Stripping Down

The bus, not myself. However, now that you mention it, I walked into my kitchen naked to make coffee before posting my blog tonight. I’m tired, it’s a Friday. I worked hard on the bus today. Coffee sounded better than sleep.

I live in a condo. Basically a big rectangle, 39 foot by 21 foot wide. Really it’s two rectangles, side by side. If you knew me when we lived in that motor home, a single wide with the living room we built beside it, its a lot like that. The two bedrooms and two baths make up the left side of the condo, and they go the whole 39 feet. The living dining and open kitchen all make up the right side. That living space is about 31 feet, with a front patio and a back screened in porch, about four foot deep each. That’s the open rectangle, there’s no wall between the front door and the back slider. A small square window in the kitchen that looks out onto the parking spots. My neighbor upstairs uses that one, I park in front of the bedroom window.

I don’t use half my space. I keep thinking that, and I’ve considered a long while about moving into a trailer or RV or motor home. Even a van, but there’s just not enough room in one for me and the animals. The bus is perfect, and they are usually 7 ½ foot wide inside, give or take. When Connor is over here, he rarely sleeps in his room. He chooses the couch. Although having that personal space with the door shut is nice. But he’s on the verge of being eighteen. If he comes to visit from college, hopefully I am at the Grand Canyon or someplace where he doesn’t mind the loss of a room. So I’ve been mentally limiting the space in my house for a while. I will be losing the bedrooms, basically. Well, it’s more than that, a few feet of width in the kitchen and living will make a difference. It’s actually my living room I don’t use. The dining room has a table I bought for $20.00, we used it to wood carve and paint a RISK game into it. We use it for puzzles and that’s about it. I eat in my room with the computer on my desk. The dog chills on the bed and the cat chills on the table behind me. At least when she isn’t walking over my laptop back and forth wanting me to scratch her fleas for her.

I just poured my third cup of coffee (I like this routine). I am dressed this time, too. When I walked out there to make the pot, I was just out of the shower, dry enough that the towel wasn’t wrapped around me anymore, and naked. The coffee pot is to the right of the door, the sink is in full view of the window. I ground the beans, put them into the filter and carried the pot to the sink and ran the cold water. I turned around and the neighbor’s headlights were shining on me, she just got home. I’m not sure what she saw, I didn’t run out of the way or anything; just walked to the side and grabbed a shirt that was sitting there on the counter. I had a clean change of clothes with me while working on the bus today. But I came home still wet with sweat, and didn’t change into them tonight, and just went straight for the shower, so the shirt was there by my keys. Convenient!

When I titled this blog, I promise, I was thinking about the bus being stripped. I just thought it was a cute play on words. As soon as I typed the second sentence and realized I had just finished flashing the neighbor, I figured it was a god (small G today) thing and typed out the story. But Bonnie did get stripped down today as well, at least a good portion of the seats are gone. I’ve officially moved on from Startup to Demolition. And it went much smoother than I anticipated. Don’t misunderstand, that was hard work today, and it will be hard work the next day I get out to finish taking the seats out. But I like labor, mostly because I don’t have to do it every day all day. But I miss being in the shape I was doing that framing work when I first got to Georgia. There’s 13 rows of seats. That’s on each side of the bus, and each seat has 4 bolts through the floor. It also has three bolts on the side that are bolted through a rail on the side of the bus. With the floor bolts it’s easiest to just take an angle grinder and cut them out. And it really was. When I took the seats out of my Van, there were 12 bolts total. They would not come off by twisting and by getting the locking pliers under the car or any method I tried until I took my sawzall to them. This angle grinder I used today was a breeze compared to that project, although I went through 10 cut off wheels and need to buy more before I finish the rest of the seats. It wasn’t easy but it was less difficult than I planned on.

After grinding, I think I got through 18 of the 26 seats, I went through the side bolts from underneath the seat. It was hit or miss, bolts would just spin, and I couldn’t get a grip. I realized when I took the bottom seat cushion of the seat frame (which took some crawling around and a bit of banging on the clips) it opened everything up wide enough to get the bolt from the top and just hold the nut with my fingertips on the bottom side. I know, this is a technical manual instead of a blog, but if you do ever decide to strip down a bus, these paragraphs will come back to remind you.

The clips were metal I collected them for scrap as I went, as well as all the screws and washers that kept them attached to the seats. All those nuts and bolts from the side rail as well, went into the same box. The seats are going for scrap metal, but I don’t know yet if I need to strip all the cushions off or not. I took one off to see what was underneath; it’s basically a metal plate for back support. The vinyl and the foam are all going to be trash. I took off the seatbelts too as I went along. I saved all those bolts. I don’t think anybody needs a big pile of seat belts (I think there’s 54 sets of them) but those have metal parts for the scrap pile as well. I saved all the bolts, and there’s a slight possibility I can use those, and the seat belt metal bracket as clips somewhere anyway, so I made some extra work for myself, maybe, but it was enjoyable (for work, anyway!) and possibly useful.

I am in a storage facility. Mostly just one of those places with the roll up doors and 10 x 10 garages, but he’s got two parking lots in back for RV’s and landscaping trailers and a couple of Camaros, and a big yellow bus. I can get away with doing a lot of work back there, running a generator for three hours running that angle grinder, for instance, but I can’t just dump the seats out into the yard and call it a day. Cleaning as I go is very important. So even as Bonnie strips down, she’s carrying her cushions in a pile by the back door, and a box of parts on the wheel well, and seat frames lined up under the windows. But the hallway between has gotten wider, and I have a kitchen area cleared of seats, and trash. So. Much.Trash. From between those seats. I am kind of glad there is a layer of rubber on the floor, and the plywood beneath that, that will be coming up to get to the bare (rusted) metal, tp keep that trash from even touching my actual bus.

Stay tuned, there’s pictures eventually coming.