So there's this bus...

This bus is in rough shape, but oh boy, THE POTENTIAL. The seats had already been pulled out by a previous owner. We purchased this hoss from a kindly family who had begun their own kind of transition, so it came with a whole couch, a bed, a half-way constructed wall, and some economically sourced cabinets already installed. My hubby doesn't do anything half-assed, which meant all of that immediately came out and we (mostly my husband) stripped the bus down to the sheet steel.

After hauling all the interior furnishings off to the county dump we thought we had made progress, but then we pulled up the rubber flooring covering the wooden boards beneath and quickly accepted that.... there was still tons of work to be done. The plywood floorboards were stinky, wet, and visibly rotting. The steel beneath them was pockmarked with rust so there was lots of sanding, angle grinding, sweeping, and vacuuming that went on to prep the steel for an anti-rust treatment. After a couple of coats of Ospho (a chemical designed to stop the oxidation process that causes rust) the floors were ready for a layer of rust inhibiting paint to seal it up.

Since the floor steel has been squared away and made more stable the primary focus has been prepping the bus for the next major change - a roof raise.

That's right. We're going to cut this bus in half and raise it's roof up by about a foot because we are a tall family and what sense is having a magical-adventure-mobile that we can't stand up all the way in? That however, is a topic for a different blog post. Thanks for reading about our project and until my next post - cheers!

~ Elise B. Simmons