Category: How it all began

Since we didn’t want to spend the next few years carting 40 kids from A to B, the first step was to completely gut the bus.

2 days and about 50 flex discs later, all the benches were out. This immediately created a completely new feeling of space, we now had 20 square meters at our disposal and of course immediately began to think about how best to expand the bus….

But the seats were only the beginning…

The floor was covered with rubber mats, which had to be scraped off with the spatula in painstaking work, shred by shred. As a reward, we got to see more and more of the rusty floor.

The hardest work, in the truest sense of the word, was tearing out the interior trim, which was made of a ton of steel. Puuuuhh, we probably knew that the Americans in terms of cars on a massive construction value, but that it is so hard we would not have thought. After a few trips to the scrap yard, everything was disposed of and the tons of steel even earned us some money.

Now the bus was completely empty and you could see any rust and weak spots. One beam was rusted, the floor got some and here and there some rust, but honestly, we had expected it worse.

 

 

 

To be honest, we didn’t necessarily decide on a 30-year-old school bus, it just turned out that way. It was clear to us from the beginning that we wanted a somewhat larger vehicle than our previous VW T3 bus. There were several models to choose from, but an American school bus had always been our dream. Unfortunately, we could not afford the taxes, as well as costs for shipping, so we did not even think about it. But as it often happens, the solution is closer than you think. For about 20 years the school bus of our dreams was used for rentals and advertising purposes of a beach sports hall, in our area. We had been eyeing the bus for a while, but didn’t really expect them to want to sell it, but it was worth a try. After a few nice conversations with the owner and some thinking time on his part, he was really willing to sell and thus support our project. We could hardly believe it, we actually got the vehicle we always dreamed of and at a price we could afford.

The bus was not exactly in a good condition: The TÜV had expired three years ago, there were some leaks and accordingly a lot of rust, the right side including the window was sprayed with graffiti’s and what was wrong with the engine, we did not even want to know. 30 years have just left their mark….

But we didn’t care, we were full of energy and started right away.