Reconstruction

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. ...

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] ...

Okay!! I apologize for the long silence, but that’s how you know things have been busy in(and out) of the bus. I’ve got a ton of stuff to go through, most of which have good images but some might not. I’m planning to do a walk through video once it’s done so hopefully that will capture anything I forgot to photograph. With that out of the way let’s tear into it :) The first thing that happened after my last post is that we found some fresh and grey water tanks at good old TSC in Arnprior. We measured these out and decided they would fit perfectly into one of the luggage bays under the bus… and they did :) ...

I’ve got a lot to talk about in this post, but also a lot of good pictures to go with it :) I thought I’d just start with this picture that I forgot to put in the last post of me putting together the kitchen counter… The next thing that we did after the counter was the toilet and fridge. We realized that the washroom wasn’t quite as far forward as we’d hoped and therefore not directly over the last luggage bay. It was decided that the best and probably only course of action was to raise the toilet off of the ground 6 inches and run the pipes forward before going down through the floor. This works out quite nicely as we needed to raise the fridge up anyway and keep the return vent open. Here’s a picture of the pipe coming out of the front of the bathroom, and then one of the toilet in place: ...

Just a quick update this week. The plan was to do the front benches next but I’ve realized that I need to put in seat belts first. The belts are in the mail and I am waiting to get a piece of steel made to secure them. In the meantime, we built most of the counter for the kitchen out of some nice knotty pine boards. Eventually we will stain and/or seal the wood but for now we’ve just got it all built in. We decided to build around the window mechanisms so that the original emergency exit handles can go back in. The small area along the back should serve nicely as a duct for the heating and AC. ...

So here we go! Now that the floor is all done, things are starting to get built on the inside. This weekend we finished the back bed area, bunks, and washroom. We framed the bunks with 2x4s and the washroom with 2x3s. Then we used 11mm plywood to panel the ends of the bunks and walls of the bathroom. We figured that if we built the bunk and bathroom walls well, then we could just throw a 2x4 across and lay down the plywood for the back bed. ...

Well, some exciting things have been happening on the bus since my last post. I’ll try to keep this one a little more brief than the last but no guarantees… First off, the Drivers area. I was planning to take out the old plywood here and put fresh stuff in but I realized that one large sheet stretches across the whole front area and has more or less every major and minor wire passing through it along with the heating fluid, steering column, and pedals. Needless to say I decided not to dig that deep and simply went with pulling up the old floor. I bought a large entryway mat to retrofit in as a carpet. I thought this was great because it’s moderately comfortable for the diver and won’t allow water or dirt through it into the wood below (it was also rather cheap). ...