Demolition - Walls and Ceiling

When we arrived at Minneapolis, I immediately phoned Michael so he could pick us up. He told us his mom would be waiting for us at baggage claim and that he would be bringing a metal chariot to pick us up outside. He said,


"Look out for a 35' bus. You can't miss it!"



I couldn't. Here is the interior of the bus when he picked us up.

We started work on the bus immediately - well ... immediately after Memorial Day. On the national holiday, Dick (Michael's dad's best friend) visited us and gave us such great advice on how to convert the bus. Invaluable advice like "save all the screws and label everything."

Save all the screws, nuts, bolts, etc.

and L A B E L everything!

Since we were going to tear down the walls (to remove the insulation and treat any rust) and then put them back up, we had to label the panels. "S" is for starboard, and the numbers started from the front of the bus and ended in the back. On the other side we used "P" for port. There was one set of things we didn't label and it bit us in the butt a month later. We didn't know that the latches for the windows were individually bored in!

We took out insulation from every pore of the bus. The ceiling frame had batt insulation within the hollow metal parts! My little fingers came in handy because I was able to get at the little pieces here and there. Michael had given up on the task and moved on to other manly things like grinding the rivets off, taking out the spare tire, and tearing off the wall panels.

Removing the rivets was a two-parter. After grinding off the rivets from the outside, we had to pop off the stems that were left within the wall frames.

This hammer, among many other tools from Uncle Frankie's workshop, came in handy in doing all the demolition.

The picture above shows the walls and ceilings demo-ed. We had toiled with the decision to take out the floor or not. We thought it would take a lot of work. Was it worth it? The condition of the existing floor was pretty good as is. Sure there were holes from the air conditioning vents we were going to take out, but we could always cover them up. Maybe it wasn't worth it to tear up the floor. We only had 3 weeks left at that point. Michael's family thought it was a lot of time, but we knew there was so much more to do.