Getting from Boom to Bus on €50k tiny home Dervla 

Must go: Dervla Dekker has many hundreds of miles under her fanbelt. She's named after intrepid wheeler  Dervla Murphy

Fare deal: Dervla Dekker, the  Tramore Eco Bus converted to sleep six in comfort is ready to move on: yours for €50k.

THINK the key to a decent property purchase is ‘location, location, location’?

Outstanding in its field: The funky double decker bus is now on sale for €50,000.

It can be all of that, and more, in the case of the Boom to Bus, Dervla Dekker, a former Dublin City 69-seat double decker bus converted to a comfortable ‘tiny home’ on wheels that can sleep up to six.

Currently Munster-based, but mobile enough to easily relocate, all you need to do to call it home is to find the location yourself upon which to site it, and hook it up to power and a tap.

Oh, and to buy it.

Pretty as a picture in purple and with her name spelled out in neon, Dervla, with many, many hundreds of thousands of miles under her fanbelt, is now for sale, with a price tag of €50,000, all ready to roll up, or drive up to its next place to call home.

Creating the home on wheels from a robust Dublin double decker after the heroic solo traveller, cyclist and acclaimed writer, the late Dervla Murphy, were Waterford-based musician and lecturer Mark Graham, and freelance journalist Ellie O’Byrne.

Author Dervla Murphy at her home in Lismore, Co, Waterford in 2014.

They’d stayed in something similar around the start of the coronavirus, the Wild Atlantic Bus in Galway back in 2020 and almost immediately fell for its charms. Mark was googling ‘busses for sale’ before they’d even made the return trip from the west, says Ellie.

Converting and creating and curating Dervla over two years and mid-way through the conversion, the duo doubled down. They bought a second bus and called it Desmond, after the Jamaican reggae musician and songwriter Desmond Dekker.

Peddling a bus? Ellie and Mark have cooked up ambitious travel plans

Desmond Dekker is nearly done and dusted, and as he approaches completion, Dervla Decker is ready for road — so to speak — for sale, at least, as the couple plan to take two years off and to cycle around the world, starting in 2025.

They’ve already done much of southern Europe, Croatia, Albania, Greece and the like, and Mark did the entire Wild Atlantic Way on a wooden bike. Next stop for them both is the exotic Silk Road, and the various ‘stans’ heading towards Mongolia, and Asia….sort of following in the tracks to the great voyager Lismore’s very own Dervla Murphy.

Full tilt ahead

To pave the way, they’ve invited prospective ‘tiny home’ hunters to come to Tramore and to literally ‘kick the tyres’ of this personalised property and sample its creature comforts, or to even stay a night or so. Dervla has already proven its worth as a five-star rated Airbnb venue, notes Superhost Ellie.

She reckons there’s still only a small number of successfully converted double deckers around Ireland, and a fair share of them are used as guest accommodation, for small corporate gigs or as diners.

Domesticated Dervla has already had lots of media exposure in national newspapers, and radio, and can be lived in year-round, with a pot-belly stove downstairs and two electric heaters upstairs. The ‘Red Dot’ favourite spot is the double bed up front (pic, left) with views of starry skies. Last week’s northern lights was a free light show, they enthuse.

The bus underneath it all is a 7.3 litre Volvo that they bought with a full CVRT in 2021, with unspecified mileage and which had served as a school bus after its time ferrying Dublin city commuters. Even chewing gum found under the seats didn’t burst their bubble....

Upstairs Downstairs

“We’ve had people thinking they can buy it and use it as a mobile home, but it’s really not suitable for that. It drives or can be transported but should be parked up, so it needs a site,” explains Ellie.

Ideally, it will be one with power supply (but it is wired for off-grid power, and has been professionally certified by an electrician) and water. It also has a 1,000 litre tank, hot water and cassette toilet.

Dervla is up on DoneDeal, with 4,500 views to date and showing a slight price reduction from €55,000 to €50,000. That sales site also has other buses in various states from a few thousand euros upwards, but in various raw or rusty states.

VERDICT: Over its two levels, Dervla has about 50 sq metres, or 49 sq metres if you take away the driver’s cab up front.

It can’t really go up on property websites like Myhome or Daft as it needs a ‘location search’ — and that’s exactly what’s up for decision now, waiting for the rubber to hit the road.