Matt and I decided to take down the ceiling panels as well as side panels and remove the old fiberglass insulation and replace it with a closed cell foam. We decided to go this route because we didn't know what kind of shape the old insulation was in and didn't want to risk something happening while we were on the road. This also allowed us to inspect the condition of the metal on the ceiling, which we actually discovered a good chunk a soaking wet insulation from a leaking emergency exit hatch. The foam will give us better sound dampening and an R value (insulation rating) of 6 to 6.5 per inch. Our first thought was to use a metal grinder and grind them all off, but it wasn't efficient on the 1/2 inch rivets. We tried a few other methods and after about 4 hours of trying different methods and researching and asking friends questions, we found that using a heavy duty pneumatic hammer with a punch head was very effective in removing the pins and then switching out to a 3/4 inch chisel head to take off the heads. In about 5 hours, we got the entire ceiling removed and fiberglass insulation taken out.
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Now that we had made the initial move on buying a bus, we realized that this is really happening. We are going to live in a bus. And it's gonna be awesome. It's pretty small, but it's also pretty big. We knew that there was plenty of space to fit all of our belongings in, it just became of question of where exactly will we put our bikes? Our water tanks, generator, etc.? It was fun to come up with all these ideas of where to store our stuff. To challenge ourselves on what would be wasted space and what we could turn into useful space.
So we bought some masking tape and taped off how big we wanted our "garage." We figured we would want this to be large enough to fit our bikes, camping gear, and generator, but wanted to keep the inside of the bus as spacious as possible. So we allowed ourselves about 28 inches of garage space, starting at the back end of the bus. Then we figured our queen sized bed would be on the other side of that wall, on a platform so we can have storage underneath. We played around with a lot of different toilet/shower layouts, but found the best option was to put the toilet over one wheel well and the bathroom sink over the other wheel well. The shower would be next to the sink and that way, we would be able to maximize our kitchen and living room space. We figured we could have kitchen cabinets and counter space on both sides of the bus and still have room for a loveseat and chair with storage underneath and eating table that also functions as a dog crate. It's possible that our layout could change once we really get in the grove of things, but we plan on keeping it as close to this as possible. |
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