Before you decide to renovate a school bus, you might want to consider the question of paint.  As is often the case with bus issues, it is the size of the beast that causes the problems.

If, like most of us, you don't have a garage large enough, you will be working outdoors.

If you are renovating a bus you are probably not rolling in cash.  A bus will need a fair bit of paint, and that fancy automotive stuff is fairly pricey...

How long is the hose on your compressor?

A good paint finish requires good surface preparation.  A school bus has a BIG surface to prep.

If you don't have a squad of helpers, do you suppose you will have time to tape off all the windows and fixtures for proper spraying?  Before the next rainfall, that is...

Are you starting to see the picture?  Painting a school bus, through sheer size, is a little different from painting a car.  Cindy and I settled on buying gallon cans of rust paint and using brushes.  The result looks a bit rustic, and the finish is not the glossy perfection one might find on a auto-showroom floor, but it was do-able and suited the spirit of the project.  Ultimately, we came to see the project as more akin to painting a house than painting a vehicle.

The biggest challenge we faced was the deer-flies.  They were fierce, making our task sometimes miserable, and they also tended to land in the wet paint, dying as artistic textural flourishes.  Our property is well treed also, and along with the flies there are more than a few pine needles embedded in the paint.

On a philosophical level, painting a school bus brings you face-to-face with your own notions of perfectionism.  Most of us appreciate a flawless paint-job on a car or truck, but in the case of school-bus renovation one has to be realistic.  If you are a true perfectionist, you might want to stick to building ships-in-bottles, or designing the perfect martini, and leave school bus renovation to the pragmatist.