Our car experts choose every product we feature. We may earn money from the links on this page.

Will Sutherland didn't intend to own a fleet of buses, or to use one of them to start a thriving Airbnb business that helped pay off his student loans. But that's just how addictive the skoolie subculture can be.

One day, if you're lucky, you might love something in this world as much as Will Sutherland loves yellow school buses. For the 32-year-old West Virginian, they've been a source of fascination since childhood. He remembers all but his earliest bus numbers, and he fondly recalls the rides to and from school being his favorite part of the day. "I actually got kicked off the bus for a week in second grade," Sutherland says in a thick southern drawl. "I had crawled underneath it to see how it worked." As is Sutherland's personable style, he even keeps in touch with his elementary school bus driver. "She drops off deer meat in my fridge even if I'm not home."

So where has this deep, lifelong affection for school buses led Sutherland? Well, he's surrounded himself with them. Of the three he currently owns, so far he's converted two of his hulking vehicles into RVs called "skoolies" to live in, road trip, and rent out. His most recent creation is an 18-foot, wood-paneled short bus—"Woody"—that earlier this year carried Sutherland on a three-week road trip with his girlfriend, Sabrina, and collie, Bruce. Parked under an apple tree and next to a chicken coop outside of his Shepherdstown, West Virginia, home, Woody is currently occupied by a local special ed teacher in need of short-term housing solution (he's found the accommodations so agreeable that his residency is going on five months). And down a stone path out back is Sutherland's first bus, a 28-foot International 3800 that maintains a 5-star rating on Airbnb after two years of renting and roughly 200 guests.

When it comes to converting school buses into rolling mobile homes, Sutherland is far from alone. The skoolie sub-culture is an enthusiastic one that has staked out a passionate scrap of the auto world at the intersection of tiny homes, classic cars, and campers. More than childhood nostalgia and massive diesel engines, school buses offer a largely blank canvas to create your own custom mobile home at a price—$4000 gets you a recently retired International—that makes your standard Winnebago look like highway robbery. "You're not limited by what some engineer thinks you need in a camper," says veteran skoolie converter Doug Hay. "It's very economical. As soon as you get it home and rip out the seats, you have a steel tent to enjoy."

Still, the cost had always been a little too steep for Sutherland, and it literally took a force of nature to push him into buying that first International. He'd drawn up conversion plans in 2012 after discovering the active skoolie community on Instagram. "I was all downhill from there," he says. "I cleared my feed of all non-skoolie accounts." But he was also interested in tiny homes, a similar style of minimalist living, at the time and got sidetracked putting in a small cabin on his lot. In July, 2014, a derecho, a sort of straight-line inland hurricane, knocked down a dozen trees on his land and halted his project.

"That storm left me busy the next three months cutting up wood," Sutherland says. "After all that, it burst my bubble." With his enthusiasm for the intense manual labor involved in building a cabin waning, he looked for a quicker project—namely a 28-foot steel cabin on wheels. In September, he lucked upon a seemingly too-good-to-be-true Craigslist ad. Listed as an IRS sale, he was looking at a 1997 International 3800 with a 7.3-liter Navistar diesel for a mere grand. The catch: The sketchy ad vaguely stipulated the bus had "parts missing." But as an optimist on a mission, he took a two-hour drive up I-95 into Maryland to discover that the "missing parts" was just the horn button — a cheap 15-minute fix. He handed over cash on the spot, took the title, and returned a week later with a friend to bring the bus home.

The first rush of adrenaline in a skoolie project isn't firing up the engine or finishing the build—it's the inaugural ride down an open highway. Even Hay, who at one point in his life piloted M1 Abrams tanks, describes his initial drive as nerve-racking. "The first couple miles I was scared," he says. "I felt fight-or-flight kicking in and adrenaline hitting my veins. I was on edge."

What Hay felt, and what Sutherland experienced on his trip home, was the power and consequence of steering a 10-ton metal box down the road. "It felt like I was driving a building," Sutherland says. "It took me two hours to get a grip on the size."

