Building Luna

Portland Update

2009-05-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

Hi all! Here's our new spot in Portland... doesn't she look purdy? We've neglected to update our bus blog lately, but only because our new town is so distracting! There is so much going on here and we are having a blast so far.

We're super excited about our new spot. Erin has a sweet sewing studio in the house, we put a garden in the backyard, and we get to play with our housemate's dog all the time. It was a tight squeeze getting her backed in there for sure, but Erin kept her cool while we blocked traffic for an hour or so. :)

Anyway, just wanted to give a quick update to let you all know we are alive and well enjoying the Spring changes here in PDX. Our neighborhood is chock-full of hidden rigs, so stay tuned for an Alberta Arts District bus tour!

Much love,
Julia

Paint Job Possibilities!

2009-03-13T09:29:00.000-07:00

We want to paint the bus soon!

I was out there yesterday spray painting over the final vestiges of "MILO ADVENTIST ACADEMY" and "M.A.A." because I was sick of looking at it. Turns out WD-40 is killer for taking the adhesive nasties off our bus. I used it earlier when some duct tape left marks on the side of our bus...not sure how eco it is...I'm guessing not very...but it definitely works.

Ok, don't laugh at my silly photoshop drawings. It's REALLY HARD to freehand on that thing!!!! I'm going for a victorian thing here. But it ended up looking more gypsy than victorian. Go figure. The blue/red/yellow thing may also get a shot of green at some point. I think that would really cement the period look of it.

So this is the panel we'd like to do in the rear arch....(she is Luna, after all!)

One option...blue extending down to the ground....note the sun panel in the front!

Another option....just a blue stripe with some accent stripes. Paint is *expensive* after all. This is the "economy" option. The guy at the paint shop recommended spray paint for this endeavor...more research to be done. If we do use the kind of spray paint we were looking at, just the stripe would set us back $75-$80. I'm guessing I would do the sun in acrylics and seal it with something? We don't have the money just yet one way or the other so this is all speculative. In any event, the economy paint job could always lead into other paint jobs down the road.....exhibit A:

Here's the serous paint job. The investment paint job. I would need a team of hippies to make this one happen....which might be possible this summer.

In the end, I think we're going to start with the sun and moon and go from there. We are hoping to go and camp outside the Dead and the Allman Brothers at the Gorge Ampitheater this May (WOOOO!) and I'd like to put a little bling on the bus before this very exciting event. However, if we can't get the veg conversion done by then, we estimate gas from Portland to the Gorge to be $165 round trip. Plus $45 camping. (Plus waaaay too much money for tickets. Hence camping outside.) Several friends may be coming, too, which would cut costs but still...at this rate we don't have the money.

BUT Julia has two job interviews this week!!!!!!! Fingers crossed!!!!!!!

<3 <3 <3

Love to all out there!

Erin

Moving to Portland!

2009-03-09T10:45:00.000-07:00

Hi all - many changes are afoot. Last time we posted, we were tucked away in the Santa Cruz hinterlands... but since then we've decided to change scenery and move to Portland!!

Staying in Santa Cruz was wonderful and I think it was exactly what we needed to get re-oriented and figure out which direction we wanted to go in. We were blessed to be staying with a group of wonderful folks in Bonny Doon who gave an unexpected and grand send-off with much love, farm-fresh eggs, flowers and pastries. Thanks guys, you're wonderful!

Erin and I are super excited to be moving to Portland - it just seems like it will be a hub of the kind of activities we want to get involved with. DIY and crafting, sustainability and community organizing, etc.

Anyway, we drove our bus up the 101 a few days ago. We took about three days to come up and got to revisit some of our favorite spots that we discovered on our last trip some months ago. It was interested to see how the landscape has changed from peak summer to winter.

We re-visited our favorite free campsite called Madrona along the Smith River and Hwy. 199. This is where we had our magical encounter with our house-bus inspiration Michael.

The river was about 3 times as full as last time and it was roaring!

Oh! Another exciting bus modification happened. While at our stop-over in Santa Rosa, I think we fixed our leaking window issues once and for all. The answer...

Gutters!

Here's a pic of Erin's latest temporary interior decorating masterpiece. We've been doing a lot of insulating with that foil covered bubble wrap insulation called reflectix so there's been a lot of silver to cover up.

Anyway, we're now in Eugene and we're planning on moving our bus up to Portland any day now. We found a couple of really awesome houses to park at up there and we're just trying to decide which one to go for.

