11.07.16 - Painting - Day 11.

Stubbs started the day with a bath. We planned on starting the paint process today, and she needed to be squeaky clean. The majority of the cleaning took place on her roof, with me on my hands and knees, scrubbing and spraying away years of greasy grime

Roughly $15 in quarters, in case you're wondering.

Two new friends found us at the carwash. Zach and Annie of Natural State Nomads stopped by to help for the day. They are doing their own conversion, and are planning on going full-time as well. Check out their blog HERE.

We couldn't have gotten as much done as we did today without them. They were such a huge help.

We backed Stubbs into her temporary home, a roofed barn that would protect her fragile new paint from the elements until it fully dries. Working at Willy's backyard has been excellent, but for this stage we needed protection.

Ask anyone who has painted anything well, and they'll tell you: prep is 90% of the work in painting. We washed earlier, and then it was time for sanding the glossy black rub rails and taping off the windows and trim. These two jobs took a long time.

Chelsea's Grandpa Bert came by and laid the first few passes of Rustoleum spray primer. Stubbs' main color will be white, and we plan to add racing stripes later. (Dealing with color right now is just far too much work and we don't have the time.) The spray primer allowed us to lay down a heavy white color beneath the finish coat, which will be rolled on.

Some paint being applied as we finished taping windows on the other side.

Zach proved to be a window taping wizard. Without him it would have taken us hours more to prep the bus. He even went as far as to give Stubbs a temporary name badge.

With her front all taped up, we could carefully apply primer. You can see some school bus yellow poking through, but we hope to double the amount of primer we have applied before rolling on the finish coats.

We put her to bed feeling like we might just be able to tackle this project before we leave.

11.06.15 - Passenger Seat (and other small victories…) - Day 10.

Long story short, Stubbs has a passenger seat, but it wasn't until about 9pm that we finally got that installed. The day was a big push to get the seat in and working, because now that we have a seat, we could pile everything into the bus and make the move to Texas. We won't leave until the 12th, but we could go now, and that's a good feeling.

The morning started with shopping. We bought two filing cabinets at the Habitat for Humanity Restore in town. We love these places. If you haven't been to one, go check it out. It's like thrift shopping for your home, and you get to support God's work at the same time.

Our filing cabinets will be used for general storage, but primarily for folded clothes. Filing cabinets are deep and cheap. Honestly, I'd recommend them for any casual storage need, and if you want to get all DIY fancy, check out Pinterest or do a Google image search for neat ways to resurface these cheap storage solutions.

After the Restore we headed to a Pick-N-Pull junkyard for a seat we found a few days ago. Luckily, it was still there, and even more luckily it came out of its original home with no fuss. Four bolts, 5 minutes of work, and 30 dollars later, we had a passenger seat to mount to our swiveling pedestal.

After gathering our supplies, we put a few hours in on the bus, mostly ripping out the last piece of plywood. I wish I had removed it earlier, but because I need to be able to drive Stubbs around town for mechanic and welding appointments, the plywood had to wait until I could take the drivers seat out for a day.

We hit the welding shop right before closing time, and Wes the GENIUS delivered to us an excellent, strong, and affordably priced swiveling passenger's chair.

A quick note about Ace Muffler and Welding in Searcy, Arkansas. These guys do great work. Their welds are strong, and they are consummate problem solvers. We have spent over $1,000 there this week, and while their prices are fair, realize that their prices are fair. Steel isn't super expensive, but the years of practice it takes to make welds look like beads of silver rather that hunks of blown snot comes at no small price. Go to a welder if you need something welded. Pay them what they are worth. And if you're in Searcy Arkansas, don't think about going anywhere but Ace.

The black line that you see isn't a gap, but a ledge if you will. Its about 1/4 inch to an 1/8 inch tall, and exists because I chose not to insulate under the driver's and passenger's seats. I did this because the seats would have been bolted down so tightly that the floor would have dipped and the insulation would have been compressed to nothingness. I probably could have found a way around it, but it sets up for split-level home jokes. I will probably refer to this area as the "foyer".

Wes at Ace Muffler and Welding punched holes for us in the base of the passenger seat pedestal, but I felt they were too big, so I drilled some of my own. It didn't take too long, but remember to have a sharp bit and USE LUBRICATING OIL. 

With the passenger seat installed, Chels could swivel around. The seat is perfect for driving and sitting in the house. It slides back and forth like any automotive seat, and is nestled really close to the driver's seat to allow for maximum entrance space. I think this will become more apparent in other photos later.

11.05.15 - Subflooring and Insulation - Day 9.

Today felt like far more progress than we've made over the course of the last eight days simply because we closed it out with a piece of furniture inside.

Our work was delayed because the heater was still being removed from the rear head space, so once we got Stubbs back in our possession, we hit the ground running.

Our first stop after the mechanic was Lowes for some foam insulation and 1/2 inch OSB plywood for flooring. No kidding, from the time we went to Lowes in the morning to price supplies out, to the time we went back just after noon to buy it, the cost of the lumber went up 80 cents. We chatted with one of the associates about it and they informed us that it always goes up this time of year, and quite quickly at that. Thankfully we only needed five sheets!

We put the 1/2 inch foam insulation in first, foil side down. We think that foil side down should keep more heat in, so remember these two tips if you're insulating a bus:

1. Foil acts as a barrier for heat. If you want to stay warm, put the foam between you and the foil Keep the heat in. If you want to stay cool, foil between you and the foam, keeping the heat out.
2.   You're insulating a giant steel heat sink with single pane windows. None of this matters. If you want a comfortable home, buy a house.