While the conversion was in the works that fall, Sutherland still cruised around Shepherdstown—or as far as he could afford to wander in a vehicle that only covered eight miles per gallon. More often, he'd drive to Home Depot for the convenience of working on it in the parking lot and running into the store as problems popped up.

On his short drives, the bus attracted fans instantly and Sutherland's own enthusiasm fed off the excitement of friends and strangers. While pulling out of a Halloween festival, a group of college kids flagged him down and begged for a ride to Alto's, a bar 10 minutes away. Tickled at the chance to play school bus driver, he welcomed them in and was surprised by the $20 he got for his troubles.

Sutherland's first skoolie conversion took less than four months (many take years), and the materials cost an impressively slim $1800, thanks in large part to his resourcefulness. The flooring, insulation, and screws were all salvaged from his ill-fated tiny cabin (Airbnb guest will be happy to know most of the money went into new mattresses).

Despite having his early designs, the conversion started without much of a plan for the 180 square feet. Sutherland just went in and started shearing off the seats' anchor bolts with an angle grinder. "Once I had the seats out, I had drawn out enough layouts to have it all clicking together in my mind," he says.

Skoolie designs can be ambitious, and for Sutherland, the biggest challenge of his build was installing a wood-burning stove that didn't require cutting through the roof—he was worried about resale value. "It was a tight squeeze," he says. "The height had to be low enough for the stove pipe to maintain a 45-degree angle out of the window." Even when he eventually found a model that could sit over the wheel well and angle out of the window, Sutherland still had to shorten the legs and install L brackets. In his next bus—and he already knew he wanted another bus—the stove would go through the roof.

As winter settled into Shepherdstown in December of 2014, Sutherland decided to park the bus in the back of his lot for the season. The conversion was complete, and at a friend's urging, he listed it on Airbnb for $60 a night. "I just wanted to share the bus," Sutherland says. And as a man with frequent bouts of wanderlust, he loved the idea of meeting fellow travelers.

The bus was an immediate hit. Within days of going online, reservations started rolling in. His first guests were students, a young couple from Qatar who spent Christmas together during a brief overlap in the U.S. One had just finished a semester abroad and the other was about to start theirs. It was the only three days they'd see each other for nine months. As an example of why Sutherland maintains a five-star status, he even drove the couple to and from the train station.

But the real charm and warmth of Sutherland's Airbnb school bus doesn't so much radiate from the crackling, burning logs, but from the man himself. An unabashed, fiercely proud West (by God) Virginian, Will says the interior design, from the stove to the banjo, was an expression of his love for his home state. His embodiment of the Mountain State is perhaps one of the purest distillations of Southern hospitality. Of course, the dogs help too.

In addition to a pair of lovable, rambunctious lab rescues, there's Sutherland's eight-year-old collie, Bruce. "He's just the king of the property," Sutherland says. "He's the most mellow, chilled out dog. People always want a picture with him, he's an icon." Guests even ask Sutherland if Bruce will spend the night in the bus with them. "I'll say yes," Sutherland says, "but it feels like I'm pimping him out."

As those $60 nights kept adding up, Will saw an opportunity. He had a solid dayjob in marketing at a local casino and hadn't gone into the Airbnb business with plan, but suddenly his student loans were more than covered and he had extra money in his pocket. So he set his sights on that second bus.

In a testament to his fervor for small living, Will's next bus offered just 76 square feet, less than half the space he was renting out. Not only did he enjoy the cozier living quarters, but being able to use normal parking spaces and regular auto mechanics eliminated two headaches that come with the big buses. And this time, he found his project closer to home. It was the drunk bus for Alto's Bar, the same destination Will delivered those grateful college kids to a year earlier.

Despite its smaller stature, the new project took five months. With Will's newfound skoolie experience came a greater desire for perfection. He'd learned so much on his first bus — like the necessity of wall insulation—"once that stove goes out in the big bus you've got about 15 minutes before it gets cold"—that the smaller space became a much more intricate work of craftsmanship. He also admits that his girlfriend Sabrina Hartley, who entered his life in the last year, played an important role. She fell in love with his Airbnb bus at first sight, describing it as "Pinterest-worthy."

"My first stay in the bus was a dream," Hartley says. "We built a fire in the woodstove, played cards, and listened to 'Freebird.'"

