WE TRADED TINY HOMES FOR 24 HOURS! (van life vs bus life)

So tomorrow we are swapping homes with Raya and Louie. And I'm already feeling a little guilty because I have a feeling this is gonna be a much more comfortable experience for us than it is for them.

Wait, I have to, like, step into the shower to open this drawer.

But now I'm feeling extra guilty because the sliding door on our van just broke. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to look like this.

We're Karen May. After traveling to a hundred countries TW 2020 brought us back to the US where we bought a converted sprinter van that has now been our full time home for over a year.

Figure we should leave the toilet empty for him. You're welcome. I'm a much cleaner person when I'm cleaning for somebody else than I am when I'm cleaning for myself. I'm sure the mechanic watching this video is going to think that I'm really dumb, but this just feels like an unnecessary piece. It's keeping the door from shutting. To exchange the cable track. Remove the door trim. This looks like a big job. Remove the door handle and the passenger's door seal. What? This guy is literally taking the whole van apart to replace this cable. All right, I think I may have found a temporary solution. I'm going to lift up the door, and then you grab this black wire right here and just pull it as hard as you can. One, two.

It's never going to be completely right because we have broken pieces like this. Maybe we just won't tell them. And the first time it breaks, we'll be like, what'd you do to the van?

That would be mean book bunny.

Wow.

Table's still here. Honestly, not even sure I remember how to do this.

Think I'm doing this wrong.

It looks very wrong.

Oh, look. It's this thing.

It's been so long since we've done this. Wow. I've missed.

Today is the big day. We have got the van looking better than it has in a very long time. This should be fun. Holy cow. It's so big.

The van looks so tiny.

This is our houses.

How crazy is that?

I know.

Look how cool we look.

The van has a lot more character. Yeah.

The bus. So the plan for today is to.

Tour each other's homes.

Then we're gonna swap keys, drive to our campsite, which I think will be very interesting with Nate driving a bus for the first time.

No, no. I went too far.

And then we'll be stuffing our friends into our tiny van, and we'll live in luxury for the next 24 hours.

Did it run off.

All right?

We just gave Ryan and Louie a little tour of the van. They didn't seem too disappointed. And now we're gonna get a tour around the bus. The luxurious, massive bus.

I love it. Welcome home.

This isn't fair. Oh, my God.

Welcome to the happiness bus.

It's so beautiful.

So this is the driving seat, obviously.

Where does the passenger go?

She'll just chill here.

Yeah, I'll just lay like this. I'll put my feet up, get my laptop out, do some emails, I guess.

Like, in a school bus, there are no seat belts.

Yeah.

Like, for kids, you can just hang out.

So we've got a little storage thing up here. This is like, my little area. I literally just wrote this on here when we measured it earlier.

I don't know what any of those buttons do.

Yeah, there's a lot of buttons here. I found this one yesterday. I was like, I have no idea what this one does. There's lots of mirrors. But the one thing I didn't have time to install for you guys was the backup camera. So let's just hope you don't have to reverse. We've got our temporary sound system.

I thought you were saying the bongos were your sound system. I didn't see the speaker sitting underneath.

This actually pulls out into a bed. So this table lowers down and then.

This folds over to here. So we've had friends come and stay.

We had a friend stay in the van once.

Good night, Dusty. Good night.

In here, what I've done is I've got a power strip, and I can just charge all my camera batteries. And then this is another drawer of just, like, tech stuff.

Wow, that looks beautiful.

So this is our kitchen. This is where all your cups and plates and bowls and everything. This is our smoothie station. We've got chips, salsa, Just anything essentials. Yeah, anything you need, really. So the oven doesn't currently work. We do have a toaster oven in the oven.

Okay.

It's like the Russian dolls, isn't it? Like, you open, there's like, another oven inside. There's another oven inside that oven.

In we've got all our spices.

What's in here?

I don't think I've ever opened that.

Really?

This is the difference. If you have this much storage in a van, you would be using that.

