subflooring out.

/

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.

Chelsea gave us eyepatches! For safety!

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.

Sawdust is an excellent foreground.

With our powers combined...

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.

No adhesive. Just hidden screws.

Very proud.

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

That's a seam, not a cut.

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

That cut became a HUGE problem.

Cutting along the cabinet line.

Pulling it out as hopefully one place.

Crack!

All I see is a reduction in allergens.

 

new plates and no lettering!

/

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.

/

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

bedtime.

/

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.

A bed!

demo time.

/

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