October 22nd
2003
I forgot the camera today, along with my plumbing and electrical
books...
Becky and I did manage to get the kitchen wall finished. All of
the insulation on that wall is covered now and I can finally begin
working on the plumbing and cabinets.
The drawers and cabinet doors that we scavenged from the trailer are
sitting outside under a couple of tarps. I am a little worried
about the effect that all the rain that we have been having will have on
them. As soon as I get the cabinets built, I can temporarily mount
the doors and drawers in place and get them inside the bus and dry.
We have a couple of tubes of sealant now, so it's just a matter of
getting up the nerve to cut some holes in the side of the bus for the
various panels that we have. I chickened out today, but I grinned
a bit when I looked over the sawzall sitting in a corner of the
bathroom. I figure that is the tool that will do the job with the
least amount of work... How to drill a hole large enough for the
sawzall blade is another story though.
Becky managed to peel/chip almost all of the vinyl striping off the
right side of the bus today. We tried out a heat gun on the
striping. The black vinyl comes off much easier with the heat gun,
but the reflective red striping just sticks that much harder when
heated. Becky has resorted to using a window razor on the red
striping and managed to get a lot of it off the bus today.
Removing all of the striping will make sanding and painting the bus a
lot easier.
I spent an hour or so trying to clean and tint the back window of the
bus... It was frustrating because it is curved both horizontally
and vertically. I went through a pretty big section of the tinting
material and only have a nice clean back window (un-tinted) to show for
my efforts.
We found a cheap source of 1/2 inch MDF sheeting. That has
basically made up my mind on the build or buy issue for the
cabinets. I don't know if MDF is a good choice, but I've seen
cabinets made from crummy particle board, so I am going to give it a
real try. I've built bass speaker enclosures out of the stuff and
it was easy to work with, so I figure that I will create the cabinets
and then cut out the openings for the drawers and doors as needed.
A bit cheesy perhaps, but since we have decided to paint everything
anyway, it will be nice not to have any seams to sand or fill and the
stuff is very strong when glued and screwed together. I made a
sketch of my plans, but since I didn't have the camera today, I'll have
to post it here tomorrow.
Thank You!
We've been getting a lot of encouraging e-mail from all over the
place. Recently my dad sent out an e-mail to practically everyone
in the world he knows... We've been getting a lot of really nice
feedback about the web site and the work that we have been doing on the
bus. With all that has been happening in our lives recently, I
just wanted to let everyone visiting this web site know that it helps to
hear that the work that we put into the web site and the bus project is
appreciated by you all. Thank you! |