We're excited for our move and will update again soon when we get settled. Love to everyone!

Storms, leveling and tarps

2009-02-13T16:08:00.000-08:00

It all started with this...

Back at our old spot in the Santa Cruz mountains, we knew we had some bus-leveling to do. This time we decided to try a new tactic: digging out underneath the tire (as opposed to rolling onto boards or using a bottle jack). It was working great until we discovered that we had dug just a little too deep and were un-level the other way!

So we fell back to the tried and true rolling method:

We got it pretty much just level enough, unnoticeable on the inside. Last time we were here, we discovered that at the particular angle our bus was at, when it rained, the water dripped right onto the deteriorating window seal. This of course caused the epic flooding of a few months ago. We caulked that side up good and tight. Lesson #247: never postpone finishing a job. We didn't caulk the other side of our bus at that time because we knew that we would be coming back to this spot with that particular angle..... but now, of course, with our "superior" leveling we're tilted just slightly the OTHER way!

So the inevitable:

Erin's mom was a genius and suggested we use a clear tarp to cover our solar panels so that we wouldn't lose precious battery charging. But, without grommet holes, it makes it a bit tricky to secure. Hence our highly evolved tarping/bungie/weight method.

Anyway, it is an ongoing challenge to keep our little abode dry. Other water issues we've been battling of late include increased condensation on the metal interior, a non-draining grey water hose (cheap hoses apparently stay permanently kinked), wet firewood, etc. Wish us luck with the forecasted 60 mph winds tonight... I can't wait for Spring!

A few other exciting developments:

Since we have access to a bathroom where we are parked right now, we decided to convert our bathroom to a closet (temporarily)! Woo.

Erin finally fixed our range fan and mounted this sexy switch.

Stay tuned for furniture renovations in the near future.

- Julia

Tips on living without refrigeration

2009-02-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

We're back in Santa Cruz, tucked away in a lovely mountain nook, working out kinks in our home on wheels, looking for work, and trying to plan deep into the future (with variable success).

We have exciting bus project updates to share, but that will have to wait until we actually get around to taking some pictures. In the meanwhile, I thought I'd share a few tips about living without refrigeration, for anyone else out there who might be curious about the possibilities.

Our experiment with non-refrigeration actually started by accident. When we arrived in California about five months ago, we were horrified to discover that block ice costs about twice as much down here than in Oregon. Ack! It's about $5-6 dollars for two ice blocks here, which run out in about 3 days. That realization coupled with with a 30 min - 1 hr city bus ride home (with leaking ice all over the bus floor) made it just a little too inconvenient and pricey.

Luckily, we discovered that if you are a bit more discerning in your purchases and put a little more planning into your meals, you can most definitely do without a fridge! The main change that has to take place is giving up some sweet luxury (yet perishable) food items. The main foods we have to do without are milk, yogurt, and extra soft cheeses like cream cheese. Jelly and jam also doesn't last that long before it starts growing mold, but you might have a couple days of jelly overdose.

I think it also goes without saying that they'll be no frozen food items or ice cream either, at least not on a regular basis. Boo.

It turns out that eggs and butter are pretty much good to go for quite a long while at room temp. Of course if it gets really hot, you may have melted butter everywhere, so be warned. Also, hard cheeses like cheddar last a while too (maybe about a week?). Plus, you can always cut off any suspicious looking parts. Foods preserved in vinegar like capers, kalamata olives and pickles seem to be ok without refrigeration after opening. Mustard too. Your nose and eyes are key allies in rooting out any possible spoilage.

If you've really got to have a spot of milk in your tea, or in a bowl of cereal, dried milk works just fine. It may not be the most tasty, but it does the job. Plus, you don't have to feel too deprived, because you can still buy such perishable items, you just have to make sure you eat them FAST! For example, I recommend the single serving containers of yogurt for a treat. Pre-made salad dressing might not do so well, but a dash of olive oil and balsamic vinegar is all you really need!

Vegetables will last a long while too, and with a little fore-planning, non-refrigeration won't be an issue for them either. Lettuces and leafy greens probably wilt the fastest, so make sure you just get enough for a few days to a week at a time. I have found that actual heads of lettuce last longer than those bags of mixed greens. Beets and cabbage are especially good at staying fresh without refrigeration. Again, the trick is to just keep an eye on them, and eat your foods in a timely manner. Keeping veggies in a cooler part of your house can also help - we have started keeping our veggies in a bag/box under the bed, which seems to always stay very cold.

