I wish I could go back in time and take down some proper statistics on peoples’ reaction when I told them I bought a bus. But lacking that, I feel pretty confident throwing out a number off the top of my head. I would guesstimate that the initial response of about 75% of the people I told was, “That’s so cool! But…where will you park it?”

Wow, did they manage to hit the nail right on the head. This question plagued me and really was the main reason I dawdled for three weeks after first seeing my bus before I finally bought it. In the world of school bus renovation, few are those undertaking this task without owning a driveway or yard to park the bus in. School bus renovations take anywhere from a couple months for the ambitious to several years for the tinkerers. Either end of the spectrum is a pretty big chunk of time and as such many people drive their bus home in a less than legal state of affairs and park it until the renovation is complete. I live in an apartment and no one I know near me has a good place to put a bus, plus I am on a budget. So the option left to me was to park the bus on the road. In order to park a vehicle on a public road it has to be current on registration and inspection and be operable. Plus I wanted to use the bus to haul lumber and such so it needed to be street legal. I had heard horror stories online written by other skoolie owners about how difficult it was to get their bus legal so I wanted to make sure I had the process figured out before buying the bus.

Here is the part where you want to skip to the end if you aren’t interested in the process of making a bus legal to drive before it is converted to a motorhome.

Here’s how it is in Texas as far as I know. First of all, the best thing to do would have been to stop being antisocial trying to figure all this out online and just call the county tax assessor in the first place to see how to go about titling and licensing the bus. It doesn’t hurt to check on the law for what type of vehicle your bus qualifies as in your state just to make sure the person you deal with at the tax office isn’t grossly misinformed. This could happen since not many people drive a former school bus as a personal vehicle or motorhome. Texas required me to bring the old title, bill of sale (this may be optional?), title application, my ID, and insurance. I was really nervous waiting in line because I was sure there would be a problem. Nope. Handed my info over, answered a couple questions, and walked out a couple minutes later with regular passenger vehicle plates, a new registration sticker, and this weird sort of rush because it felt like I just got away with something. Apparently if a bus is not actually used as a school bus then, BAM, magic happens and it is just “bus”.

Insurance turned out to be the sticky part of this whole situation and the part that made me want to give up a little. There are only a couple of insurance companies such as Good Sam that will insure a school bus after it has been converted to a motorhome and I sort of already knew that after stumbling upon forum posts about that. The sticky part is they will not insure the bus before the conversion is complete. There is a whole story to that upon request. So I turned to regular insurance agencies. After lots of looking I found that Progressive would cover me, but not as a private vehicle. I had to insure the bus as a commercial vehicle for private use only. Basically they get to charge me more because commercial vehicles are required to have more coverage. It goes back to the story that requires requesting.

The best parts for me (though not for people with larger busses) were the inspection and driver’s license. The mechanic I took the bus to for repairs offered to do the inspection. The driver’s license was a nonissue because my bus is under 26,000 pounds so no special license required and it has hydraulic brakes (like a regular car) so no air brake endorsement. Easy breezy.

Now I am glad that my lack of parking options forced me to get the bus legal so I can do fun things like drive it to friends’ houses and to school. Plus the peace of mind that comes with being ready to drive it at any time is worth a lot to me.