new plates and no lettering!

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With one of Christian's recent and few morning's off, we finally got around to registering the Campbulance in Colorado. We'd been driving around with quickly deteriorating 30-day temporary Ohio plates since the first of May, so our time was running out. After a few stops and fees paid, Campbulance is officially a Colorado gal.

With only a little bit of the vinyl lettering remaining, we got to work in the hot sunshine (when it comes off most easily) to get the rest off. Turns out, the worst part of the vinyl removal was the fact that we'd left the painter's tape on for the better part of a month. As you can see in the following photos, the painter's tape has dried onto the Campbulance and left it's dried and crumbling mark. We're hoping a hot soapy bath and some elbow grease will take the rest of it off. In the meantime, at least all the lettering is off.

With the vinyl removed, we were able to see the ghost of the lettering from when Campbulance was an actual rescue vehicle. I could make out only a few words, but paired with some Googling, I was able to find out that its original home was Lambertville - New Hope in PA/NJ. We'd actually come within 40 miles of it on our big road trip out east, which I thought was pretty cool. Christian thinks we should have them sell another decommissioned ambulance to T-Dubs to hold onto for 7 years and we'll go get that one for a future conversion to add to our fleet.

- Chelsea

me special.

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We bought a fairly large portion of astroturf to cut to fit as a temporary flooring while we strip the old flooring up. Knowing we'd probably eventually haul some kayaks and other outdoor gear in the future, we figured it could also be used as a protective covering in those instances.

We'd had so many people say we should turn it into a putting green that we went to the nearby thrift store during a break to grab a few putters and golf balls.

The old laminate has proven to be a monster to remove. We've spent hours upon hours scraping and sanding the old floor to try and get it down to just wood to treat it and cover it back up with a secondary sub flooring before we put laminate over it.

While Christian worked away at the flooring, I painted the back wall of linoleum to see how it'd look in a warmer tone other than the grey that covers most of the surfaces. It's amazing what a difference a coat of paint can do for a space.

Cutting the astroturf.

After hours of scraping, we'd hit a wall with the floor and decided to put the astroturf in and get to work on removing the vinyl lettering on the outside (something that's been bugging me for quite a while).

This proved to be another tedious job since we want to keep the orange vinyl stripe and much of the lettering was on top of that. For that reason, we chose to forgo the use of a heat gun and work to pull it off using the heat of the sun.

We made fairly good progress and worked until the sun went down. We didn't finish the task completely, but instead left a few remaining characters and called it a night.

- Chelsea