The last thing to consider is left overs. This doesn't have to be a major problem either. Instead of making enough food to last a week, we tend to make enough beans/rice/veggies to last about 2-3 days, which seems to work fine.

Come summer-time when our entire bus becomes an oven, our non-refrigeration scheme may not hold up as much. We'll have to see.

I'm sure there's many more tricks to this, so if anyone has anything to share, we'd love to hear it!

Buses, Biofuels and Climate Change

2009-01-29T15:54:00.001-08:00

I just finished reading Vandana Shiva’s book Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis. Shiva’s work has been an inspiration to me ever since I read her book about ecofeminism. Her writings talk about science, sustainability, economic theory, social justice, and feminism in an accessible and articulate way – for anyone interested in these topics, I highly recommend her work!

The issue of global warming has been on my mind for some time now. Pondering the immense changes that humanity now faces sometimes makes me feel paralyzed – there’s just so much to be done! For myself, I have found it productive to think of the climate crisis as an opportunity towards community transition to sustainability.

I am often dismayed by the popular solutions to this issue, like nuclear energy, carbon trading, and geo-engineering. Shiva’s book reaffirmed for me the need to break out of the limited choices put before us by the corporate establishment – we must continue to seek our own answers that are rooted in re-localization, self-reliance, and resiliency.

The whole point of this post was to actually talk about biofuels, since it directly relates to skoolies! When Erin and I first grasped upon the idea that we too could convert and live in a bus some three or so years ago, doing a WVO-conversion on our diesel engine was a key component. In fact, we decided early on that in making the choice to fully enjoy the benefits of living in a rolling home, it was essential to take the necessary steps to ensure that our choice impacted the environment as little as possible (especially since the automotive and construction industries are both notorious polluters).

Our plan has always been to do a full conversion so that we can run our bus on straight veggie oil. However, we've always wanted to leave the option open to use biodiesel too. It might be encouraging to read about how nations around the world are starting promote biofuels as a means to curb global warming. I am realizing, though, that it is becoming more important than ever to make a distinction between local, sustainably-produced biofuels and the growing global industrial biofuel industry. It turns out that industrial biofuel production actually continues to jeopardize people's food and water security and the planet's ecosystems and climate.

Industrial biofuel production requires deforestation and the conversion of lands used to produce food to fuel. It is heavily reliant on monoculture and genetically modified crops that in the end destroy biodiverstiy and serve to benefit large corporations, not small farmers. These crops require massive inputs of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, water, and fossil fuel itself. Industrial biofuels maintain a car-centered infrastructure, contributing little to fuel efficiency or more sustainably designed communities

When faced with such facts, it's hard to know which direction to take. I think we all desire to limit our contribution to pollution and global warming as we drive to work or visit our friends and relatives (or travel in our housebus!). But we also want to support real, long-term solutions to the converging crises humanity now faces.

Industrial biofuels are not a solution to global warming. They are a means for the automotive and agribusiness industries – those most responsible for the climate crisis – to continue to pollute and expand their profits.

I feel the key concepts here are decentralization, local community control, ecological biodiversity, and a resiliency rooted in diversity. I am excited to participate in ongoing conversations about how to foster this kind of energy program, especially with other bus-folks who may be thinking similar things! Obviously, addressing the question of energy and biofuels cannot be an isolated endeavor, but must be integrated in the full dynamics of sustainable community transition.

Onward to exciting vagabond DIY energy adventures!

Bus Project Brainstorm

2009-01-24T10:54:00.001-08:00

Now that Holiday Market is over and Erin and I are finally starting to come out of our recuperative period, we've been dreaming a lot about all the exciting things we want to accomplish on our bus! Though we haven't had time quite yet to delve in (besides tidying and cleaning), we have a pretty extensive list of projects that we'll be undertaking in the near future.

Up until leaving Eugene, our main focus was getting the "main systems" in place - making her a functioning living space. Now that we've had a chance to really live in our bus full-time and travel a bit, we're about ready to start the "tricking out" process. Well, before that actually, there's still a few function issues to be smoothed out, as I expect there'll always be. To get us started, I thought I would share our rough brainstorm of the projects at hand. In no particular order:

Tile around wood stove and on kitchen counter - we're ready to replace all that grey Wonderboard with some color and texture! Plus, I think our bare wood kitchen counter has about had it from all the sudsy water from the sink, uck. While in Santa Rosa, we scored some sweet recycled tile at the local ReStore perfect for the project.

