Hi! I’m Ben and this is Meghan. Meet Kevin, our bus! We named it after the person we bought it from. About a month before we became debt-free, we started looking online at different options like vintage trailers, tiny homes, and yurts. Then, we found a cool ad on Craigslist.
It described an old prison bus turned into a mobile command center. It had a generator, shore power, and many other features already set up. The bus was in great condition and was located in Massachusetts.
Within a week, we went to see it, toured it, and met the interesting gentleman who was selling it. We decided to buy it right away! The entryway area isn’t finished yet—it’s on our to-do list.
When we bought our bus, it was painted a scary mix of black, red, and dusty rust. The paint was in pretty good shape—just some surface rust, no deep rust or holes. That’s a big reason why we bought the bus; its body was in great condition. But we knew right away that we wanted to repaint it; we didn’t like the original colors.
At first, we planned to redo the inside of the bus and think about painting later. We got three quotes for the paint job. They all said it would cost between nine to twelve thousand dollars at least, and that was if we did some of the prep work ourselves.
This price didn’t include any bodywork. So, if we wanted a professional job, it would cost us about $15,000.
We decided not to spend a lot of money on painting the bus, so we thought about painting it ourselves. We soon realized it would take a lot of hard work—more than we expected.
Since we both had full-time jobs, we could only work on the bus during weekends. We spent about 10 hours each day painting, and luckily, the weather was good for us.
When we first started dreaming about this project, we had about $100,000 in debt from student loans and car payments. We made a plan and worked really hard. After three and a half years of making some lifestyle changes and working hard, we paid off all our debt.
Their Instagram ~ https://www.instagram.com/wilddrivelife/
