I love buses so much I BOUGHT one – I screamed when it arrived & use it for my supermarket shop…my family think I’m mad
A YOUNG woman loves buses so much she bought one, screaming when it arrived and using it for her supermarket shop – even though her family thinks she’s ‘mad’.
Liv Rayment, 22, invested thousands of pounds as a teenager on her beloved double-decker which she use to travel across Kent.
Her love of buses began earlier, when she became a fan of a simulator video game – before making her bus driving dreams reality.
She used a loan from a friend to spend £4,500 on the vehicle about to be dumped by public transport firm Arriva.
Seven years later Liv is still paying the debt back to her pal, at a rate of £100 per month.
She is being helped by wages from her day job – working for a bus firm, Warwickshire-based Ridleys Coaches.
Ths bus she bought was built four months before she was born.
She has given it a fresh coat of paint, while keeping the original seats, and regularly drives it to bus-owner rallies.
Liv, from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, also uses it for leisure journeys – as well as her weekly supermarket shopping trips, while also driving it when attending her sister’s wedding.
She has described finding the idea of not only owning but restoring an old bus as “really cool”.
And she remembered buying hers despite being aged just 15 and scepticism from her family.
Liv said: “My parents weren’t too warm to it and thought it was a bit odd – but they were quite happy that I wasn’t going out and doing bad things at the weekend.”
She also remembered bullies at school calling her bus obsession “sad” and telling her to “get a life”.
But having completed her bus driving test 10 months after her A-levels, she now works as both coach driver and admin manager.
But it is her own double-decker which remains her favourite.
She said: “My friend bought it for me and he owns a body shop doing paint work on buses so I worked at the weekends to pay it off – now I pay him money every month.
“I was so excited and screaming in the kitchen when I heard that we’d bought it.”
Yet she now says she prefers working in the office rather than driving – blaming other motorists’ “lack of awareness for larger vehicles”.
Liv added: “It takes so much concentration and it’s so stressful.”
Elsewhere, a DIY whizz revealed how he lives full-time in an old school bus converted into a home with its own shower and kitchen.
A family of four have also started living in a former school bus.
And a couple took a Sainsbury’s delivery van which they gave a makeover into a cosy camper with plans for an Arctic trip ahead.