Fix range/oven issues - the range fan still needs to be tweaked and the oven is mysteriously not working either.

Install our 3-way mini fridge we scored at Bring - this project probably won't happen for a while since our fridge is in Oregon and we are now in California. Interestingly, we've pretty much been living without refrigeration completely this winter. All it takes is not buying milk and eating your veggies pretty soon after you buy them! We'll see how that goes come summer-time though...

Extend couch - we've been re-designing our whole living room zone. We took out the sewing table corner and are changing the space up in exciting ways. Making the couch zone more comfy is a key ingredient of this.

Carpentry finishing work - this includes putting some sweet doors on our cabinets to start, but also finishing all those rough edges to our novice and hasty construction job. Also, we still have that pile of recycled hardwood oak flooring we want to put down! Other small jobs like making our kitchen table a few inches shorter, putting up a few more shelves, the list goes on...

Re-design clothing closet system - we've realized that two people actually need quite a decent amount of space to store their clothes. The main thing we are lacking is some kind of closet rod to hang our jackets and some precious garments of Erin's... but where??

Re-vamp some electrical kinks - this involves installing a DC plug so we can charge our computer more efficiently, rigging up a sweet stereo system, finally covering up all our dangling wires, perhaps investigating some new lighting fixtures and/or investment in a strand of 12v LED lights to make it super cozy.

Finish ceiling details - our bus-friend Michael that we met on the Smith River had ingeniously used a cloth tapestry as a ceiling covering (instead of paint or wood, etc.) This is a very exciting idea for such a fiber-lover as Erin! Now we just have to find the right tapestry and a nifty non-toxic glue to attach it with.

Streamline fresh & grey water systems - we want to create a fresh-water fill nozzle on the outside of the bus. Also, we are very much looking forward to finding a more permanent spot where we can build an experimental constructed wetlands to process our grey water! No more yucky smelling grey water to empty...

Beautify the driver's cab - self explanatory. This also involves finding a more convenient and permanent location for all our tools (right now they ride right under the passenger's (me) feet when we drive... a little awkward).

Build a sweet roof rack/deck.

WVO conversion!!

Well I'm sure there are a million more things to be accomplished, but this is a start. We will keep you all updated on our progress. First thing up - re-designing the living room zone. We've already started on this and hope to post pictures soon.

Thanks to everyone's patience as we slowly get back into sharing our bus-life adventures after a short hibernating hiatus.

All our love.

Our Blogs are Getting Divorced.

2009-01-18T10:18:00.000-08:00

YES YES YES!! Yay!!!!!!!!!!! I can't tell you how many hours of work it took me to transition to my site!! I'm still selling stuff through Etsy, still blogging about my housebus here but now I'm going to be able to blog about craftiness in my very own craft blog. I also got my portfolio up so that everyone can see all the best stuff I've made over the last couple years. WOOOO!!!

Patchworkunderground.com (the new one) was also my first foray into Wordpress so we'll see how that goes. So far, so good...sort of. I sure learned alot. I'm not one of those gals who can just deal with a pre-made theme so messing with the code to get it all just right was a learning experience...that...took...forever. I'm used to just good ol' html but this was god-knows-what and databases and all those fancy bells and whistles. Phew. Hopefully the worst is over. (Thanks to Allegra's fiance, Alyn, for giving me a friendly hand in a moment of sheer blog crisis!!!)

In the meanwhile, check it out and let me know what you think. I was also able to update a lot of our links and blogrolls (on this blog and the new one) so I apologize for slacking on that. It's not personal - we love you all!

xoxox, erin

Woodcut Mini-Journals and Cards

2009-01-05T09:40:00.000-08:00

Here's some new purdy pictures I took of our latest block print/woodcut mini-journals and cards. I carved all of them except for the sun and river one - that one is Julia's! Once I got her started, she was the primary book-binder/printer. (I was too busy sewing!!)

I want to post them on my Etsy store but there are so many different color combinations (we made a BUNCH....seriously) that I'm overwhelmed by cataloging it all for folks' shopping pleasure....in the meantime, you can see more of my photoshoot here.

Phew...Holiday Market is Over!

2008-12-25T17:29:00.000-08:00

After 7 days of vending here in Eugene at the Holiday Market, all I wanna do is curl up in bed with a cuppa tea and my computer. I talked to enough people in those 7 days to last me all year!! Here's our annual market family portrait...me and Julia are hiding there on the left towards the back, wearing hats. We are tiny!

