What’s here
Getting Started
A guided path through the whole build: which guide to read at which stage, what each one settles, and why the order matters more than the effort. Start here if you have never done this before.
Follow the path →Full Project Planner New
Pick one vehicle and every integrated tool builds around it — electrical, solar and battery now, water and kitchen layout as they join the platform. One project instead of a pile of separate calculators.
See how it works →Floor Plan Designer
Lay out your build on a real bus footprint. Drag in beds, tanks, cabinets and appliances, draw walls, set mounting heights, then export a dimensioned PDF that measures true at 1/4″ scale in Bluebeam or any CAD program.
Open the designer →Build Planner
Pick your bus and a build standard and get a phased checklist in the order the decisions actually depend on each other, material quantities worked out from your bus's real dimensions, and a budget that counts the mechanical work most estimates leave out.
Plan your build →Bus Database
Interior length, width and ceiling height for 22 common models across Type A through Type D. Every figure is labelled by how well we can source it — no invented numbers. Open any model straight into the designer.
Browse the database →Build Guides
Ten guides on the decisions that are expensive to get wrong: choosing between Type C and Type D, sizing solar and batteries, diesel heaters, fridges, bathrooms, roof vents, and what a build actually costs.
Read the guides →Planning Calculators
Size the systems before you buy them — solar and battery capacity, heat load, appliance draw, bathroom space and build cost. The floor plan designer is live now; the rest are in development and say so plainly.
See the calculators →New to this? Start here.
Pick the bus
Length decides everything downstream — what fits, where you can park, and what you can legally drive. Compare real interior dimensions before you buy, not after.
Draw the layout
Move a bed six inches on screen instead of six times in plywood. Find the conflicts between your bathroom, your wheel wells and your water tank while it still costs nothing to fix.
Build from a real plan
Export a dimensioned, to-scale PDF you can take to the shop, hand to a welder, or check your cuts against. Measurements on paper, not in your head.
Why we build this
A bus conversion is one of the last honestly accessible paths to owning your home outright. No mortgage, no landlord, no permission needed to move. It asks for work and stubbornness instead of money, and it pays back in something most people never get: the ability to change your mind about where you live.
The planning tools for it, though, have always been someone else’s expensive CAD program or a sheet of graph paper. That gap is what this site exists to close.
Free, and staying that way
The designer and the database cost nothing. No trial, no subscription, no paywall on the tools themselves.
Honest numbers
Where we do not have a figure we can stand behind, we say so instead of guessing. Your build deserves better than a confident-sounding estimate.
Yours to keep
A free verified account is all it takes to save your work and export your plan as a file you own — no subscription, no lock-in.
Built with the community
The symbol library grows from what builders upload and share. Add what you make and it helps the next person.
Get the build notes
Occasional emails when new tools, guides or bus models land. No spam, no selling your address, unsubscribe any time.