Freakishly Happy

It’s been a busy couple of weeks! I can hardly remember all that’s gone on.

If you’ve been keeping up with the bus-cam you may have noticed that we’ve been windowless for a while now. We noticed soon after getting all of the seats out that we were having some issues with water coming into the bus, with the main leakage points being the windows. So we took all of the windows out, scraped off all of the old weather-stripping from the windows and the window ledges, de-gooed the windows and put them up in the barn for safe keeping. John also took off all of the silver metal siding under the windows. As the water was leaking in, it would pool up in cavities causing major rust on the exterior walls and damage to the insulation that was in this area. All that had to be removed, soggy insulation and all. We’ve spent a lot of time sand and scraping trying to remove the rust from our walls.

Last weekend we worked late into the night with a Dremmel and sandpaper trying to get all of the paint off of the windows sills so that we could seal them. In order to use the automotive sealant that we bought we needed the weather to cooperate. It was really tricky, because we needed it to be at least 50 degrees out and dry- but we kept getting warm and rainy or cold and sunny. Thankfully we finally had a window of decent weather last weekend and were able to seal all of the sills. (say that 5 times fast!)

Earlier in the week we borrowed a sandblaster from our neighbor, and on Saturday we began to sand down all panels under the window ledges. It was pretty slow going at first. The air-compressor that we were borrowing from my dad did not have enough um-pah to work for any duration of time, so it was really really slow going.

On Sunday our friend Jody came to help us which was great! Fortunately her father also had a much larger capacity air-compressor that we could borrow which made our progress a lot better. John sandblasted which Jody and I tried to keep the sand swept up and filtered so that we could get multiple uses out of a bag of sand. Sunday was a shorter day, and that evening we rewarded our hard work with pizza and a movie.

On Monday we started in the late morning and continued sandblasting. We were still working getting all of the rust and residual insulation out of the walls. Things were going really smoothly until late in the afternoon, right around the time I took over the sandblaster. I swear I only used the blaster for 3 minutes when it stopped working! We decided to pack things up and start afresh in the morning- thinking that it was probably just a full filter or some such nonsense.

We also had a whee of time moving the bus! Gus came to life on Monday after Rich tinkered with it for awhile and we moved it back onto the driveway from behind the barn. With the warm weather and sunshine that we’ve been having the ground has started heating up, thus causing our bus to start to sink into the mud. It was quite a trip trying to rock and roll the beast over the ruts we’d created. John did an excellent job and was able to maneuver through the trees, between the barns and not hit a single thing! I’m so proud!

The next morning when my dad took a look at the filter things looked a little more dire. The compressor has something called a steel-plate peacock valve- a very thin metal piece that was shaped like a fan with six fingers. One of those fingers had broken off. This wouldn’t have been a problem except for the fact that Sears was no longer making the part and the thing was made out of spring steel (some that’s very trick I’m told), which means that we couldn’t easily have another manufactured. We spent a lot of time running around to different places trying to figure out a good fix and it seemed that there was none to be had.
I also realized late the night before that my wedding ring had gone missing- so I wasn’t really in the frame of mind to deal with another crisis…. So Tuesday morning and afternoon were not the best times for me.
The day improved later in the afternoon when I remembered to breathe, told myself that we’d done all we could with the compressor and that my wedding ring was more than likely in the house somewhere (or in the yard if the dog got it as we sort of suspect) and if it wasn’t it was just a thing, and although I love my ring and it means a lot,yet it is just a thing.
We worked with the little compressor for awhile and as the sun was setting Jody showed up in work clothes and we worked late in to the night and were able to paint many of the side walls with sealer.

Yesterday and today we’ve been focusing on trying to get all the rust off the floor. Yesterday, Jody dropped off her the part that was broken which her father had done a quick fix to, and we were able to get rolling again. It seemed like we were blasting forever- and unfortunately it’s still not done. We’ve decided that we’re going to buy an angle grinder after all, and finish de-rusting the floor with a wire wheel. I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but I am so sick of demolition! I am very much ready to begin construction.

We are having some technical glitches with the camera- either it’s uploading to our website and not saving the pictures to our computer or visa-versa. We’re not such what we’re going to do as of yet, (John is pretty sick of the thing as it keeps breaking down), but we’ll keep you posted. Thanks for watching!