We didn't lose money at market this year but we made about 1/5th of what we'd hoped. Crafting is risky business, especially with the economy the way it is. We were trying out a lot of new designs for the first time so that was a gamble. People really seemed to like the stuff but not the price tag. We're beginning to wonder if handmade clothing is the right direction for us at all. Watching our neighbors sell $10 sweatshop t-shirts all day is kinda demoralizing.

Our biggest sellers were our flower headscarves and the regular fleece/felt scarves - (Both under $20).

It didn't help that it was snowing and icing for the better part of the market. Here in Oregon we're snow wussies...just a few inches and no one wants to drive or go anywhere.

It was really nice to meet up with a lot of our crafty friends here in Eugene. We miss the sense of community you get at market - everyone choosing a different path together, supporting each other, celebrating successes and trying to figure out how to remedy failures. It actually makes you feel like you're not crazy for trying to follow your dreams!

In other news, I wiped out on the ice while carrying one of my booth's tubs and dislocated my finger. Obviously, I can still type!! Oh, poor fingy - it went sideways at the second knuckle down and I had to go to the ER to get them to put it right again. Hopefully I'll be playing banjo again within a few weeks.

I'm so thankful that it wasn't any worse but all in all, we've been feeling a little unlucky lately. Hopefully things will start lookin' up as we head back to CA. I feel like things have been crazy for a while and I'm looking forward to settling back into a nice comfortable routine in our bus. Mom has been babysitting Luna and taking really good care of her (thanks Mom!!) and I'm excited to get back. Hopefully we'll hear about J's possible job opportunity in Santa Cruz soon, too - then we'll really know what we're doing, when and where. If that doesn't work out....we're thinking roadtrip. Epic roadtrip. =)

New Winter Wrap Skirts at Patchwork Underground!

2008-12-16T19:44:00.000-08:00

(Click Here to see the new Skirts!)

Howdy all....as many of you know, our bus building and driving is on seasonal hiatus. The sewing machines are out, the patterns are cut and the X-mas holiday shopping/crafting season is well underway!!! We've been busy bees crafting up a whole new line of wrap skirts, fleece scarves and woodcut journals for everyone's holiday enjoyment.

Once market is all over and we're millionaires (ha ha ha), we're going to knuckle down and get on with the veg conversion. We promise to post details here asap! =)

Santa Cruz Mountains Transitions

2008-11-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone! It's been quite a while since we've last posted - bus-life is still good. We've been hunkering-down in the Santa Cruz mountains for the last few months. We thought we'd be well on our way with our veg-conversion by now, but after finally settling and re-orienting here in sunny California, we realized that in fact Holiday Market was just around the corner! We've been busting out tons of new products to sell at this year's crafts fair - we'll be vending Dec. 13-14 and 20-24 in Eugene, OR. Come see us if you're in town!

There hasn't been too much major bus construction since we've been down here, mostly a lot of dreaming and many random repairs. The first big storm we had this Autumn, our wall flooded again. We tried leveling the bus better, but water somehow was still getting down into the wall and making all our lovely eco-insulation soggy. We've had to take the wall down more times than I care to recall now and air things out. But, I think we finally figured out the problem. We think that when the bus is even just a tiny bit un-level, water drips right into the side window channels and overflows the inside ledge. We did some more caulking so hopefully we won't have any more troubles.

Other miscellaneous bus things - we replaced our composting toilet vent-cap finally. No more funky back draft when we drive. Another dream/plan that's been in the works: once we get a more settled spot, we're going to build a small scale constructed wetlands to treat our grey water! I did some initial research about this and it is quite excited. Once we seriously get into it I'll post more specifics.

We've been keeping things toasty warm with our wood-stove. We scored a nice stash of firewood. Here's a pic of it it keeping dry underneath the homestead:

Well, that's it for now. The last few months we've been mountain-living home-bodies. It's been nice. We're both looking forward to figuring out our next steps after Holiday Market (it is pretty all-consuming at this moment). Many warm solstice wishes to everyone!!

- Julia

Patchwork goodies make the wheels on our bus go round and round....

