Tuesday, March 31, 2015

This week's progress

Where do I start? I did so much this weekend!

The weekend started with my putting up the final piece of the sidewall of the bedroom. It needs to be redone when the M5 bolts arrive from Hong Kong. Those won't arrive until early April though. Meanwhile I have some from Lowes that I can use to secure the boards nearest to the partition I intend to build at the back of the bedroom.

After that and it was a fight to put the boards up against the side, I attacked the remaining yellow painted areas. There still are a few patches I didn't hit but those are hard to penetrate with a brush and will need to be sprayed. The end result is pretty good. All I need now is the front interior partition and darkened windows to make the bus look quite sinister.

Now the reason for the tricky woodwork was due to my having to work around windows I wished to retain as windows. Also in an attempt to keep the wood flatter, instead of bending it around a small body rib, I cut it around the rib. It didn't seem to make any difference though.

A rather tiresome piece of work reared its head on Sunday. The plywood floor installed by the hillbillies had rotted. I'd regarded it as suspect but poked it with my finger and it flaked up. The problem was that the hillbillies could not be bothered to spend 30 seconds to glue a rubber door seal back into place so water had penetrated and the wood had rotted. I remember fixing that rubber seal was the first thing I did, way back in November. The old plywood was torn up and OSB laid in its place.

Looking in through the back door, the bedroom looks much better now. The room still needs walls and a door at this end and tops on the walls and a door at the other end but it is taking shape. As I have a week off, I'm hoping to get that and the bedroom furniture done by the 20th.

The plan was to take the bus to Lowes on Saturday but when I tried to crank it, the battery was flat. It took 6 hours to get enough charge in to crank it the following day. Thank Heavens my lady has a pickup truck! We used that to pick up supplies.

I will definitely have to get myself a set of coveralls. It's getting to the point where my bus work clothes are getting too grubby to wash out properly. Judging from Saturday, a hard hat looks worthwhile too. I remember dinging my head on the emergency exit as I pulled up plywood. That had me sitting on the floor while the room stopped spinning! The next time, I stood up underneath the wing mirror and clonked my head on the steel bars that support it.

Monday was an important day too. Monday I paid my final rent payment. I intend to get the bedroom livable by April 21st and will move out of my place into it around then. I am so determined I handed my notice into my landlord and bought a pot of paint for the bedroom. The color - Cosmic Pink by Valspar.

Having lived in rented accommodation before, where the walls were lilac in the closet, pink in the bedroom and yellow in the dining room, I intend to have a really cheerful set of paint colors. Boys have blue, girls have pink be damned. I want something happy and cheerful. It's my home and I'll do what I damned well please and hang the bizarre opinions of others!

Those with memories stretching back a few months will remember there were several bunk beds on the bus. I took them out and have not managed to find any use for the steel. In fact the only things that I have recycled from the old conversion have been the sink and the unrotted sections of the plywood floor. Thus, the steel was lying idle until one day my lady's sister's boyfriend wanted some steel. I told him he could have what he wanted. The next day, the cunning soul had come up with a do-it-yourself plow made of that steel, an old railway sleeper and a hand cart. He plowed some of the field ready to plant crops.

Now that's inventive and useful!

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