this post has been in the making for a few weeks; it's hard to find time to do a tutorial blog while simultaneously keeping two preschoolers and a baby alive and fed and not living in chaos.

Parking the Bus

It might seem a little superfluous to start out with a section on parking, of all things, but here's why:

Here's the takeaway from this: if anyone involved doubts that the ground is solid enough to drive on, maybe you should reconsider ;) Just sayin'.

Anyway, with a few minor hiccups, Nate eventually got the bus parked out behind our place (with our landlord's blessing, of course). All the tires are currently resting on plywood sections to avoid dry rot. We're soon going to be investing in a bottle jack and some jack stands so we can raise the wheels off the ground, but for now, this is an acceptable solution.

Removing the Seats

The Bolts

In our bus, there are 24 seats total - twelve on each side. As you can see in the photo below, the steel seat frames for our bus have legs that run up the center aisle of the bus. The other side of every seat rests on a metal ledge that runs the length of the bus, below the windows. In this particular photo, you can see the wheel well that rises under the seat; this will be something we need to take into consideration once we start designing the floor layout. Anyhow, the bolts on the legs go clear through the floor and emerge on the undercarriage. The bolts on the sides simply anchor the seat to the ledge and nothing more.

Top Left: Bolt behind the seat, fastened to rail. Top Center: a seat not yet disassembled. Top Right: Floor bolts.
Bottom: The floor bolts as seen from under the bus

Seat rails on the left, the flipped-up bench on the right. Notice the bolt holding the rails to the bus in the picture at right.

The Benches

So in the left image, you can clearly see the rails and one leg of the seat frame, and the plywood, cushion, and vinyl bench in the image to the right. The bench here has been flipped up, and you can see the two c-clamps that hold the bench to the curved seat rail. The rusty piece, screwed to the plywood, swivels to latch the bench to the rail. The rail in turn rests on a ledge that runs the length of the bus, about 10” off the ground. Looking at our first photo, it's hard to see this ledge per se, since it's obscured by the mound of the wheel well. However, if you look closely at the second pic, you can sort of see this ledge under the left side of the rail. Nate used a power hand drill with a Phillips head bit to unscrew these three pieces of hardware. He stacked all the bench seats in the back of the bus to be reused later. The foam under the uncomfortable vinyl appears to be in good shape, judging from the bits we can see through the drainage holes in the plywood, and should be great for couches and seats in the future. We'll scrap some of the steel seat rails and put the money back into the bus, but we're hanging onto a few in case we can reuse them in the future.

Images via Here, Here and Here

Two People

Nate and his friend Eric first tried removing the bolts that held the legs to the floor with a breaker bar and a pneumatic (air-powered) impact wrench with a hex socket attachment. The impact wrench was powered by an air compressor similar to the one shown here. The idea here was that one person would hold the bolt still with the breaker bar, and the second person would use the impact wrench to loosen and remove the bolt. I should mention here that while some of the tools Nate uses in working on the bus are from his personal collection, he also has the benefit of borrowing tools from the business where he works. It can certainly be more economical to rent or borrow things than to buy, if it's a tool you won't be using all that often.

They employed two different approaches to leg bolt removal, but each proved less than satisfactory.. Eric first used the breaker bar inside the bus, with the idea that he could brace the bar against the seat rails for extra leverage. Nate was under the bus with the impact wrench. This was troublesome because the rust on the bolts under the bus made them prone to getting stuck in the socket of the impact wrench. So they switched tools. With the impact gun inside the bus, it was slightly easier to loosen the bolts, but there were still inherent problems. For one, the air compressor made communication nearly impossible; it was too loud for them to speak to each other while working. Secondly, the rust was stripping the faces of the bolts, rendering the breaker bar useless; you can't hang on to a hex bolt if it's suddenly round. Third, both methods created a good bit of rust dust that showered the person working under the bus.

Anyway, between the two of them, they removed as many bolts as possible in this second fashion. There were still bolts remaining in the floor that couldn't be removed because of the stripped heads, so they returned to them later with a slightly different method.

Having done as much as they currently could to remove the floor bolts, both guys went back inside the bus, each armed with a 1/2" hand ratchet and a box wrench, which you can see in Nathaniel's hands here. They set to work removing the bolts mounting the seat rails to the ledge, holding the nut still with the box wrench and using the ratchet to loosen the nut. They loosed the bolts for ten seats, then returned to the stripped floor bolts. One person went under the bus with a vice grip to hold the bolt still, while the second person used the impact wrench inside.

By the time both guys were ready to call it quits for the night, they had removed ten whole seats. The remaining fourteen were left for Nathaniel to revisit to a few days later.

One Person

After several days, Nathaniel returned to the bus solo with the intention of finishing the removal of the seats. Each seat had two bolts attaching the rails to the ledge: one bolt positioned behind the back of the seat, and the other "inside" the rails, only visible when the bench is flipped up or removed (see the picture of the bench seat above). For the bolt behind the seat, the box wrench and hand ratchet worked fine. However, the bolts towards the front of the rails were a little trickier to remove in this way, so he used the box wrench with a power hand drill, equipped with a 1/2" socket attachment. This method would work fine for anyone, whether working alone or with help.

There were still some stripped floor bolts that the two guys hadn't removed, but being only one person, Nate had to come up with another method to handle them by himself. The method that follows is one he wishes they would have started with for ease of removal. So anyway, if you're looking to remove seats in a bus of your own, I recommend starting with this one. Using an angle grinder fitted with an abrasive cutting wheel (ACW), Nate tackled each bolt in the manner illustrated below. Word to the Wise: this will take multiple ACWs, so don't worry if you find you're using a bunch to accomplish this. That's just how it goes.

Using these tools and methods, Nathaniel was able to remove the remaining fourteen seats in one afternoon. And all by himself, too.

Ahh...it's so much easier to envision living in here now.

Next time we catch back up with the bus, it'll be to discuss some more interior demolition. We're taking this bus down to the framing and building it back up from there, so we'll be documenting how to remove the panels and beginning to make sense of all those damn wires behind them. We'll keep you posted.