February 04, 2015

everything but the kitchen sink...oh, and that too!

February 04, 2015/ Chelsea Tuttle

Two nights before the big Gore Canyon Race (a race down a Class IV-V stretch of whitewater on the upper Colorado River), Christian was planning his lines with his R2 buddy Shawn (you'll also recall he was the one that convinced us to rip up the subflooring) and then to distract from his fear, helping me install the new Rocket Pump we'd bought for our almost finished kitchen.

Shawn and Christian getting to know their race boat and talking about their lines.

Christian wanted to make sure that I mentioned that he and Shawn won gold in the R2 division. They're unsure of their time, but they were definitely first (...because they were the only boat in their division to finish).

This is Shawn and Christian about to huck a 12-foot waterfall rapid called Tunnel Falls. (I was lucky enough to get taken into a the canyon by a railroad truck to photograph this spot for the race.)

Kitchen counter in the foreground, Campbulance in the background.

Prior to ordering the Rocket Pump, Christian had done some Googling to see what kind of instructions, etc he could find on the subject. There were none. Turns out, it's because you don't need any. The pump is literally installed with two screws (included) and you simply jam the water hose up onto the bottom and boom, installation complete.

Installing a Rocket Pump = drilling a hole and screwing in the two screws it comes with.

Getting ready to test the pump for the first time.

I think I was a teeny bit annoyed that the one photo taken of me during this project was of me vacuuming up the aftermath. I promise I did more than just take photos! (I think...it's been a few months...I could be wrong.)

June 07, 2014

subflooring out.

June 07, 2014/ Christian Tuttle

Chelsea and I have been attacking this project with a motto:

Where we can do nothing, do nothing.
Where we do something, do it right.

If we don't need to fix or change a piece of the Campbulance, we won't. An example of this would be the bench seat structure and the majority of the sliding cabinets. We can't improve upon the existing structure without an unreasonable amount of effort, so we're leaving them as is.

We planned on leaving the majority of the flooring by simply peeling off the original laminate, and sanding down the 3/4 inch plywood that made up the subfloor. We spent hours on this "save-the-sub-floor" project. I suppose, in the back of our minds, we knew that the right thing to do was tear the old plywood out, but we had a variety of excuses to keep us from this.

Then Shawn showed up.

Shawn's my R2 buddy. We were rookies at Vail together on Mountain Safety, and rookies at Timberline as well. He's the only one with whom I'll paddle many stretches of advanced rivers. When we're in a boat, he's the confident/overconfident one, and I'm the chickenshit. It works great.

He was the one that pushed us to pull the floor. I'd heard arguments against it; I need to hear his for it.

Shawn is performing last rites on the sub-flooring. It went quietly.

Shawn did a tricky thing. He talked us into cutting out the flooring most affected by the dry rot. After the first, the first, move towards removing any peice of the sub-flooring, I was hooked. It was coming out of the Campbulance, and it was coming out now.

Neither or us could figure out how the magical cutting wheel worked. We used it anyways.

We didn't know it, but we're fighting a screw.

We used a circular saw, many pry bars, even more hammer, a ball joint separator, and sweat to pull the floor out. We thought that it was only held down by adhesive, because we couldn't see any screws, but lo and behold it was the exact opposite. No (useful) glue, and hidden screws everywhere.

HEY ASTRAL (maker of that shoe), SPONSOR ME.

Pulling hard, but didn't want to break anything.

May 30, 2014

bedtime.

May 30, 2014/ Chelsea Tuttle

The biggest initial project we wanted to tackle within the Campbulance was building the bed. The current bench seat and pad was too narrow and we eventually want to add a hinged component to make the bed sleepable for two. The first step in this process was to remove the old bench seat and prep the area for the new bed.

If you look at the bottom of the bench seat that Christian is pulling out, you can see the gurney hardware below the bench. We plan to use a similar slide-out metal arm to add support to the foldout double bed option.

Checking out some of the hardware in the bench seat.

Removing more of the linoleum from the wall.

As with every project we've undertaken so far, there's always a further complication. Since the linoleum on the walls and floor are so old, they don't like to come off cleanly. Because of that, we've tried to leave the linoleum everywhere that it's fairly intact and not bubbling up or peeling away from the walls.

The next step was to cut a new bench seat. We did some measuring and decided on 22" wide to provide a deeper seat and sufficient sleeping space without protruding too much more into the living space or being too deep to comfortably sit on.

Our biggest goal has been to use whatever existing hardware we get from the Campbulance to save time and money. We put the heavy duty piano hinge from the old bench right back onto the new one and secured the new bed in place.

It was a perfect fit and after spending all day working on it, was incredibly satisfying to see a project (at least halfway) finished. Since we haven't quite figured out how we want to integrate the foldout layer of the bed, we'll leave the second half of the project for later while we tackle the rest of the Campbulance projects.

May 28, 2014

demo time.

May 28, 2014/ Chelsea Tuttle

Now that we've finally finished up all the road trip blog posts, it's time to dive into the work we've been doing on the Campbulance since we've been home.

"Before" tour of the interior.

When we arrived back in Colorado, it was still cold and snowing pretty regularly. This made work a bit difficult, but we were lucky enough to be able to use the not yet active space in Christian's rafting boathouse for some of our work as we waited for it to warm up.

When I arrived to help Christian get some work done, I'd found that he'd pulled the metal anchors (used to secure gurneys) to reveal the plywood flooring beneath. It was right then and there that we decided we would be ripping the linoleum out of the box.

Some of the spots were easier than others, so a mallet and a wedge tool provided just the amount of force we needed to strip the old linoleum out. As is true with most projects like this, things got more complicated as we worked and we realized that the linoleum was so old and brittle that it was leaving behind most of the paper backing on the wood. Add that to the fact that there were multiple spots of dry rot in the wood and we were fairly convinced we'd be replacing the entire sub flooring as well.

We took turns working on the floor, making little to no headway and getting discouraged fast, Christian decided it was time to attach the airway chair box that we'd decided to pull out. Nothing but screws stood between us and that empty corner, so Christian began working to remove them. Sadly, the screws were so deeply in there and very much stripped that any attempts with a screw driver were in vain. A Sawzall was finally taken to the box to make the screws more easily accessible so we could try and drill them out.

Christian celebrates taking a Sawzall to the airway chair box after struggling with getting to the screws.

We've made a lot more progress in the last few weeks, so I can't wait to keep posting and updating about it as we work.

- Chelsea

Blog-ulance

everything but the kitchen sink...oh, and that too!

subflooring out.

bedtime.

demo time.

Traveling Tuttles

Search Our Site

Get Blog Updates by Email

Blog Post Archives