2008-10-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

We are alive and well in the Santa Cruz mountains staying with one of our bestest friends, David. Lately, most of our time has been taken up with minor bus repairs/improvements and long (city) bus rides into town. Veggie conversion is imminent. Funding is necessary hence the plug for my biz...I've been sewing a lot lately....how many head scarves before we can afford a 12v inline heater? hmm.... Plans have been drawn and will be uploaded very soon for your enjoyment! And now, a word from our sponsers. Us. =)

............

New Stuff at patchworkunderground.com !

Felt flower headscarves and patchwork headscarves and $20 corduroy shoulder bags...Oh my!

I'm stoked to finally have my gorgeous flower and patchwork headscarves online! I've been selling these locally at Saturday market and people really seem to enjoy them. I haven't seen one person try them on and look bad....you just can't. How can you go wrong with a big ol' felt flower? You just can't help but smile. =)

Also....my infamous $20 corduroy shoulder bags are online now too!! These babies are awesome. Small pocket is for goodies, big pocket is big enough for books and a few apples. Serged seams reinforced in key spots with frayblock AND the extra-long strap is extra-secured with lots of reinforced stitching. Cheap: yes! Twinky? HECK NO!

Hope folks enjoy the new stuff!

<3>

Tales from the Road

2008-09-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

Julia here with Erin taking over somewhere in the middle.

Well, the first part of our road adventure has come to a close. We arrived in Santa Rosa, CA on Monday after many days anchoring out in the weird and beautiful spots of Oregon and California. We took so many random pictures that we put them into an album you can link to from the Flickr icon on the right side of this blog.

Let's see if I can recount some of our journey from where we left off on the last post. We spent the weekend before this last one out on the Rogue River just outside of Grants Pass. We thought we would stay at this one free BLM spot, but after we got back from town that Friday, our amazing isolated paradise had been inundated with drunk guys. So we decided to suck it up and pay out for two nights at a nearby state campground, Indian Mary.

It was a pretty silly place with many gawking RVers but it was good to not worry about drunk people messing with us and fill up our water tank. We learned that the park used to belong to "Indian Mary" herself and it apparently was famous for being the smallest reservation in the country. Her father was granted the land when he snitched out his tribe's planned attack on a nearby village. She ran a ferry for settlers across the Rogue River for a time until they built a bridge and put her out of business. The bridge fell within a year (wonder why?) but they built a new one. Then the state took her riverside reservation and made an RV park out of it.

After two nights there, we moved to another free spot further up the river on Sunday night, above Rand Boat ramp. Had the place to ourselves. First thing Monday morning, we headed over to Pacific Truck and Trailer just before Merlin Rd. hits I-5 and got our air brake hose fixed. Super easy. $50 installed. From there, we headed down to Grants pass to try and score a California Atlas - we've been having lots of fun with our atlases. Walmart et al was sensory overload after being in the woods for days. We got out of there in a hurry.

Before choosing our destination for the night, we briefly entertained the idea of visiting one of the women's land farms in Oregon. We found a listing for one called Womanshare outside of Grants Pass. They were very nice on the phone but said that 32 feet is pushing it for their turn-around. Next time we really want to plan our trip around women's lands but it didn't work out this time. Onward. We broke off at Grants Pass onto the 199 S. that would eventually hook up with 101 S. We made it as far as Cave Junction that first day and parked behind Puff n' Stuff to stock up on food, diesel and ice. Never seen so many methheads in one grocery store but, hey, they had organic tortilla chips.

We took the Oregon Caves Hwy for a few miles and camped at Grayback campground for the night. The campground host was pretty awesome and filled us in on some of the local history. We learned that there was a huge influx of hippies that came to the area in the late 60's to set up "mining claims" up and down the river. We've been hearing for a while that getting a mining claim was (and is?) a cheap and easy way to get a piece of land. The forest service wasn't too enthusiastic about the homemade cabins springing up along the river so in 1968, Johnson wrote the Wild and Scenic River Act. I think the Rogue River got included into it in 1971. They took away back-to-the-landers spots and hired other hippies to burn down all the cabins and scatter all the stones from the fences. I had never heard about this kind of thing before and thought it was pretty interesting. Yet another example of the system polarizing two issues to keep the movement down: environmental protection vs. alternative living.

The campground host who told us all this history had his cabin burned down, too, even though the old time miners "took a shining to him" (his words) and assured the forest service that he was actually in the creek panning everyday and that he was producing enough mineral to be legit according to the prudent man act. All true. Fast forward - now our gracious host is a world renowned camp ground host and mushroom expert - check out his website: http://www.matsiman.com.

