Category: interior

Finished the shelving up, cut our rugs to fit. Installed a new electrical box for the fridge to hook up to. More cosmetic stuff, finishing touches.

Thanks RJ for the quarter round idea to help keep the under bunk storage in!

We decided to go with flexible shelving for clothes and stuff. Plus it’s cheap. And lightweight.

So, bunch of photos. I’ll try and come back and write more about them. For now, you just get purty pics to look at.

-Matt

Another flurry of activity in January. Got the Fridge fitted in. Installed the first parts of the shelving. More bathroom work. Also some updates with my grandpa’s toolbox that I was refinishing. Paint finally done. I might powder coat it at a later date.

Minor update. Some cosmetic changes to the bathroom. Added some wood to the exposed 2×4’s. Sealed up the bathroom before it got too cold.

Our late Aunt Linda and our Grandmother were great collectors of fabric. Some people had stamps, they had fabric. Our Mother also has a fair amount of fabric as well. Anyways, the great thing about having these fabric collectors in our lives is that they have plenty of fabric to go around. Matt and I spent some time with our Mother looking through fabrics and picked out a lot of possibilities and started the whole process of washing, measuring and weighing in on what we’re gonna use.

Matt did all of the sewing work with our Mother for the drapes. Thanks Matt! Thanks Mom for helping Matt and letting us use your sewing machine! I ended up sheathing the dinette seats in the bus while he was doing this. Finally got to put my new table saw to more use. Winter also decided to show up. Garage is cold and not as much fun to work in when it’s in the 20s.

We ended up redoing the height of the top bunk so that the person on top wasn’t so close to the ceiling. Took it down a bit, unfortunately it means that the bottom bunk has less room (can’t put that down because of the wheel well) but overall a big improvement on the space. I also found this massive drill at my Grandma’s house.

Our rules for Kings. Had a little going away get together. We had to rip out part of the shower so that we could get access to the wiring to install our trailer hitch light. That was zero fun. Finished up some of the plumbing. Fixed the wiring of the internal lights, and the brake/turn signals. Wired in a new 12v charger/lighter thing.

June was a hectic month. We found out that our landlady wouldn’t renew our lease because she needed to move into the place. So we asked to work out of our Detroit office, which was approved. After that it was a mad dash to finish up as much on the bus as possible so we could enjoy our last month in Tampa. I’m typing this in mid August. Took much of July and August to get settled back in.

We rewired the lights. The previous lights weren’t meant to handle 110, so we took some lights built for a runner and stripped off the runner hardware and wired and mounted them up. Pretty easy to do, and these lights look much better and are for sure brighter.

I also finished wiring up the automatic transfer switch, the shore power hook up and the inverter/charger. I was kind of apprehensive about the inverter/charger since it wasn’t cheap and I didn’t want to mess it up. I managed to hook it all up correctly. It was pretty easy once I broke down what I needed to do. The manual was also helpful in showing some basic wiring diagrams to give you an idea of how to wire it. So, still no battery bank for the interior.. but we have lights and power when we have shore power!

We also finished up the water system. The water tank is really large for how big the bus is. So the downside is that it takes up a lot of room, the upside is that I shouldn’t have to worry about water too much while traveling. It was a complete bear trying to wrangle the water tank in and build something to hold it in. It was even worse getting the water tubing to go where we wanted it. It got done though! After that we were able to make a counter top. Just took a 4×8 and trimmed it down and cut out a space for our sink.

We also had a trailer hitch put on, and bought a trailer as well so we could haul all of our crap. We somehow managed to fit a motorcycle, and a L shaped couch into the trailer and bus along with all of our instruments and other crap. The trip north is deserving of its own post though. Unfortunately I don’t think I have any pictures from that period, so.. fingers crossed that Matt does.