We cut and laid the foam insulation after filling in the holes from the old seats with silicon and then moved on to cutting the plywood flooring to fit in on top of it. We cut the foam with a box cutter, no problem. The plywood we orientated to minimize cuts, as our floor layout already minimized visible seams.

It's important to keep the supervisor happy, which sometimes means breaks to play with measuring tapes.

Christian let Willie show him how to cut a straight line with a skill saw.

Flooring in and waiting to be attached via self-tapping screws!

Today was the first day we truly worked into the darkness because we had set ourselves the goal of getting all of the flooring down and the kitchen moved into place.

Once we were done attaching the flooring, we wanted to get the kitchen in, but between the two of us it was just too heavy to lug hundreds of feet from the Campbulance parked in front of the house to the back where Stubbs was. Our solution was an empty lot across the street, where we were able to back the vehicles up to one another and simply lift the kitchen into the bus and slide it in with ease. What resulted was a pretty suspiciously odd exchange in a dark abandoned lot.

If only moving all furniture was this easy!

After getting the kitchen in, we took Stubbs the bus back to its spot and sat around contemplating our layout for a while since we now had a major piece of the puzzle on hand.

When all was said and done, we decided that the layout we'd been pretty set on via graph paper was exactly what we wanted, so tomorrow we plan to start framing out around the kitchen and building up the back bed/loft area!

11.04.15 - Painting the Floor - Day 8.

Today we needed to get the floor and interior prepped to lay a new subfloor and insulation, so our first stop was Lowes to get supplies (wire brush attachment for drill, sanding supplies, Rustoleum, etc).

We got to work cleaning up the remaining small rust spots (mostly just small areas around the seat bolt holes) and treated them with some fancy rust stopping agent the welder graciously gave us. Of course I didn't take a photo of the bottle, but if you're interested, I can look at it later and give you the name. The stuff is pretty cool…it turns active rust into a black hard substance and essentially just stops it in its tracks.

Once we treated the rust, we took a break to let it cure and sanded the walls to prep for a quick coat of white primer. (We plan to cover the walls with wood panels later, but for the time being we figured at least a coat of paint would help it feel less gross.)

When the floor was ready to be painted, Christian went around with a foam brush and laid a thick layer of Rustoleum Heavy Rust Metal Primer along the edges. I followed closely behind with a roller to coat the entire floor.

We wanted to add a second coat, but it got to be pretty dark out before it was anywhere near dry. We also have an appointment with the mechanic first thing tomorrow morning to remove the remaining heater, so we didn't want to worry about them walking through tacky paint while they work.

We're SO happy about our progress today, though it doesn't feel like much given our dwindling timeline. Just having the floor ready to lay out the subfloor gives us hope that we might have some vaguely livable vehicle by the time we have to hit the road a week from tomorrow.

11.03.15 - New Floor - Day 7.

We showed up at Ace Mufflers and Welding this morning to see if the guys had started on the floor yet as we were anxious to get Stubbs back to start work again. We were excited to see someone inside welding and noticed the old rusted out flooring piled outside the bus.

The guys at Ace didn't mess around, which made us extremely happy with our decision to take Stubbs to them. They'd pulled out all of the worst parts of the floor and were busy making new reinforcement framing to weld the new panels to. They estimated it'd be done by tomorrow morning, so we left them to it and went to find something else to do with our day.

After wandering around the Habitat for Humanity Restore in Searcy to check out some paint we were mildly interested in, we noticed an RV repair shop next door that seemed to have a scrap yard out back. Intrigued, we walked over and asked if we could go picking through the old motorhomes in search of a chair to use as a passenger seat.

Most of the motorhomes were fairly gutted already and either burnt or rotted to the extent that one glance inside was enough to inform us that we wouldn't find what we were looking for. We had a few nice small finds (a woven screen folding door in an old Winnebago that I might return for later and a folding counter extender that I bought mostly for the hardware), but overall it was a bust.

After the RV graveyard, we decided it was time to hunker down with some graph paper and finalize our layout plans. We knew once we got Stubbs back, we'd need to really push to get as much done as possible before we have to leave (tentative shove-off date is November 12th…eek!), so we didn't want to dilly dally simply because we were unprepared with our layout.

Part of our design woes involved not knowing dimensions for our planned kitchen space. We'd happened upon a kitchen section with drawers and cabinets in tact yesterday at one of the Restores in Little Rock, so we started experimenting to see if it would fit into our space.

Amazingly enough, the kitchen looked like it would fit perfectly, so after a few more shuffles of graph paper cutouts, we decided to pull the trigger and go back to Little Rock for the kitchen.

We weren't 100% sure it would fit in the Campbulance for the ride home, but once you've paid for an item they'll hold it for three days, so we figured we could come back with the bus later.

It doesn't look like much, but for $100 and the time it will save us not having to build one, we are pretty pleased with the find. I plan to sand and paint it before we install it as well, so hopefully with some effort it'll look as good as new…or better!

Amazingly, it fit into the Campbulance with about a 1/2 inch of clearance on either side. We were pumped to not have to make another trip down for it later and I figured if the floor took longer than expected, at least we had a new project to work on until it was ready.

On our way back, we got a phone call from Ace Mufflers informing us that they'd finished the floor and Stubbs was ready to pick up. This is the second time a service for Stubbs has been completed ahead of schedule! Who has ever heard of that? Not us. 

The new floor was expensive, but sturdy, and Stubbs needed it. We can't help but think how lucky we are to have pulled all the subfloor out. Now we can really start building. Tomorrow we will scrub the floor, sand the rust away, fill the gaps in the floor with silicon, and lay down a coat of Rustoleum paint.