Hello! Welcome to the beginning.

Inspiration
I used to imagine that if I ever became a billionaire, I would live in a luxury zeppelin. I liked the idea of being mobile, able to float almost indefinitely, and being at home wherever I went. Of course, since zeppelins aren’t really a thing anymore, it wasn’t a practical dream.

I love boats. To me, boats are the next-best thing to zeppelins. I sailed a little bit in the boy scouts, and have taken any opportunity I have been given to go on short sailing trips. Even though I live in the Puget Sound Region, not many opportunities have come up. Renting boats is expensive. Buying boats is expensive. Fixing boats is expensive. I ain’t rich. I do love the architecture of boats and the philosophy behind sailing your house anywhere you want to go, though. I’ve been lucky to find friends that sail here and there, but those people don’t tend to stay in one place very long.

RVs never really appealed to me. It seemed like a fun weekend thing to do, but having been a boy scout in the splendor of the Pacific Northwest, it seemed cheesy to me. I’m used to carrying my camp on my back and sleeping in tents in the rain. RVs seemed to spoil the experience of getting away from it all. They were always plugged in at car-camping sites, or blaring their generators so the occupants could watch TV. What was the point of even camping if you’re just going to stay indoors all day?

Then, I saw a bus conversion for the first time, and was struck. I could make my own home, and it could be whatever I want it to be. Unlike standard RVs, school buses have big beefy tires that can tackle rough terrain. They have steel shells that are safe and structurally sound. It was like a cave on wheels; a blank slate.

Getting to Work
I love building things and working with my hands. This project seemed to be right up my alley. So, I started doing research and fantasizing about what I would do. It started out as an interesting thought, but it didn’t go away. I kept finding myself looking up pictures or videos or blogs of people doing the project and encouraging me to do it too. Before I knew it, I knew a lot about RV construction, building tiny houses, and skoolies. It was all theoretical, though, until my girlfriend and I moved in together and specifically chose to live in a place where I could keep a bus.

With the help of my dad, we built a driveway, which was the first real concrete cost of the project. Now it was up to me to get started or call myself out on my own bs.

I came up with a budget, and for months I looked at buses on sites like Govdeals, Public Surplus, craigslist, and ebay. I watched for school buses going for sale at my local public school bus depot. I called First Student and asked them if they had anything they were thinking of selling. Along the way, I discovered that Washington State school buses are some of the most highly sought-after surplus buses in the country. We have some of the strictest standards for bus maintenance and retirement. Therefore, when a Washington bus is ready to retire, it is often bought directly by used bus sellers. If it manages to go to auction, it’s often bought by sellers from out of state and shipped abroad to be resold at 3 to 5 times the price. I couldn’t catch a break. Every available vehicle was snatched up before I could get to it. I was ready to buy the right thing at a moment’s notice, but couldn’t find it.

Eventually, a friend of mine told me about Harlow’s Bus Sales in Auburn. Apparently he had bought a bus from them back in the day for $400 with the intention of building it out. That project never happened, but for a while he was the go-to guy for moving stuff. I went down to Harlows with no expectations. There was no salesman available, so I talked to Tim, a rad retired mechanic that just loves buses. I told him what I wanted to do and he lit up and exclaimed, “I think I have something for you.” This was good.

We followed Tim to the far side of the lot, passing a lot of other buses that looked perfectly fine, eating face-fulls of spider webs, until we came to one that had oxidized paint and some moss growing on it. Tim was ecstatic about it, but I was skeptical that he was just trying to unload the stock he couldn’t get rid of otherwise. He started it right up on the first try. Tim told me that it came from the Sedro Woolly school district as a trade-in last year. Still skeptical that I was being flim-flammed, I asked him if I could get something better, if I paid a little more. He killed the engine, looked me in the eye with a puzzled look on his face and matter-of-factly asked me, “What do you mean? It doesn’t get any better than this.” He went on to tell me about how newer buses have various cheaper parts that tend to fail, redundant systems, computers controlling things that don’t need controlling, etc. This bus is 100% mechanical, there’s almost no rust, and the parts are all made to last. Not only that, but the engine/transmission combination is so common, it’s basically infinitely rebuildable.

I scheduled a test drive for a week later. They had to move the other buses out of the way in order to get this one out of the lot. Tim got behind the wheel and she started up on the first try again. Tim got that bus up to 75 miles per hour! This thing can fly! I was sold. I bought the bus for $3,500 and asked for some new tires to go along with it. We found some on the lot, and I got them replaced at Les Schwab on the way home.

Once it arrived, I met with a couple of my band-mates, who were coming over for practice. I kept the bus a secret because I didn’t know if it would ever actually happen. I was still in disbelief about the whole thing. My girlfriend said the oxidized paint made it look like Sherbet. Therefore, we named it Sherbet, The Woolly Mammoth, after the way it looked, and the school district it used to serve.

After roughly 3 years of research, I had my bus. Now I really had to get to work.