Little Miss Skoolie
She’s a small bus. A mini. A shortie. Alias: Sunny the Bus. My wife and I liked the Little Miss Sunshine movie so much, we actually named our first-born pupper after Olive. So, naturally, while it’s not a VW Bus (I think I’m longer than a VW Bus anyway), we went along with a Little Miss, uh, Little Miss Skoolie theme.
No, we’re not that crazy to paint it yellow with a white top, as this is illegal in most of our united states, but we just liked the whole vibe of the underdog rising up and busting through the whole ‘being normal’ thing. We are, after all, far from normal. Eclectically quirky, let’s say.
We wouldn’t have it any other way.
The particulars for the geeks (myself included):
Sunny is a 2005 GMC Savanna 3500 Dually with a Corbeil coach (that’s the bus part), 5-window, with a 6.0-liter, gas-powered V8, with an automatic transmission that’s only gone 99k miles in her 17 years. We found her locally in Putnam, CT, and bought her from a fella who worked for, and bought her from, a local prep school, Marianapolis, in Northeastern Connecticut. So when you board, please wear a tie or something argyle.
Just a quick note: Throughout this build, I have used many, many products from Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. However, I will only link to products that I used and found helpful. Some products I even provide mini reviews for because they are so good. Screws and sandpaper are not always created equal. OK then, now get going!
Stairway to Heaven: There are no donut ghosts in this Grand Ballroom
So after we painstakingly installed the floor in the Grand Ballroom of the bus (disco ball coming soon), we had to turn our attention to the entryway. After all,
How we put in our skoolie floor in 132 easy steps
Compared to skoolie people, you could say that most DIY vanlifers have it kind of easy. Since most buy empty cargo vans, even if a few years old, they
Pennies and POR-15: The skoolie floor comes up
Ughs. We thought about, for more than several moments, that we were just going to slap a new floor over the old and let it be done. We were
How we replaced a rusty beam in the bus
Every vehicle needs a good backbone and in this case, our rig has two: One for the truck itself, the factory frame, and two, the coach frame that supports
Rusty Beam Tetris: Like Operation, but with a Skoolie
Under bus rust busting begins. Steph jumps in with the wire wheel. I’m not particularly fond of – or good at – metal fabbing things. I’m a
Rust, crust, and dust: Excavating Sunny’s undercarriage
Fighting claustrophobia in a HAZ-MAT suit whilst wielding a grinder. One of my favorite books/movies of all time is Stephen King’s Christine, about the ’58 Plymouth Fury
Bussin’ in the Family: From ancestry to skoolie, a brief history
Buses Aplenty – The bus in the foreground is a 1958 International 68-passenger and the bus in the background is the 30-passenger 1950 International. If you look really
Doing brakes on a bus is just like doing brakes on any other vehicle, just way harder
Doing brakes on a bus is just like doing brakes on any other vehicle, just way harder and much more time consuming. After our first adventure home, we wanted
We found a great new watering hole
Back in the heady days of sprint-distance triathlon training (hopefully we’ll have more heady days), sometimes it got a little difficult to keep up with the training and keep
Top 6 reasons we bought a skoolie
I’ve got a damn bus to build, so let’s not muck about and get right to it… No. 6 – PRICE. Every traditional camper van was approximately $9 million at
