
Christmas time and the winter holidays are one of the most beloved times of the year. It’s also a great time to become financially overextended and to bring a screeching halt to your most exciting personal projects (i.e.: building a 20 year old school bus into a traveling home).
So after a few-week sabbatical, we are back at it! I’ve spent the last two days patching holes in our floor with JB weld and plates made from the old ceiling and finally getting a good coat of paint across the whole floor to try and seal it up from any future rust issues.
Eventually, this subfloor will be covered by XPS foam board insulation, a layer of plywood and then finally faux-wood vinyl flooring to finish it all off. The pretty vinyl stuff won’t come until the very end, after we finish framing out the interior and installing most of the other carpentry (no reason to install some nice flooring and then cover it all up).
My next big task will be resealing a leaky hatch, voiding out windows that will be behind furniture, moving side escape windows around so they suit our floorplan better (I’ve found that by propping open the top-hinge escape windows during the demo I can get a lot of really nice air flow through the bus and I figure it would be a shame to do away with them), recaulking most of the other leaky window frames and possibly removing the existing stock stainless sidewalls. I’m dithering on whether to remove them because they are riveted into the bus frame and there are a lot of rivets. I know our best bet in the long term is to rip them out and reinsulate with modern foam but the cost, labor and knowledge that we could just insulate over them is keeping my busy fingers moving onto less dirty and more rewarding tasks at the moment.