But we, like, have never. I would have, like, pillows in there.

And then back here. This is toiletry skincare.

Very jealous right now.

Yeah, a little bit.

You don't have to worry about water in Here, our water tank is 125 gallons. Yeah, you can shower. You don't have to turn the water off. Wash all your dishes.

I'm going to take a long shower. All right.

This is very important. The most important part of this tour. Make sure this is closed because everything will fly out of the fridge. This is where you can enjoy our huge water tank in our shower.

Whoa.

I feel like I'm in a Moroccan spa. I love it. I can't wait to take a shower. I don't say that often.

The bathroom is over here. We have the same toilet as you, Louie.

I'm surprised that you fit in here.

I literally, honestly have to open the door to, like, wipe.

Also, sometimes when he pees, he's like this.

He's like.

There'S no way I can piece. Daniel, we have a full size closet.

What are these metal things that the clothes are on? These look really nice.

This also pops up to our roof deck, which I'll show you later. But that can just pop up like that. Or you can pop it all the way up and, like, we've, like, slept under the stars.

No way.

That's cool. We just set up our Nintendo Switch for you guys. If you want to play some map, you want to play some Mario Kart.

We'Ll invite you over. You can play like this.

This is rising.

Cute little books and stuff.

This is amazing.

I was feeling guilty before, and now I feel even worse.

This is the 125 gallon water tank, which we just filled up.

To put that in perspective, we have a 40 gallon fresh water tank in the van that will last us an entire week. How long does it last?

I think that would be at least a week of us both showering, like, nice long showers every day. So there's a lot going on back here. We've got our bikes, Raya's bikes, a little bit worse for wear. Also essentials, we've got didgeridoo.

What?

And then we have. There's all our main battery bank down here for, like, powering the bus. There's like a little fuse panel here.

Oh, yeah.

I added this. This chin up bar. So this is, like, a cool way just to, like, work out.

Oh, my gosh. I'll probably start the day with some pull ups tomorrow.

It's starting to rain a little bit, so I'm thinking we're going to save the roof deck until we get to the campsite. So before we leave, I need to learn how to drive this monster. All right, kids, get in.

First thing is, this is like the cut off switch. Unfortunately, I've lost the little thing for. So when you stop, I need to pull this out and then it cuts the engine.

I was already nervous at the fact that I have to turn the plus off. Using a pair of pliers now makes me more nervous. But it's taking for a little spin in the parking lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Push the little cut off knob in and then turn the key.

Do I need to disengage the air brake right now?

Yeah.

So now. Now it's drivable. So now if you back up straight, how do. So there's a lot of mirrors, thankfully. So you can look at all the mirrors, but you can't see directly behind you.

All right, cheers. Watch out. I'm nervous. All right, I'm doing it. How's it feel? I feel like I'm driving a tank. I wish I would have booked a closer campsite. Pull this part out.

There you go.

And then I'm gonna pull the brake out.

Yes, that's it. That's good.

Oh, I think I'm sweating a little bit.

It gets very hot up here.

I can't believe you're trusting me with this.

Hopefully you don't crash into anything.

Thanks for the encouragement.

Here goes nothing. What could possibly go wrong? All right.

A lot of steps to starting this thing.

Pull this out. I think this is supposed to be out.

Guess it's supposed to break off.

I don't like all these loud noises.

There's not even a seatbelt in this thing.

What?

All right, here we go.

Oh, my gosh. This feels so wrong.

I'm actually really nervous right now. Wish us luck. This filtered fitting. We're pulling out of a school parking lot in a school bus.

First thing turn.

We barely even made it.

The bus is a bit louder than our van.

Just relax. Don't worry about a thing.

Okay.

I feel like you're getting the hang of it.

What was that? So we're stopping at the grocery store to get some food for tonight. And where do you park this thing?

Not a lot of places that can fit the van.

You did it. You drove five whole minutes.

All right, so we only took up 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 parking spots.

