The donor bus
A 1987 Bluebird, still yellow
The bus was built in 1987 and spent its working life as a school bus with the Humboldt County School District. The crew bought it used in 2005 and gave it a second career.
The scrapbook / How she got here
Building
Porky.
From school bus to legend.
A bus with a backstory
1987 Bluebird.
2005 rescue.
The roasts were already happening. What the crew did not have was somewhere to put everything. In 2005 they bought a gently used 1987 Bluebird school bus from the Humboldt County School District, drove her home through northern California and Nevada, and spent the next stretch of their lives turning her into a kitchen.
One-way · Humboldt County to Salt Lake City · 2005
One road trip. One old bus. Thousands of memories.
Nobody involved would describe the purchase as sensible. Everybody involved would do it again.
The teardown
Out with the school seats
Every seat, rail and scrap of old flooring came out — grinder, pry bar and a lot of patience.
A clean shell
Walls, ceiling, floor
Gray walls, a red ceiling and a new floor turned an empty school bus into a blank canvas.
Prep for paint
Sand it, tape it, mask it
Back at the house the yellow got scuffed, sanded and taped. Young helpers pitched in on the wheels.
The makeover
Paint it crimson
Goodbye, school-bus yellow. Hello, Utah red — sprayed on with the windows and grille still masked.
The woodshop
Benches from scratch
Hand-built frames down both sides of the bus, tested by the crew’s most dedicated quality-control nappers.
The galley
Fridge, sink and cabinets
Cabinetry, a fridge, a sink and room for coolers went in where the back rows used to be.
The finished Porky
Red, black and ready for game day
Striped red-and-black benches with storage under every seat, a butcher-block counter and flat-top grill, a re-covered driver’s chair and red floor up front. The yellow school bus was gone — Porky had arrived.
Every photo on this page comes from the crew’s own build folder, in camera-roll order. A few early frames carry the camera’s date stamp; those dates have not been checked against the crew’s account, so none are used in the captions.
The crew’s build folder
Frame by frame.
All 59 photographs from the conversion, start to finish. Tap any one to flip through them full size.
The evolution
Still
rolling.
Every photograph, sticker, cabinet and upgrade is another page in the book. Porky is not a museum piece. She is a working tailgate that gets a little better every autumn.