As Sutherland dug in on the new conversion, Hartley was there for every step, from staining pine side panels to fitting the ceiling. "I wasn't staying up until 2 a.m. working anymore," he says. "But she also didn't let me skimp on details." His West Virginian aesthetic, which he happily calls "redneck," remained and flourished on new details like hood-mounted bullhorns and the woody-style sidewalls made of pine planks and about eight coats of finish.

Sutherland didn't have a half-collapsed cabin to mine for this conversion, but friends and family we're happy to pitch in. A neighbor renovating her kitchen donated cabinet doors, his dad had an old sink bowl, and another buddy tossing out a waterbed frame provided storage drawers that Will refinished and installed under his custom bed frame. He also had an old family pool deck to mine for wood, which he turned into a collapsible table and bench.

On February 7th, 2016, Will hit the road for that three-week cross-country adventure with Sabrina and Bruce, who now responds to "on the bus." Instead of the world coming to Will's bus through Airbnb, he was hitting the road to see it himself. Over 7000 miles, through the Rockies, down the Pacific Coast, and with a stop at the Grand Canyon, the only mechanical hiccups were bad battery terminals and a shot starter solenoid—combined, a six-hour fix. And the only oversight during the conversion, Will says was not installing a rack to keep the coffee maker in place while driving. "The coffee pot rack was for Sabrina," Sutherland says. "We had a couple spills."

Back at home, and with two gorgeous skoolies on his lot, Sutherland seemed ready to settle in and look further down the road for his projects. He thought about taking his work out of the driveway by building a 1500-square-foot workshop to do three or four commissioned skoolies a year. That didn't happen.

"It was only a couple months before I began to have the itch once again to buy another bus and convert it," says Sutherland. "Itch" undersells his passion—the man's head is on a constant swivel for parked buses while he drives. He has friends at the local school bus depot keeping an eye out for cherry buses nearing retirement. And if he suspects he's spotted a school bus sitting in a neighbor's yard, he checks Google Earth for confirmation.

So when a short bus that'd been on Sutherland's radar for a year had the price knocked down from $2500 to $1700 in May, he jumped. "Just the thought of someone else having it would be upsetting for me," he jokes. After a test drive revealed weak brakes, he agreed to $1200 and the unrelated but reasonable task of helping the woman take a photo of her hyperactive Bichon Frise—he's a nice guy, after all.

Sutherland bought the new rig, a 1984 Chevy drivetrain under a Carpenter body, with a plan. In the course of two recent weeks, three engaged couples had approached Sutherland to drive for their weddings. As a man with a lifelong yearning to be a school bus driver, it was another business he couldn't resist. While his smaller Woody bus only has one passenger seat and a bed, the new bus—his last he claims—could retain the first three rows of brown bench seating and be followed by a U-shaped couch. With seating for 16, it'll be perfect for chauffeur gigs. He also plans to fix the brakes, install a 5000 BTU air conditioner, and a wireless five-speaker stereo. "We may tint the windows, but that's for future consideration," he says.

But before he can do anything, Sutherland first needs to sell one of his non-bus vehicles, a 1970 International Loadstar 1600, to "declutter his automotive life" and also help fund the third build. While he's sworn off a fourth bus for himself, he eventually wants to convert handicap-accessible short buses for people in wheelchairs. "I have friends who dream of having a bus they can access and travel in," he says. "I'd love to have that purpose." Sutherland's confident he can make three or four skoolies a year using his Woody bus as the template. After all, he says, "America was my proving grounds."

If they happen, the commissions are a couple years away, which presents a problem for Sutherland. "I literally have anxiety if I don't build something at least every six weeks," he says. Even with his plan to turn the most recent bus into a party rig, he's increasingly torn because he also wants to do one more budget conversion. So sure, he's not going to get a fourth bus. Rather, he says, he might get back into tiny homes, maybe build more chicken coops or, even start making realistic playhouses. Sutherland also has a side obsession with big trucks, hence the International. This spring he picked up a Jeep Comanche with a topper for when he wants to really rough it on road trips or the Woody is rented out. But really, he's not going to get a fourth bus. Probably.