Louie and Ry are vegan, so tonight we're doing vegan tacos. And I think this is the healthiest looking shopping cart we've ever had. Oh, K. Just put some chips in. Never mind.

Okay. To be able to bring in our groceries, set them down and have places to put them.

What?

Ow. Still have a few of the inconveniences of the van.

What's going on?

Oh, no. I think we broke the door.

Oh, no.

I don't even know if we can close it right now.

Oh, this is pretty broken.

Uh.

Oh, it might be fully done.

They broke the door.

What? All right.

Next stop is the gas station.

Just reach into the black hole.

All right, let's see what the damage is going to be. This is the price of living in a luxurious bus. We've just crossed over 20 gallons, which is max capacity for the van, so everything past here is just extra.

Got a little diesel on the way. Oh, one on the butt.

Oh, no. It just shot out. Oh, thank you.

I could take my first shower in the bus now.

$97.96. Honestly, not as bad as I thought it was gonna be. Thanks for the help. Yeah.

Oh.

You ready? Yeah.

Just take a little shower at Kroger, get my razor out, shave the legs. Put that.

Very nice of you to help us with our bus.

Yeah, of course.

Okay. I think I'm gonna take my pants off in the parking lot as well.

Oh, nice. Let me go change my bedroom.

All right. Longest drive of the day.

Watch out, everybody.

You're not going anywhere fast in this thing. And give you a massage while you're driving. Wow. I love driving the bus. I will say, it actually hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be.

That didn't sound good.

What was that?

Whoa. Oh, this is a disaster. We've converted to bed. Everything's falling out of the fridge. All the pots and pans are on the floor.

I cannot believe the one thing Raya said not to forget from her tour.

All right, this is very important.

I forgot she.

Look at the bungee card.

Whoa, big girl. It gets so much hotter when we stop.

Almost missed it.

Good save.

No, no. I went too far. Oh, yes. I made it. You did it.

We made it.

Oh.

Oh. So earlier, when I forgot to bungee cord the fridge and it flew open, this entire shelf of things with all the stuff on, it came off. And I tried to put it back on, and it just won't. And that's because I broke it. I feel so bad. I have a question for you, Nate. Do you have any super glue in our van?

Yes.

Really?

Yeah. Do we break something?

Could you sneakily get it? Yeah.

What is that?

It's the shelf that fell. It's broken and it won't stay.

Thought we'd made it without wrecking the van or breaking anything. I'm 50 confident.

That's not very encouraging.

I'm gonna wait till the COVID of darkness. They left a toothbrush in the back with all the tools. I just put it back there sometimes. All right, should we go act like nothing happened?

Yeah. Hey, guys, Everything's fine.

Unlike our van, the plus is not going to be self sufficient for the night, so just got to figure out how to plug this thing in. Should we hook up the heater?

By the way, I use your coffee thing.

I actually cleaned the Chemex for them. By the way, if you watched our last video, then you know my dirty little secret.

Rookie mistake.

It's beautiful, Clark.

All right, this is home for the night. We've driven about an hour south of Nashville, and we're spending the night on a little farm with lots of cute animals.

Cute donkey. Oh, my gosh. He only has three legs. Yeah.

Oh. Ow. He poked me in the chin. You're a little spasted. That's okay.

So I just learned something I did not know about billy goats and kind of wish I didn't know. Apparently, they pee on their face and, like, wear it as cologne. I don't know if it, like, attracts the ladies or scares off the other guys, but this pin right here is the one for the guys, and then the other pin's the one for the girls. And we're not gonna petting the guys today. Oh, hey.

French fry. Not appropriate.

Did you just headbutt the camera?

Oh, no, no, not me.

I'm pretty sure it just said no.

Hi, sweet boy. Look how giant his head is.

He looks like he's smiling.

Are you ready for your dinner? Can I sit with you? Oh. Oh, yes. Wow. Look at his little tail. You did it.

