Decommissioned school buses are surprisingly inexpensive. On ebay right now you can find schoolies on sale for $1000 to $5000. Many people have realized that a school bus frame makes an ideal skeleton for a house on wheels.

As bus-dweller Eli Shanks explains in this Cornell Sun article, school buses are built on truck frames, which gives them a road life of 1 to 2 million miles. But many school districts replace their buses well before they’ve driven that far. The result is a surplus of well-maintained, perfectly drivable buses available for the public to buy. Since there are so many more of them, full-size school buses are actually less expensive than short ones.

My dear friend Ben bought a short one and spent two years converting it to a home. He left the engine and controls in working order, but he took out the bench seats and installed a sleeping bunk, a dining banquette, a kitchen space (still unfinished), a wood-burning stove, and lots of storage. The home measures about 250 square feet and is finished on the outside with a sleek blue paint job.

Work space on the exterior.

Some surfaces finished on the interior.

Now Ben is moving on to his next adventure and selling the bus. You can have it for $6000, which is a crazy good deal assuming you have the wherewithal to finish the interior and somewhere to put it. (Consider that in New York City a similar-size apartment could easily cost you over $1700 every month.) Maybe living in a schoolie is the next adventure for you!