Being fooled by life happens way more often to me than I’d like to admit, but this time around it was on a major purchase. In fact, the most major purchase of our whole project… Our school bus!
This especially eats away at me because initially, I couldn’t have been more excited about the bus purchase. It just seemed perfect! The school bus met all our qualifications; it had very little rust, it revved up on the turn of a key, it only logged 72,000 miles, and it’s asking price of $3,100 seemed more than reasonable.
The seller even ripped out all the seats already. He mentioned that he planned on making the bus into a Skoolie but after a year of doing nothing with the project he decided to sell.
Both Mike and I left Alabama in absolute bliss with our newly acquired school bus. It wasn’t until a few days later that I noticed one slight problem.
As I was putting away the title, in dark blue bleeding ink under that the first title transfer section, the Cobb County Board of Education wrote that the bus odometer showed 201,140 miles at the time of the sale.
After a brief bit of panic, I tried to calm down by telling myself, “It’s okay, the school’s auctioneer must have made a mistake after selling so many school buses and wrote down the wrong mileage”.
For my sanity, I cough up the $40 for the CarMax report to confirm the bus was at the low mileage I bought it at. And it did just that, the report labeled a 20-year-old Thomas School Bus with a little under 72,000 miles, but this wasn’t enough for me.
The next day, I called the school district’s transportation department to get the service records and to my surprise, the bus had indeed transversed over 200,000 miles. Years ago, the dashboard had been changed out, therefore, resetting the odometer back to zero miles.
After texting my findings back to the seller, he pleaded his ignorance. Whether I chose to believe that or not didn’t factor into the current mood of feeling played. What was a happy experience now feels tainted by this revelation.
One of those life lessons we sadly learned the hard way… the oh-so-obvious read the documentation in front of you before you sign it!
In the end, we’ve decided to keep our Thomas International. Rather than go through the trouble of returning or selling the bus, we’ve agreed that it’s still got good bones.
Only time will tell if it holds up.
Quick Note
Some skoolie blogs only like to write about the good things that happen during their journey which can lead you to feeling less than stellar when your own project goes awry.
(I’ve definitely been there! I’ve spent a good bit of time comparing my bus purchase to others I’ve seen on the Facebook group Skoolie Nation or independent blogs)
When working on a project this big, you’re going to experience a roller coaster of experiences and make more than a few mistakes along the way.
That’s why we’re committed to talking about everything! Our good moments, our bad moments, our lazy moments, our mistakes, and much more.
We share these moments because in the great words of Eleanor Roosevelt
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
– ELeanor Roosevelt
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