He looks like the Got Milk commercial. I'm just gonna steal a little bit of this. Yes. I've made friends.

Well, that was so much fun.

So we were supposed to be swapping vehicles, but Ryan and Lily have taken back over the bus, and they've invited us up to the roof for happy hour.

This is so romantic.

Cheers.

Cheers, guys. Thanks for coming out today. Wow, this is sweet.

Mm.

Don't have to worry about how much water I'm using. Raya's cooking half half of our dinner. I'm cooking the other half, and then we'll bring it all together. Look at all this space.

I feel like what we just did on the roof is what you think you're going to do every single night when you buy a bus or a van, but you really only end up doing it on special occasions, like when you're with friends. We should do that more often.

Maybe we should set up our chairs more than this.

Oh, it's so heavy. I wonder how they're doing in the van. Oh, what are you doing?

French fry. That's me having dinner on there. You can't put your pooh hooves all over that.

A lot of the meals that I cook in the bus are like a lot of ingredients. We're cooking like a huge portion and I would not be able to do that here. I can't really meal prep in here. I feel like, okay, wait, I have to like, step into the shower to open this drawer.

Okay.

Is this really nice?

Wait, he's got his self defense knife. Shall I grab that?

No.

I was just going to look for a piece of a tripod up here. Oh, yeah. All right, good luck. I discreetly got the super glue from the van. All right, so while K finishes dinner, I'm going to see if I can secretly and quickly fix the part of the fridge that we broke. This piece just needs to glue right back on just like that.

I think this is actually going to work. It's pretty solid. Wow.

Nice. Those are probably waters.

Hi, neighbors.

As crazy as it sounds, the reason that we're eating in the van is because it's the only place in either vehicle that has room for four people to sit together. So while it's a little tight in here, at least we have four seats. Seats. This might be the most involved meal that's ever been cooked in the van.

One of the best tacos I've ever had.

You say pill when you've used all your letters and everybody grabbed one more. Yeah, I don't care if I splash my face while you do that. Here's how I rinse my face in our van. The least amount of water possible. Try to turn the water off while the water still stays in my head and just flashing on my face.

I do that too. And the water is warm.

What are you doing?

Just vacuuming the bugs. So our windows have these little net things.

Screens.

Screens. I'm tired. And so the bugs can't get in. And we have these cracked. And we just weren't really thinking about it back here because we came back here and there were these teeny tiny bugs. Just.

How great is it that this bed is already made?

So you said like, you make a little A and then you push out.

I'm sweating doing this.

Normally there's only one light switch to turn out in the van.

Good night.

Morning, guys.

Morning. How'd you sleep?

Good.

It was nice that you weren't grinding the beans right next to my face.

This has to be one of the best parts about the bus. I feel like I would be at least 50% more productive living in here. Having a work area that's separate from the bedroom. The bed's just not a productive environment. So I end up scrolling on Instagram for a lot longer than I should. But here I'd just be like, productivity.

Thank you. Made this look so easy. Oh, not a bad way to start the morning. It's kind of weird watching other people live in our house.

You think they spill coffee in bed.

As much as we do?

Hope not. They do let one more goat in bed than we do. Louie is so tall.

100, 102.

103.

Oh.

I can't do another pull up. How many have you really done?

5.

Oh, no, I wasn't recording. Too bad.

I think we're on a little bit of a slant.

I think I'm gonna take a shower just because I can.

It's so rare that I shower two days in a row, but I just had to experience this. It was amazing.

You know what my favorite part about showering in the bus is? Check this out. The toilet is completely dry, and the ground around the toilet is completely dry.

What doesn't get much better than this? Okay, Van life versus bus life.

Bigger is usually better, but not always. I feel like right now, if I'm Raya and Louie living in the van for 24 hours, I'm thinking, how do Kara and Nate do this? But I feel like if we were to go on a one week road trip where we were, like, moving from place to place every day, by the end of the week, they may have a different opinion.

