September 9th

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September 9th 2003

	We finished all but a few feet of the insulation on the walls of the bus. Both Becky and I are getting tired of cutting and fitting pieces of the insulating foam board. It's pretty boring work, so we decided to switch gears and get some other things done. While we were working on the front of the bus, Emily was helping to saw off the spray foam pieces. She worked on them for almost an hour and did a pretty good job of removing some of the biggest ones.
	I did an inspection of the under side of the bus and made a fairly accurate sketch of where all of the major obstacles are. It looks to me like the existing heating and cooling system on the bus will have to go if we want to have lots of storage and make the plumbing for the kitchen easier. The depth of the unused space under the floor to the bottom of the wall sheeting is 20 inches.
	The only major obsticle to keep us from utilizing almost all of the space (18 feet) between the wheels appears to be the heating/cooling system in about the center of the bus. They take up a large section just below where I intend to put the kitchen counters that divide the bus. If I remove this system, the other trouble items (mostly vent channels and copper piping that I think carry the heat from the radiator to the heater) can also be removed and I will have virtually unrestricted space under the bus for storage and systems.
	The existing floor plan that we are thinking of doing works well with the available space below the floor, so there will not need to be any major changes to the plan because of the available space under the floor. The bathroom is perfectly positioned for the gray & black water storage tanks. We finished the day off by removing the lights and metal strip from the center of the ceiling. The wiring for the lights seems to be in good condition and has enough extra wire length to reach just about any point on the ceiling around the current location. That may come in handy later.

Here's the basic layout top and underside:

We went to look at a travel trailer that a local dealer had taken in on trade. It's in too bad of shape (structurally) for them to sell to anyone for any profit, so I made them an offer for $500.00 to let me take anything I might need for my conversion out of it. They took my offer and will let me have unrestricted access to it starting tomorrow for a duration of up to 2 months.

The trailer has a large Dometic gas/electric fridge, gas range & 4 burner counter unit. It has a gas forced air heating system, water heater & pump, water tanks (fresh, grey and black) all checked out with no leaks. It has a 20 foot awning that appears to be rather nice, sinks for both kitchen and bath, toilet, etc. The cabinets inside are all in good condition, so we might be able to make use of some of them as well. All in all a great find for the price. I am going to be paying for it tomorrow morning and I will pull the most valuable items from the trailer ASAP. I am not sure how much of the parts I can pull from the trailer will be of use to us in the bus, but with a little imagination here and there we should be able to save ourselves a thousand or so dollars by ripping the existing trailer apart... I'll take the camera and get some pictures tomorrow if I can remember.