Conversion Diary – Week 4 – Leaky Windows, tracing more wires and Decal Removal

This week seemed pretty uneventful, but we actually did get a good bit accomplished even though we spent less overall time at the bus this week. We really only took one weeknight off each of the first 3 weeks. I think we took 3 weeknights off this week.

The time change really took its toll this week. It’s so much harder to get anything done by spotlight, and the first week of the time change always screws me up. Somehow with a 1 hour time change, 9pm suddenly feels like midnight…but we were still able to knock a few things off of the to do list.

Leaky Windows

Once we removed the subfloor the previous owner began installing and removed all of the walls and ceiling panels, we could easily see that we had a lot of resealing to do around the bus.

The caulk around most of the windows was so dry rotted and deteriorated that it turned to dust if you looked at it the wrong way. There are spots beneath the majority of the windows where you can see that water had been leaking in for some time.

There are a lot of skoolie builders to remove all of the windows to clean and reseal them, but we also saw that even after all of the effort of removing cleaning and resealing each of the windows that there were still leaks in some cases. We definitely want to waterproof every area that we know has issues, but removing all of the windows without the promise of success just wasn’t going to happen. I hope that we don’t regret that decision down the line, but I think it’s the right choice.

So I just used a painters tool to remove all of the old caulking from the outside of the windows, cleaned the area to remove all of the dust and old caulking and recaulked with a silicone window and door caulk.

And the result…The windows still leak. We finally got rain this week, and even after all of our efforts, we still have some leaks. We still need to do some work on the interior to clean and caulk so hopefully that will remedy the issue.

Removing Decals

This is another area that plagues new skoolie builders. Removing all of the old lettering and reflective decals. Liz tackled this task and it took most of the weekend to get it done.

There are multiple methods that I’ve seen people use for this, from scrapers to heat guns, but I don’t think it could have gotten any easier than using the oscillating multi tool that we bought to use on the wheelchair tracks.

We just used goo gone to remove the remainder of the adhesive it left behind. This was a long tedious task, made much harder by the painters tape left behind from the previous paint job, but were are glad it’s done.

Tracing the Remainder of the AC/Fan Wires

We had traced many of the wires for the AC units under the bus, but we still hadn’t removed the fan wires from pulling those units out from under the bus the week before.

These wires actually went from the driver’s switch panels where the AC units were switched on and off all the way to the engine compartment in the back of the bus. We were able to trace all of the wires to this wire housing on the inside of the bus above the engine compartment, greatly reducing the amount of electrical wires in this space. This should help us to more easily relocate these wires to get them out of the way down the line.

Hopefully we are done with all of the dirty work under the bus for a while.

Overall, the week was productive, but we didn’t spend as much time at the bus as we had hoped.

Next Steps

We were planning to do some more waterproofing work this week, but Tropical Storm Eta is dumping tons of rain on us now and is expected to hang around for most of the week. So our waterproofing efforts are put on hold until we have some more dry weather.

We are also waiting to hear back from a fabrication shop that should be able to install a new support and floor panel to fix our rusted out floor holes. Fingers crossed that it won’t cost us a fortune.

Since we are in a holding pattern on those projects, we are moving forward with the ceiling furring strips that will be out contact points to install our shiplap ceiling in the future.

We’ll also need to order our Havelock wool insulation soon because there is a 4-6 week shipping wait.