I didn't realize how often we just get off an exit without even thinking about, like, if there's a parking lot big enough for us or if the pump is big enough for us, or.

If we're gonna hit a bridge as we're driving under it.

Yeah, our drive here was so stressful because all of those things we've just never had to think about before.

But 100% since we've been parked, the bus is far superior to the van. If you're watching this video to make a decision on whether you should buy a van or a bus, I just think you need to take into consideration how quickly you want to move. Like, if you're gonna park up somewhere for a week or a month at a time, probably buy a bus. If you want to just, like, move to as many places as possible, have A lot more flexibility. Probably buy a van.

The whole bike trip, like the highlight of 2020 for us, couldn't have happened. I mean, the van barely survived. This really felt like a vacation.

It was luxurious, so lots of pros and cons. I'm super glad that we did this. It definitely lets you, like, confirms that we made the right decision with the bus, but how many times have we done that?

Also, we learned last night that Ryan Louie paid a very similar amount for the bus as we did for the van. So I'm curious to know, if you had your choice and both vehicles cost the same amount of money, which would you choose?

I feel like before we lived in one, I would have said the bus.

100%, but I think people saw the fear in my eyes driving yesterday. Put yourself in that position every time you want to move this thing. All right, we're going to go see how Ry and Louie's night in the van went.

Welcome.

Morning.

I like what you've done with the ivy.

Oh, yeah.

This is from there.

All right, so we just want to know favorite and least favorite thing about the van.

My favorite thing is probably the doors at the back opening.

We don't do that.

My favorite thing is the two seats in the front that we can sit next to each other and actually talk while driving.

Oh, yeah.

My least favorite is the kitchen space.

Yeah, heard that.

Probably like, having to, like, make the bed every time you want to sleep first, and then if you want to set up the table, having to, like. I feel like this is a lot of work every day to switch the spaces.

So we have a small confession that we need to make.

Okay.

Don't be too nervous.

Okay. Or maybe do.

So we actually have three little confessions.

Okay.

Now let me take you on a little tour.

I'm desperately looking for broken things.

So we made some French press coffee this morning, and I was cleaning it out. I'm sorry, Louie. I broke your French press.

The bottom just fell out.

I didn't realize we were so destructive.

Should be using a Chemex anyway.

We've never used that, so that's fine.

I'm relieved. Yeah. I don't even use that.

So you're joking.

That came with the bus. And we're like, I guess we should keep this. So that's fine.

You're good. I'm so happy. So next up, do you remember, like, that one thing that you were like? If you don't remember anything else from this tour, don't forget to secure the fridge before you drive. Yeah, we forgot that okay. The fridge flew open.

Okay.

Things violently fell on the ground, including this bottom shelf here.

I have a confession. That was. That had actually already happened, and I'd already repaired it once.

No, you didn't.

Yeah, I had already glued it. So basically what happened is you just re broke. What was something that was already broken?

No. Okay, great. So we're two for two. Okay. Move back to the shower area. Yeah.

While I was showering that this piece of tile fell off.

That's fine. We literally did a bunch of tile.

Repairs after this happened. I was like, they're never going to be Franciscans again.

We've ruined three days.

Do you know what the worst thing you did was? That's not on this list. That you just told me, like, in passing. I'm very protective of my pillow. You're on the pillow this morning. She's like, oh, I squished a bug on your pillow. And I went back and I was.

Like, louie, I'm so sorry. It wasn't intentional. I was trying to, like, vacuum it up, and instead I just, like, smeared it.

So we're still good? We're still friends?

Yeah, we're still good. I mean, one more round of banana grams and we'll check back on that.

Okay, Good plan. As you can probably already tell, Raya and Louie are really awesome people. So if you enjoyed this video, you should definitely go check out their channel to see how they felt about living in our tiny van for the last 24 hours.

Hours?

How do you drive?

I don't know.

Starting. We're starting.

No, A. I was in first. How did I beat you?

What the heck? I don't like this game.