So there's this bus...

skoolie roof raise

raise the roof.

Roof raise. Raising the roof. Lifting the hood off of an entire school bus. Did you know it could be done? I didn't. Hadn't a clue. But my William knew. He was aware it was possible then he opened my eyes to the reality that anything that can be imagined, it can be created.

Now I had my doubts. It's true I did there for a bit at first. But then I saw pictures from the internet. Proof of existence in the real world. If they could do it, so could we. An ism we’ve adopted ourselves is that, “anything one man can do, another man can do.” In the words of Tolkein however (or at least them people who made his books a movie), “I am no man.” Which means I'm a woman and I wasn’t sure how to make this idea happen. Before the roof raise could be attempted though, we had to determine how in the sam hill to do it in such a way that the bus wouldn't be flooded by the cursed torrential downpours of this region. And this at the start of hurricane season as well. Until we were ready, we parked our bus under the convenient overhang of our shop. It fit by just under half a foot- definitely not enough room to lift its head up and bring our tall bus dream to life.

So, we persisted. I thought, “What if we get one of those party tent things? They’re like… thirty feet long and ten feet wide. See if we can get one off facebook marketplace. You add stilts to it and call it good.” That plan was ok, but not quite right.

On a different day, Will pointed out the many tall strong trees surrounding our garage and asked my opinion of tying a big tarp up between a few of those pines and oaks. I thought, “Hey yeah! Let’s do that.” But, well… the welder and gas tank for it are heavy, need power, and the spot we were eyeballing would make an annoying haul every time to work on it. Also, the ground wasn’t anywhere near level.

In the end, we decided we needed some kind of simple but sturdy metal framing for a little standing shelter thing. I don’t know the legal term for this type of structure but where I’m from we call ‘em “carports” pretty often. Like horse barns for our cars. Just something to keep the rain and falling tree debris off a little bit. But we needed one that would be at least like… fifteen feet tall. Do you know how tall fifteen feet look when you’re five foot eight?



Tall. 

So anyhow, Will found a dude selling something basically exactly like what we was looking for, and we bought it. He welded on the stilts, welded some additional metal tubing to the horizontal pieces extending the total length out from about 19’ to 30’. He found a giant tarp on sale at Harbor Freight.



Our little bug and I went to pick up the miscellaneous sudden needs like bungee cords, sand bags, additional welding wire, and over about four days, Will and I got the thing in the air. It looked so silly and so extraordinarily tall at first, but with the bus parked under it, we high fived and congratulated ourselves on our creativity and perseverance. Now our bus could get its top hat installed. I’m excited to report that on June 17th, my William lifted the roof of that bus. 

Wild. He really did it. I didn’t do a thing to help that day other than keep our kid and myself well out of the way. Could she and I have helped a little bit? Probably. But we helped mostly by making sure he had cold water to drink while sweating buckets in the rising Carolina heat. An important task if ever I’ve taken part in one myself.

Now that the roof is raised up by a foot (a daunting task which went surprisingly quickly), Will has spent the most recent days cutting and welding metal supports, checking and re-checking alignment, planning out the sheet metal installation to re-skin the bus, and I’ve been measuring and drafting out blueprint plans. We’ve had many discussions about windows with our morning coffee. Where to put the refrigerator and the pooper are two choices we’ve gotten hung up on. Each conversation seems to involve one of us realizing an entire aspect of building our own little RV machine that we hadn’t thought about before (grey water storage tank, power voltage concerns, solar panels and power banks, what comes first? The wiring or the insulation?). At the end of our conversations, I get up and take care of our rambunctious four-year-old, and Will gets up and goes out to work with metal some more, because the skoolie won’t skin itself.



And that’s about the sum total of our days lately. Childcare and bus stuff. Yeah work is in there but mostly, life is bussin’.

~ Elise B. Simmons