When 28-year-old Craig Gordinier had to choose between moving in with his parents or living on a school bus, he chose the bus and to go and live out his dreams.
And that turned out to be a really awesome thing.
It all started at the beginning of 2020 when a business deal didn’t go exactly as expected for Craig.
“After a failed business deal at the very beginning of COVID last year, I ended up, at 27 years old, home on my parent’s couch starting fresh again,” he tells Rachel Ray, according to Yahoo! News.
That’s when Craig started thinking big picture-wise.
If his dream was to get an RV and tour the country at 65, why wait 40 years to do that when he retires?
So, Craig decided he didn’t want to and that he was going to live his dream now.
“I started looking at sprinter vans and trailer and tiny homes and buses, and I finally found the perfect bus that was in South Dakota. I flew out there, and I bought the bus,” he explains.
Craig rode the 1991 Blue Bird school bus back to Massachusetts, which was a 28-hour drive.
“And I had this amazing moment pulling in and seeing the look on my parents’ faces of me driving this big school bus,” he said.
But that was the easy part. Now, Craig had to start renovations on the bus to make it livable.
Thankfully he had the help of his family and friends.
The bus had to be stripped down to a hollow insulated shell and had customized pieces built into it.
The bus’s entry has a residential door and a security pad. Craig also raised the roof about 20-inches in the living area. The bus has also been outfitted with lower storage boxes and a deck to transport Craig’s motorcycle.
There’s also a roof deck, solar panels, and skylights.
The driver’s seat area, however, pretty much stayed exactly the same.
“I wanted to keep this history alive. And it’s just such a beautiful thing,” Craig explains.
His kitchen cabinets are recycled and the space utilizes slide-out storage for ease of use.
Craig cooks on a three-burner propane cooktop that he made in his grandparents’ garage.
The kitchen is also outfitted with a stainless steel sink, a 100-gallon freshwater tank for hot water, and a stainless steel fridge and freezer.
And there’s a lovely espresso bar and Craig will often drink his coffee at a fold-out table he made in high school in 2011.
The bathroom is outfitted with a blue glass shower tile and rainfall showerhead. And there is storage hidden all over the house. There’s no word on whether or not there is a toilet up in there but we’ll leave that to the imagination.
The bedroom is located at the back of the bus and has a gorgeous skylight overhead, as does the bathroom.
“Just because houses have rooms does not mean that a bus needs to have rooms,” Gordnier told Insider. “It feels like a mansion on wheels.”
You can take a tour of Craig’s Blue Bird home in the video below.
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