Demolition - Finish Floor and Fasteners

Insulation galore! This was only half of the insulation we pulled out. Dick periodically came by to advise Michael and would always leave with some sort of trash to dump or items to salvage. Needless to say, he dumped the insulation somewhere.
Dick told us about Michael's dad and how he notoriously would dump garbage in certain places around the Twin Cities. Bear, as his friends and family called him, had a beef with neighboring Scott County and made sure that his "deposits" would always sit on a roadside that was in any unincorporated city of said county. Mind you, Bear was very neat about it and would stack his trash in a tidy and tall pile. But ever opportunistic to be a thorn in the side of those on his shit list (Hmmm ... much like his progeny ...), he made sure it was the county who would have to pick up the trash.

Back to the bus ...

The existing flooring was a thick rubber glued to a plywood subfloor. Here's how our removal of the finish floor went. 

Click to play V I D E O: Floor Demo - Rubber Flooring

What a godsend the air compressor is! Before Michael had time to show me how to use the tools, I tried to use a paint scraper thinking my muscles would do the trick. Pshaw!!!! My teeny tiny mushells were no match to the power that an air hammer has!!!

After the rubber flooring, we had to find all the screws and bolts. Because we only had one air compressor, we split the work. I manually took off the screws with a screwdriver. Michael would use the air hammer to dislodge some of the ornery screws. I'd say 35% of them were like that. He also used the tool of magic to loosen these fasteners that I like to refer to as "the ticks of the construction world." 

Their round head has been notched and bent in two places to create these "teeth" that locks into the plywood. Michael first tried to drill through the head, but that took so long. Enter again the air hammer, which Michael used to tear up the wood around the bold heads. Once exposed, he had leverage to use the hammer to just chop off the head. We should have recorded these blogs sooner because we now can't remember if it took us 3 or 5 days to get all the screws off. It was a looooong time. So long, in fact, that we skipped doing all the bolts, left about 15 % still on, and tore off the plywood in frustration.

Click to play V I D E O: Bus Demo - Floor - fasteners 

Here's a little clip of the destruction that lay outside the bus after the rubber flooring was removed

Click to play V I D E O: The Destruction