We did a lot of thinking about all this history as we continued our journey. We decided to camp just past Grayback up a forest service road for the next night. I did some sewing to bulk up stock and get ready for a website update and we listened for passing cars. You could hear them coming miles away from where we were. The second night we got spooked by two drunk guys in a pickup truck driving like maniacs, whipping around the forest, passing us and slowing down and speeding away up a split road, racing back down and cruising us again.

We camped at Grayback again and then left in the morning, picked up ice in Cave Junction and decided not to go to the Hope Mountain Barter Faire for lack of funds. Then we cruised down into CA and stopped at a free campground called Madrona, next to the Smith river, where we met Micheal and his bus. Micheal's been living in his bus for the last 30 years and it is a life work. He was a really awesome guy and a total inspiration to us. We have renewed bus building energy and got a lot of good ideas on bus decorations and destinations from him. Seeing Micheal and his bus really reaffirmed our passion for buses and bus people. We feel lucky and blessed to have gotten the opportunity to meet an old timer who hasn't given up or forgotten joy. Thanks Micheal!! Oddly enough, Micheal also talked about mining claims and noted better times for busfolk before "our rights were taken away" by the Forest Service. I guess we were not the hardcore hippie historians we thought we were because here was a huge hole in our historical knowledge. Fellow novice hippie historians take note. More research to be done?

After swimming in the Smith River and hanging out at Madrona for 2 days, we moved on to the redwoods. We camped first at Prairie Creek and then at Burlingame in the Humbolt Redwood Forest. The redwoods are completely amazing - not even gonna try to describe them here. We even saw elk! AND Wowie! CA campgrounds are so much fancier than OR campgrounds. Hot, spa-like tiled showers? Free maps, information brochures and adequate (excessive?) signage that actually tells you what is happening on trails? PHONES? Visitor's centers? Recycling bins? It was all great until...$8 firewood?! $10 6-packs?! Ahh, California. How I'd forgotten.

We got more and more anxious as we drove closer to the Bay Area. People started cutting in front of the bus, using any old lane for passing and generally being silly drivers. The roads were the worst we'd seen on the whole trip - rutted and bumpy doesn't really cover how they feel in the bus. And then, getting closer to Santa Rosa - dead stop on the 101 in the middle of the freeway. I forgot that's normal.

The trip in a nutshell: most fun we've had in a long time. Bringing your home with you wherever you go is mindblowing in ways we didn't expect; the bus makes a lot of people really excited and happy and when it doesn't its pretty funny; there is a significant portion of the middle aged population who respond to the bus with an instinctive peace sign; bus people love to see other bus people; hitchhikers feel totally entitled to a ride on your big hippy bus and take it pretty hard if you reject them; diesel is cheaper in CA.

Anyway, we are very excited to get to Santa Cruz on Monday and start in on our veggie conversion so stay tuned! Many veggie details to come....

On the Road Again...for the First Time!

2008-09-12T15:19:00.000-07:00

Day #4 of our adventures in goin' south!

Right now we're in an internet cafe in Merlin, OR outside of the Rouge River BLM land near Grants Pass, OR. We're having an awesome time - it feels so good to be out and about experiencing our home in all these different places. Much relaxation happening.

I'm also getting lots of driving practice in! She can sort of keep pace with the semis on the I-5. The only fatalities so far are the many bugs caught in our radiator.

Here's our first camping spot on the North Umpqua river off of hwy 138.

We were planning on taking 138 through to Crater Lake and hooking onto the 97. Unfortunately, there's a big wildfire up in those parts and the road is blocked! Travelers take note!

While we were there we hiked up to see the "McDonald homestead"....it was 4 miles uphill but it was worth it!

After camping there 2 nights, we went up to the road closure on the 138 to figure out what the heck was going on with all this smoke, fire and closed road rumors. We thought they would tell us that the road would open in a couple days. We were wrong. They told us it might be weeks before the road opened because the fire was only "8/30 contained" (whatever that means) and to turn around and backtrack back to the I-5 . We turned her around and sent our best wishes for a safe and swift end to the fire. The folks up in Dry Creek are worried about losing their homes to this thing.

So we backtracked and drove a couple hours south on the I-5 to the Rogue River BLM land outside of Merlin. Awesome! Washed my hair in this river. =)

Our sweet parkin' spot....

