Our family loved living out of a converted van and bus so much that we started a business so others can share in the joys of #vanlife

• Jake and Gianna Bachowski spent years traveling the country and living on the road with their kids.
• The couple lived in a van when their oldest child was a baby and a bus when they had their second.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gianna Bachowski, 34, and her husband Jake, 35, about their journey from living in a van and a bus with young children to opening a business that converts vans and buses into tiny homes for others. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Gianna: Before the van, we'd been trying to figure out how to spend more time together as a family. Jake was working all the time and missed a lot of firsts with our first daughter.

Then, we discovered van life on Instagram and took a leap of faith and joined in. We quit our jobs and sold everything and just trusted the process.

Our oldest daughter, Luna, was about 1½ when we hit the road and it was so, so wonderful. It was so freeing. We got to spend so much quality time together. She still talks about it to this day.

I think it built Jake and my relationship. We started off so strong, but it was really cool to see all these different places and experience it together and with our daughter.

Our 1½-year cross-country road trip was life-changing

Jake: Our first trip lasted 1½ years. We started March 2019 from Middletown, New York, where Gianna's grandmother lived.

We left there and then we traversed down the eastern seaboard for a little bit, and we made our way back to Florida. We had to paint the interior of the van and then there was actually a hurricane coming.

We hightailed it out of there and made our way through the center of the state and then we ended up in the center of the country, in Minneapolis.

It started to get cold and we weren't used to the cold so we headed a little more south and west and we made our way through Colorado. We went to Utah, and then down through Arizona, and then into Nevada. Finally, we made it to the West Coast.

That was a big moment when we saw the Pacific Ocean in San Diego for the first time. It was a really cool experience.

We made money on the road through brand partnership and selling our van-conversion designs

Jake: While we were on the road, I worked for a traveling pharmaceutical company where I did sales for a CBD startup.

Then Gianna started to grow our social media page.

It just opened us up to so many opportunities like being featured in magazines and on the Tamron Hall Show. We did so many things we wouldn't have been able to do if we did not step outside of our comfort zone.

We were able to work with brands and we were able to do sponsored posts and promote products that we loved. We really tried to be smart with our partnerships and leverage products that we could use, stuff that we would spend money on whether it was food or a diaper company.

Then we found other ways to make money. People always asked us, "How big is your kitchen?" So we decided: let's just put together our layout and we'll sell it for $10 on our website. That became another little stream of income.

When we found out we had a baby on the way we sold our van and converted a bus

Gianna: Around the time we got to the West Coast, I found out that I was pregnant with our second child.

I had some complications in the beginning of my pregnancy, so after we left San Diego, we hightailed it back to Florida where my doctors were. We parked at Jake's parents house where I was able to rest and see the doctors that I needed to see. Luckily, everything was okay.

While we were there, we sold our van and got our toolbox out to start on another conversion.

Jake: We found a school bus in Miami on eBay, and we ended up buying it for $4,800.

Our second child was born on July 16, 2020, and then seven days later we packed up the bus from Sarasota, Florida, with everything that we own. We had our seven-day-old baby and our three-and-a-half-year-old daughter and we drove from Sarasota back to Warwick, New York, in four days. It was a crazy adventure.

Gianna: Then once we did some final things on the bus, we hit the road again for about a year.

Then our oldest daughter expressed her desire for a little bit more privacy and a little bit more space. And we also felt like it was time to settle down.

Jake: We also wanted to have another baby, so we said, "Now is probably a good time to do that." We put $40,000 into the conversion, and sold the bus for $50,000.

When we decided to settle down, we turned our passion for conversions into a business

We wanted to stay involved in the van life community. We love it so much, it changed our lives. It's crazy to see how it's changed so much over the last couple of years — it's really turning into a huge thing.

We moved back to Florida in May 2021. And then we bought another bus in July because we couldn't stay away. So we said, "We're just going to build it and we'll sell it, we'll find someone to buy it."

Gianna: And then more people asked us for conversions! So then we set up a shop in Sarasota.

Jake: I grew up here and I have developed a network of incredible relationships across the board. So we have a really wonderful labor pool. When we were looking for talent — carpenters, woodworkers, painters, body shops, and things like that — we were able to have a really awesome pool of people who want to work and who do great work.

We do all the work in-house. We're almost like a general contractor, in essence, where for larger jobs and things like that, I'll bring in 1099 employees. It halves the time but we're always there overseeing things. It's a really awesome operation to see all these people come together and have a great product at the end. We also have some guys in-house that work there.

We do partial work, too. So not only do we do the full conversions, but we also do tons of small work.

We have a young lady who just came to us who wanted to make her passenger seat more comfortable for her dogs to sit on, and also more comfortable to work from on a laptop. So we made this really cool removable extension. We also do a lot of custom woodworking.

The options are really endless when it comes to vans and school buses. We've done some cool stuff with trailers as well.

We've converted a Ford Transit into a mobile custom tailor shop. We've done multiple mobile barbershops.

We had a young lady the other day who has a mobile esthetician shop and we did some repair work — it's this luxury high-end Sprinter that's gorgeous and offers all these great services that comes right to your door. So it seems like it's the way of the future. You can have a brick and mortar business, without paying all the taxes or fees.

If you bring the van to us, for about $60,000, we can make you your own salon. It's yours to drive around. Our homes average between $60,000 to $100,000.

It's been a whirlwind of entrepreneurship and figuring this out. We're navigating through being first-time business owners without any formal training, but it's been so much fun so far.

Quite a bit of our builds have been for families. So it's nice to see that they'll be making memories on the road.