Zara’s birthday has come and past, which is a story in itself, but as usual the blog is a little behind. We finished getting the roof re-insulated fairly quickly, but not without difficulty. We realized after some trial and error that it was going to be really hard to put the metal paneling back up without knowing where each one came from. This meant that we had to sort through and deduce one at a time which panel came from where… There are not really any photos of this process because we powered through it as quickly as possible and were struggling to keep our arms from giving out on us after holding panels above our heads all day.

We were now feeling the crunch time approaching before Zara’s birthday. We had booked our trip to whistler and had a few more projects that needed to be completed before the bus was ready for its next excursion. We knew that we wanted to rebuild the bunk beds so that they had a little more space and privacy. We also knew, however, that unless we wanted to haul wood through the windows later, we needed to reconstruct the back wall while the bunks were disassembled.

You can see in the picture above that there is a bit of a shelf-type shape that is formed by the sheet metal at the back. The plan was to build around this and end up with a nice shelf built into the wall. The weather was starting to improve from all of the rain we get through the winter, which was perfect for planning and cutting outside:

In the photos above, you can see the vision coming to life. We never quite got the shelf finished (and I’ll get back to that) but we went as far as we needed to before shifting focus back to the bunks and rebuilding them. They now stretch right up to the ceiling, which makes them a lot more comfortable. We also installed a plug into each one for phone charging, and will put a little LED light bar in the future.

Speaking of plugs, the next task was a bit of and overhaul of the power system. I installed a proper sub-panel under the kitchen counter, and laid out some more appropriate circuits with new plugs in the kitchen and bathroom. We also have plans for a few plugs in the back bedroom, including one in the shelf (which we never got to before the trip, and why it is not currently completed).

The last really big project before our trip was painting the ceiling. This was one of Zara’s main requests, and I definitely agree that the old pattern from the 80’s was not the most stylish. This was a two-weekend process because we wanted to make sure we got two good coats on there. If you have ever painted a ceiling you will understand the struggle of reaching and looking up for hours at a time… it’s pretty rough.

With the ceiling painted, we could finally install the LED lighting that we’d been planning for. We put up lengths of 2×2 above the windows, which we could lay the LED strips on. This would also double as a hanging point for the curtains that we had made, so we installed eye hooks along the bottom at the same time. Some nice rough-cut paneling then attached over top of the 2×2 to hid the LEDs and hooks:

Overall, we are super happy with how this stuff turned out. We put the same system in the bathroom and will be installing it in the bedroom as well once we have some time again.

The only other project we completed for the trip was our curtains. If you read the last post, you know that we were a bit preemptive with these guys. We ended up buying a bunch of blackout curtains, and then cutting and sewing them down to a bus size. Unfortunately we didn’t totally think through all of the measurements and ended up deciding to take them back home and make them a little smaller. The only photos of the completed curtains were taken on the trip, so you’ll have to wait for the next blog post to see them 😉

Thanks for reading!