About
Hey there! We’re Chris & Sarah!
We are a husband and wife team from Wisconsin who decided to start Skoolie Livin, both living in a self-converted school bus full-time and this SkoolieLivin website.
After paying $2500 / month for a 650 sqft apartment in Silicon Valley when Chris worked on the iPhone team at Apple, we decided to stop renting and decided to go tiny with a tiny house on wheels!
On this page, we go into a little more about us, our bus details, and how we ended up creating SkoolieLivin.com.
About the Skoolie
Our bus is a 30′ 2000 International 3800 with a Blue Bird body. It’s a 9 window with a side door on the passenger side.
We’re rockin’ a DT466E engine and an AT545 transmission. The bus peacefully maxes out at 60 mph. Chris wants a new transmission put in, but we’ll be saving that project for another year.
We purchased the bus in November 2018 from a gentleman out in Michigan who is a diesel mechanic by trade. He bought the school bus from Virginia Beach Public Schools and drove it back to Michigan just to find out he was not able to use a school bus to service other school buses broken down on the side of the road. So he put it up for sale on Facebook Marketplace, where we found her listed with seats and all. $4000 cash later and a 1200-mile round trip drive, and it was ours! If you are looking for a bus yourself, check out our guide on how to find a bus to convert.
We worked hard on the bus full-time for seven months to get the conversion complete by the time our apartment lease was up in May 2019. Chris blames missing that deadline because of doing quality work. We moved into the bus in the midst of our conversion in June 2019.
We have done everything ourselves from demo’ing the bus to putting on the finishing touches. We also had a little help from both of our parents.
Our Stories
Chris Kochan
Chris has always been very ambitious. He started college at 16 years old and went into the Operations and Supply Chain field after he graduated. During these 7 years, he worked in the aerospace industry, then for Harley-Davidson, and ended up at Apple on the iPhone team.
However, he always enjoyed crafting, building, and creating things.
As a kid, he got most of his DIY construction skills starting from building skateboard ramps and working in the heating and air conditioning industry for his stepfather’s business. He picked up the mechanical knowledge from doing DIY maintenance and tuning on the nine cars and two motorcycles he owned.
In 2008, when he was in his college dorm limited on space, he began putting his skills for crafting and creating into the online world by building websites and selling them to businesses and bloggers. Building online businesses became a passion for Chris and he worked on various projects while in the corporate world experimenting with entrepreneurship.
He has put all of his skills and knowledge into building Skoolie Livin, which is an ever-evolving project.
- Email: [email protected]
- LinkedIn: Chris Kochan
Sarah Kochan
Sarah grew up in Deforest, WI, and was a basketball all-star through high school. Her love for basketball turned into a love for nutrition and exercise, which lead her to study nutrition and kinesiology in college.
When Chris quit Apple in 2018 and moved back to Wisconsin, Sarah had just finished a spring semester of college when Chris asked her to help him build an online business. Not really knowing what to expect but excited about the opportunity, she jumped in head first!
Sarah always loved watching HGTV, so when Chris came to her a few months into their journey building online businesses that he wanted to convert a school bus into a tiny home to live in, she was excited about digging into an “HGTV” type project.
While Chris did the build, Sarah was helping out here and there but was really focused on building the foundation of SkoolieLivin.com by documenting all of the steps of the build, filming their original YouTube videos, and posting on Instagram. She also took some courses on Pinterest Marketing, which is when she coupled her design skills with the online world by creating beautiful pins for Pinterest.
Today, Sarah runs all the Pinterest marketing for every project Chris and Sarah build together, while also blogging and helping with approving the skoolies listed on our Skoolie Livin Classifieds.
- Email: [email protected]
- LinkedIn: Sarah Kochan