Now that Zara and I are really settled into our life in Vancouver, we have some more time and money to re-visit some of the aspects of the bus that we were never quite satisfied with in our initial conversion. I won’t divulge the entire list of projects that we came up with yet, but they will all be detailed here at some point 😉 We also have a new Instagram account for the bus (which we’ve officially named Steve) that you can follow for more regular updates from Zara [@abusnamedsteve]

First of all, a little bit of personal news. We got engaged! Most of you reading this may already know that but we are excited 🙂

Okay, now onto the bus stuff. The first project that I wanted to tackle was power. We had an inverter and one RV battery in the bus, but now that it is parked with no plugin it is always dead when we go out there and the battery itself was shot. We priced it all out and decided that some new batteries and a set of solar panels would do us nicely. We spotted a nice sale so ordered the solar panels first, which came super quickly via Amazon.

I knew that the installation would require going through the roof, and running some wires. I also knew that I always wish I’d replaced the insulation in the roof when I had the bus torn apart the first time. The solar panel job soon got side tracked as we started to pull down the roof panels to see how big of a job that would really be. In the end, we decided to go for it, as the 30 year old insulation was less than effective and it was likely one of our last chances to really do it right.

If you look carefully in this video, you can also see that we put some curtains up over the windows. Those have since come down for the renovations (they were up for a total of about ten minutes). This is one of the other projects that we started on, ordering some full length curtains and sewing them back up to be bus sized… but more on that later on when they go in for real.

Eventually we got all of the main panels taken down and the insulation cleaned up. We chose closed-cell foam insulation to replace it with and got busy cutting all of the panels out. We struggled a little at the beginning, learning how to best cut the foam and also cut out the divots needed for the cross-members etc. but by the end of the day we could rip them out pretty quickly.With the roof all torn out, we could then get the solar panels installed! This was honestly one of the easiest projects we’ve ever done on the bus, we just had to wait a couple weeks for a day without rain in order to get them put up.

We also got the solar charge controller installed, but this is when we we’re finally able to confirm that the old battery we had was totally useless. The following week we bit the bullet and bought 4 new 6v deep cycle batteries to power the bus. Now that they have the power of the sun to keep them maintained it’s great to know that they are healthy and ready for us anytime we visit or use the bus.

With the solar project done, we turned back to the roof insulation. First step was to put up all of the corner insulation pieces and start to gain some space back in the bus, which had every surface covered in cut out pieces of foam insulation.

Having a source of power has also been a great help as we start to put the roof back up. We have a lot of battery tools but some like the angle grinder are not, which we can now start to use again! This let us finally tackle the riveted roof panels at the back of the bus.

We also started prepping the roof panels to get them put back up. We are peeling off the old patterned decal from them so that they can be painted once they are back up. The center panels seem to peel really easily but the side ones do not. We are going to try using a hair dryer next time to see if we could get them to lift. There is also a really strong glue smell that remains after they are peeled so we are sanding off any residue before putting them back in (which is necessary for painting anyway).

Much to Zara’s delight, we then finally took down the fiberglass panel at the back of the bus. She’s hated it since I left it there during the first round of renovations. We are going to build some nice shelves/storage into that area and are both excited to be rid of the eyesore.

We have started this new chapter where every project seems to spawn another, so it may be a while before I can write a blog post that ends with everything being wrapped up nicely. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue through our long list of improvements. Hopefully it won’t be long before we get the roof back together so that the bus is usable again. Thanks for reading!