The start of a very long day. Woke up early to get started on the bus. Parents were leaving the next day so we wanted to get as much done as possible. We routed out the floors to lay the electrical through it. Duct taped it down so it wouldn’t jump out of the routed area while laying the floors.
We ended up going with Ikea flooring. It was only $1.25 sq/ft, ended up spending $200 on flooring crap as opposed to getting real hardwood for anywhere from $600-$800. Other benefits include resistance to moisture/warping that real wood would experience. After so long of doing prep work and demo work on the bus, it was so incredibly satisfying to get flooring down. Flooring is much like framing in a house. It’s gratifying to actually see structure going up, in this case real flooring going on. Lots of crawling around and clicking the flooring into place. The areas around the wheel well were a pain in the ass, we started with the close portion (the back of the bus) and laid it until it was slightly past the wheel well. Once that was there, we were able to lay the flooring at the front of the bus near the wheel well. The cuts took a fair amount of time, and this stuff doesn’t slide together immediately.
We ended up needing to use the black block pretty often to knock the flooring in along the longest part pretty often. Most of the time you could get it most of the way in, but it would need to extra push to really get the seams to come together.
We ended up finishing up the floors around mid afternoon. You can see the hole we cut out for the fuel pump access. That’s covered up by the original metal plate that was there now. After the floors were done, Matt and our Father took to finishing out framing out the rest of the seats and the bunks. I started drilling through the floors so we could secure the benches.
I ended up stopping taking pictures. After 12 hours you stop thinking to do it. So you can’t see the progress that was made at the end of the night. Our Mom did a great job cleaning up a bunch of the metal parts and getting them painted black so we could put them back in the bus. She also cleaned up the house a bunch before Christmas so it was more presentable to the neighbors families.