It is satisfying to look back and see how far I've have come in a few, not so short, months. I was working with a blank canvass and there were so many things that needed to get done. Things seemed to happen quickly.
This is an abbreviated photo tour of those days. These all occurred in June 2009.
Here I am staying at a friend's house (note my liberal use of electricity). I am working on taking up the black rubber flooring to get to bare metal. Then I will lay 1/2in foam board and on top of that will be 1/2in subflooring. I didn't take many pictures of this phase because I was so busy I forgot to keep my camera handy. Handling 1/2in x 4ft x 8ft pieces of plywood by myself was especially challenging. And screwing the subflooring down to the metal floor with about 500 screws was interesting. I finally found a good self tapping screw that made the work a little easier. Self tapping metal screws are not created equally.
Here I am cutting the rivets off the inside metal skin. There was an empty pocket of air that I would fill with insulation and wall off. I wanted to go into the skin so I didn't take away valuable inches inside the bus by adding layers of insulation.
What to notice here is that I have completed my foam sheet and subfloor installation. Keep in mind that this is only a fraction of my belongings. More than half of my stuff is sitting in the driveway under tarps.
In this picture I have placed styrofoam board on the top window (it was recessed from the bottom one by 1/2in). You can see that I painted the windows black that will be covered with walls. I placed fiberglass pink insulation in the space along the lower walls. The days were getting hot around this time and I firmly believed that there was no such thing as too much insulation. You can even see some spots I sprayed 'Great Stuff' behind the steel ribs to insulate those places.
I added a final layer of 2mm plastic vapor barrier covered with 1/4in foam board. I am concerned now that I may have sealed my bus too tightly and didn't leave enough space for it to breathe. Especially important in winter months when I am burning a kerosene heater. Plus I may be keeping moisture in the bus instead of out. So far I haven't seen any ill effects of my super insulation job.
Insulation on this side of the bus is completed. I have begun to hang furring strips which will allow me to screw my beaded board securely to the bus. I broke a good number of drill bits when I was making pilot holes in the steel beams to screw furring strips. In the vein of best insulation ever, I placed half inch foam board in space between furring strips (not shown here).
The beaded board is going up nicely. In photo below you can see additional insulation directly behind beaded board. At the bottom the bus has about 5 inches of fiberglass and foam board insulation, the top half has an inch and a half of foam insulation. Not counting beaded board wall.
This is the raw beaded board, no stain and no polyurethane. In hindsight I wish I would have stained (or at least primed) the back of these boards first to keep the wood from absorbing moisture trapped in by the multiple ultra tight vapor barriers. I ended up taking them off later and priming the back and reinstalling them. Beaded board has a tendency to warp easily in moisture prone environments and I didn't want to have to worry about that.
After the right side of the bus is done, I move tools, mattress, and stuff to right side of the bus and begin working on the left side.
Wall installation complete
I removed the huge heater at the front of the bus. I replace it with a cupboard to store small items. I didn't know where a scrap metal place was to sell the heater so I left it on the side of the road. Someone picked it up within a day.
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