Follow Our Progress
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October 24th
2003
We're finally getting around to doing some of the cabinet work.
The little desk in the kids bedroom was so easy to put together that we
decided to start tackling the cabinet work in the bathroom.
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First things first, the light that we had temporarily mounted on
the wall had to be moved to it's real home on the ceiling.
We found a route for the wiring and with a little tugging and
pulling, I managed to get the blue plastic conduit through the
roof and fed the cables out a hole I cut.
The wires were easy to pull one way or the other through the
conduit. While I was in there I came across one of the bus
light wires that was badly smashed and had wires exposed.
Thankfully it had not shorted out on anything metal because of
some foam padding that was caught between it and the bus
frame. We patched the wire and rerouted it.
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The rest of the light and switch installation was a snap.
Everything came together nicely.
We had to haul in one of my work lights since we had the
electricity cut off.
Once the light was up and out of the way I worked on finishing
out the panel door side of the bathroom. We had originally
planned to put an 18" deep cabinet with shelving up, but
after doing some eyeballing with a sheet of plywood, we decided
that it would make the bathroom too cramped. We opted for
a 16" cabinet instead.
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Becky came up with the idea to move the light switch to the
inside of the bathroom door where we now had a bit of room, so
we quickly put together another wall to house the switch and put
plywood over the exposed side.
I had to move the wiring a bit since I had planned for the
switch to be on the face of the cabinet. That meant
pulling down the paneling in the kitchen so I could drill and
re-route the wire.
I realize now that a lot of things just need to be re-done as
we go along. It's just too overwhelming sometimes to try
to think of every possible problem ahead of time. In the
spirit of progress, sometimes I have to go back and redo
something, but it's better than sitting around worrying about
every little detail.
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Here's a picture of the new inside wall where the pocket door
normally hides out.
I think the inside wall was a great idea and now that the
pocket door can be completely hidden in between the two walls,
it seems a bit more finished.
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Emily was very quiet in the back of the bus, so we popped in to
check on her. She had fallen asleep and looked quite happy
napping on her new bed.
It's always nice to see the girls crashed out in the
bus. They definitely feel comfortable hanging out there.
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This picture is from the hallway looking into the
bathroom.
We got a pretty good start on the bathroom floor to ceiling
cabinet. It took a few sketches to come up with a design
that will look good with the vanity (yet to be built). We
decided to put a kicker under the cabinet so that it would look
right when we built the vanity.
I was a bit skeptical at first. It seemed really flimsy
built mostly out of 1/2 inch MDF. After the shelf supports
went in and the shelves were screwed down, the whole thing feels
like it could hold several hundred pounds of stuff without any
worry.
Once the face of the cabinet is in place, I am convinced that
it will be extremely durable and work quite well for us. |
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This picture shows the light in it's new home. You can
just see the inside wall of the new cabinet that we are building
to the left side.
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It didn't seem like we got a whole lot done today, but I think we
worked out the cabinet construction process and I believe that it will
work well for the rest of the cabinets that we need to build. We
have not made a final decision on the counter tops yet. I would
love to just buy them already done, but unless we can find some that we
can modify fairly cheap, we will most likely be applying our own
laminate or covering the countertops in something else relatively
inexpensive and durable...
It looks like I will not be able to work on the bus very much for the next
couple of weeks. There are some things that need to be taken care
of at home before our Halloween party and we have some other business to
take care of early next week that needs our focus. If I find some
time in there somewhere to work on the bus I will. |