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A wheely groovy home

This coming-of-age timber house bus reno project is helping a young Christchurch family onto the property ladder, writes Mikaela Wilkes.

Four years and ‘‘a lot of tears’’ went into Michael Gilling’s Scandinavian retrofit of a groovy vintage house bus.

The 32-year-old carpenter and his wife, musician Holly Arrowsmith, say the tiny lifestyle allowed them to start a business, and rapidly save for a deposit on their first house.

The couple initially fell in love with the curvy windows on their $27,000 clunker, and the next week they were driving it down the road.

The previous owners were parents of four kids who fitted it out for weekend camping getaways. The layout was cluttered, Gilling said, so he drew up a plan to gut the interior and build something more workable, and beautiful, from plywood timber.

The bus is 10 metres long, making it larger than the average tiny home. However, it lacks the spaciousness afforded by a high celling.

‘‘It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever built, mainly because I didn’t know what I was doing,’’ Gilling said. ‘‘I think of it now as a coming-of-age project. You’re doing it to prove to yourself that you can.’’

He would best describe his day job as ‘‘wood craft’’, ranging from hand-making dining tables and shelving units, to complete fit outs of bars and bakeries.

‘‘We thought we could strip out the inside, reline it and refit it, but it was only after we started pulling things apart that we saw the bus was waterdamaged and needed restoration work.

‘‘So the short-term plan changed. We figured, if we’re going to put the work in to do the fit out, we might as well make it structurally sound.

‘‘We stripped it back to a bare shell and did it again.’’

The structural rust needed to be cut out. Gilling parked the bus up at his Prebbleton workshop, invested in welding tools, and the work was guided by YouTube tutorials and sheer determination.

The curved windows that initially made them fall in love with the bus ended up being the biggest tear-jerker. ‘‘The hardest bit was putting in the new window sills,’’ Gilling said.

The first attempt took four people, averaging a speed of one window per hour. The next day Gilling realised the first window they’d installed was upside down.

‘‘If the window slipped out, you’d have to start again. So the whole time you’re really stressed.’’ Putting in the others took him two weeks.

‘‘We called a bunch of tradespeople, and no-one wanted to do it for us. It was the same thing with getting it painted and sanded. People either didn’t want to do it, or they were going to charge a lot. That forced us to do it all ourselves.’’

He believes he spent about $20,000 on the renovation, not accounting for his own labour.

All of this was done in Gilling’s weekends over four years.

‘‘I would struggle to put a figure on it, but I imagine hundreds of hours, if not thousands went into this thing.’’

The interiors are made out of 3mm plywood, ‘‘which is quite bendy’’, and Gilling lined the bus piece by piece.

‘‘I’d slowly cut the timber, bend it in, and every time I got it in further, I’d cut it more.

‘‘It took me two weekends just to do the back piece.’’

The final result is better than he could have imagined, reminding him a bit of armour.

All the storage is hidden underneath functional furniture.

The double bed hides the bus’ original luggage compartment, which is 2m wide and 600cm high. ‘‘That’s kind of like our garage.’’

Underneath the couch is a set of drawers; next to the bed is a dresser-size cabinet for all their clothes; and the bench space in the kitchen is about what you’d have in a small flat.

‘‘We had all our food and pots and pans and cutlery in there, and we still had excess space.’’

The couple parked the finished bus on a friend’s piece of land and lived there rent-free for about half a year, over the warm summer months.

They have now moved into a rental near to Hagley Park, largely due to the addition to the family of their 9-month-old baby.

‘‘The idea was to live cheaply. It allowed me to start up my business, and allowed us to tour for my wife’s music with fewer overheads.

‘‘We were travelling a lot, so we loved the idea of living in a bus and also having a place to come back to in Christchurch,’’ Gilling said.

As lifelong renters, they were already used to small spaces.

The trick to going tiny is packing things away immediately after use, Gilling said: ‘‘You do get used to it.’’

The plan is to sell the house bus in the near future, and put the money towards a deposit.

‘‘Our time is up with it. It’s served us, but life changes. We want something a bit more permanent now there’s three of us.’’

The tiny lifestyle, whether it be in a home or a bus, will not suit everyone, he said. But for those willing to do it for a year or two, the financial leg-up is huge.

‘‘This lifestyle would help some people. It’s definitely helped us. [The housing market] has forced us to live like this a little, but it was also our choice. The bus gave us certainty of a home.’’

Homed

en-nz

2021-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

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