… in the beginning

Well, not really the beginning since I’m skipping over 50+ years of stuff, but the beginning of this phase.

Toward the end of 2020, I had to do a number of blood tests, medical scans, and a liver biopsy to get to the bottom of why I was having really high liver enzyme levels and low white blood cell counts. There was some concern about leukemia because of the blood cell counts but further testing ruled that out. I’ve had Ulcerative Colitis for more than 30 years now, and although my symptoms are better since losing my colon to cancer, one of the things that often comes along with Ulcerative Colitis, and causes those high enzyme levels, is Primary Schlerosing Cholangitis. You can google it if you want to know more, but the result is that it causes scars in the bile ducts and it can eventually lead to liver failure. Stage 4 is when you get on the list looking for a donor, and I’m in stage 3. The only known cure is a liver transplant, and the new liver may also develop the disease as well, so mitigating the scarring is the most important thing you can do. Talking with my doctor, he said the best I can do is minimize things that are hard on my liver: don’t drink, eat healthy, exercise, reduce body fat, reduce stress, and take a medicine to help break down fatty foods. The good news is that I’ve already been doing all of those except the stress reduction for quite a while, so in an effort to do everything we can, my wife and I started having conversations about how we might reduce stress going forward.

Beginning of 2021, in talking about reducing stress, we decided to sell the house while the market was good, get rid of the mortgage, and spend some time traveling. Traveling in general is kinda hard on me, so in thinking of ways to make that easier, we started looking at motor homes. A nicer motorhome would require some financing, but we came across skoolie conversions and thought we could afford to build one from the sale of our home . We did a lot of research and talked about doing the conversion ourselves, with help from a part-time nomad friend of ours, but at the end of the day, we decided that doing the conversion ourselves would take too long. I work “over-full-time” already, so building a school bus into a motorhome would be a pretty long project and our goal was to get on the road and reduce stress. We thought our best path forward was to find a company to do our skoolie build.

The plan was to put our house on the market, buy a bus to start the build as soon as possible, and use the money from the sale of the house to pay off the build. We knew the house would sell fast in the buyer’s market we were in, so first up was to find a conversion company and get a bus.

The Journey Begins

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

On May 7th, we found an article online about the “Top 10 crowd favorite school bus conversion companies” and number 1 was Lone Star Skoolie Conversions in San Antonio, Texas. After a lot of research into companies that do school bus conversions, we finally settled on Lone Star Skoolie and started talking to them about doing a build.

First payment to LSS

We made our first payment to Lone Star Skoolie, on a credit card (which will be important later on). We weren’t expecting to make the payment on this day, but we had already paid for the bus (from another company) and since we were in CA and the builder was in TX, we had no way to go get the bus ourselves. Ben, the “builder”, suddenly needed to be paid in order to go pick up the bus, otherwise our paid-for bus was going to sit at the dealer until we went and picked it up.

More money, to “start” roof raise.

At this point, the builder said they were done with the demo and ready to move on to the next phase, which was the roof raise. They said they needed more money to buy materials to do the roof raise and would need to put the build on hold until we paid. We were fine making this 2nd payment at this time because we were told our Roof Raise (which was a 10 day project) was going to begin immediately.

Also of note about this interaction, Ben said we needed to make this 2nd payment using the Cash app instead of with a credit card. It was all a rush “to prevent having to stop work on the bus”, and after some problems getting the cash app to handle such a large amount, he acquiesced and let us put this 2nd payment on a credit card like the first.

First meeting at Lone Star Skoolie

We arrived on-time for our SCHEDULED meeting with Lone Star, something that had been on the calendar with them for a month or more? We were in contact with them days before landing in TX as well as when we arrived at the hotel, so it was no surprise that we were coming. Well no surprise to us. They were completely unprepared for our arrival. Ben was in another meeting (an unlikely excuse he uses OFTEN). Amber and the shop foreman Thomas were completely clueless about the specifics of our build. After we explained again as much of our build as we could in the hour or more we were there, Thomas gave us an initial “completion” date of mid-November. After some uncomfortable discussions about how that was absolutely not going to work for us and not at all the 6-8 weeks we were promised before flying to TX, we were finally able to meet with Ben. He sent Amber and Thomas on their way and then proceeded to tell us that they absolutely would have the bus done in the 6-8 weeks he had originally promised us and then told us that Amber and Thomas were just regurgitating their standard “3 month build” mantra that they’ve been instructed to tell new customers. He said he was the one that set the pace and the schedule for builds, “because he’s the owner and they do what they’re told.”

This was the 5th time we asked them whether the subfloor was done correctly. Ben went out to the bus and inspected the subfloor himself and discovered it was put down OVER the rubber matting, that they promised us 4 times had been removed, and said they would tear it all up and redo it.

We also finally got to take a look at our bus, live and in person, after having paid for it remotely almost 2 months earlier. They had completed almost nothing on the build other than the initial demo of removing the seats and part of the floor. The roof raise had not started. The subfloor had not been completed either, and the part of it that was “done” was not done correctly.

Design… because measurements matter

Or initial design included an L-shaped kitchen and a queen-sized murphy bed. The “scale” drawings Ben drew up (a proclaimed mechanical engineer), all had these elements in them. After scratching our head on some design aspects and wondering why it wasn’t looking like it was going to fit properly, we took a tape-measure and measured the bus ourselves. We discovered Ben had been using incorrect measurements in all of his drawings. Not only did he have walls with incorrect thickness, he also had the bus at 5 feet longer than it actually is. FIVE feet longer. Well THAT’S not good.