A used school bus costs a fraction of an RV and is built to a standard that a recreational vehicle is not. They are engineered to carry children safely for hundreds of thousands of miles and they are maintained on a schedule by people who are legally accountable.

The frames are steel, the engines are commercial, and parts are available in every town in America because every town has school buses.

What you give up is that it arrives empty. Everything inside is yours to build, and that is either the appeal or the reason not to do it. For us it was the appeal, and it meant the layout suited our actual family rather than a marketing department’s idea of a family.

The thing nobody tells you is that space is not the problem. Storage is the problem. Five people generate an extraordinary amount of stuff and every single item has to have a place, or the bus becomes unlivable within about four days.

We had a rule that one thing came in and one thing went out. The kids largely kept to it, which surprised me.

Schooling happened at the table, outside, at picnic tables, in libraries when we could find them. It was better than I expected. Turns out a lot of school is logistics rather than learning, and when you remove the logistics the learning takes about three hours a day.

The children shared a space and had to work it out. They fought and then they stopped fighting, because there is nowhere to storm off to. I think that year did more for how they get along than anything else we have done.

To the right family, without hesitation, and I say that knowing exactly how hard parts of it were.

You need one person who is genuinely practical, because things break constantly and the nearest help is often a long way away. You need a tolerance for discomfort. And you need everybody actually on board, because a reluctant family member in a small space is a very long year.

What you get back is time. Uninterrupted, unstructured, unscheduled time with your children in extraordinary places. Nothing else I have done comes close.