The bad news is that we need a new air hose for our front left brake. We were idiots and let it get worn on this loose access flap that should have been secured better. Ooops. Now we know what "that noise" was. Its not leaking air (yet) but we want to get it fixed. Tried to do it here in Merlin but we were told it would be best to go on to this truck stop in Medford where they can make up the hose for us on the spot. We're going to stay over here for the weekend until Monday and make an early morning push then for Medford with a watchful eye on the air pressure. =)

We are really wanting a 12v fan in the cockpit right about now.....

Thanks all for the encouragement! xoxoxoo

Will keep ya'll updated.

Preparing for Departure

2008-09-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

Ooooo-ooo: prudy new tires and wheels!!

Annnd....we got our first tag! Thanks for nothing "husk."

My fellow Americans, I ask you: When will we stop selling fatty sharpies to rouge middle schoolers?

Anyway, we're going to paint it over (white) and paint all our lovely "chrome" (read: sheet metal) accents to match at the same time. We want to get it done today before we leave in an effort to make the bus less scary-looking.

In addition to getting new tires, we took the bus to Schweitzer's automotive to get the rear differential oil level checked and also have someone look at the transmission. It was acting weird...maybe?...we weren't sure so we thought it might be prudent to have someone look at it. The rear diff thing was Spencer's idea. The guys at Shweitzer's turned out to be very cool. The rear diff was fine (we could have checked it ourselves....oh well...just trying to be cautious this first time around) and the tranny was fine except some anonymous idiot (me) over-filled the fluid. Good to know. =)

Enough about other people messing with our bus. Back to us monkeys. In addition to painting those less desirable parts of our bus today, we are also going to replace our hood support wire. You can see in the pic here that its just hanging on by a thread...

Yesterday we replaced our engine temp gauge. Here's the broken one:

Here's the back of it...turns out that the wire coming into the bottom of it isn't a wire at all...its a tiny tube....filled with ether?!....that can be really nasty if you cut into it. (Thanks for letting me know, friendly Knechts guy!) Guess who came ::this close:: to cutting into it before she knew better? Just goes to show...if you don't know...don't cut it.

Here's where that ether tube connects into the back of the engine.

So we bought a replacement gauge at Knechts. The tube and the gauge are all one thing - they can't be disconnected from one another. That means we had to replace the whole thing.

We struggled for a while to try to get that bushing on the engine undone but eventually gave up...goddamn it was tight and in a *&^%ed up spot...and we didn't have the right sized wrench...(note to self: get complete wrench set NOW) ...luckily there happened to be a house guest staying with Julia's mom who not only had the right wrench but was also stronger than us. Yay.

But once it was installed, we weren't sure if it was working. Rev the engine as we might, it wasn't moving.

So we took the bus up over the hill out to Lane Community College...it's sort of a pseudo-freeway to get out there so that was good practice. We topped out at about 30 mph going up that hill. (Seriously.) I see a lot of driving-in-the-slow-lane-with-my-hazards-on in my future.

We also got to test out the lower gears. Don't ask me why they designed it like this but it's a stretch to reach the gear shifter from the driver's seat. I felt lucky to have such a competent co-pilot next to me because Julia was shifting gears for me like a pro. (Don't forget, its an automatic, folks!)

Lo and behold, sometime during the drive the engine temp gauge sprung to life. We were hovering around 180 degrees the whole time which seems good to me.

So once the sketchy parts of our bus are painted over and that little wire is replaced, we'll be good to go. I finally caved to the pressure and agreed to get a pre-paid cellphone for emergencies. (I hold it 3 feet away from me and use it with the speakerphone on....and keep it turned off the rest of the time...you know they can't prove it's dangerous....but they can't prove its safe either!) Also on our to-do list: clean the garage (total disaster area), sort out our tools, load up extra stuff we need to take down to CA for storage, clean cockpit (its covered in a good layer of grease/dust), install the bike rack thingy on the back of the bus, buy a decent CA/Oregon atlas and go food shopping.

Our estimated time of departure from Eugene is tomorrow or the next day depending on how fast we can get our stuff together.

Exciting!

A quick word from Julia: We're planning on driving east from Eugene on Hwy 58 and then hook up with hwy 97 so that we can check out Eastern Oregon a bit on the way down (and avoid some of the intense mountain passes on the I-5). That route hooks back up to the 5 around Weed. We want to take our time and do a little tripping around, so if anyone knows of any cool spots to stop on the way down we'd love to hear about it! This will be our first experience taking the rig on the road, finding places to park over night, and hopefully even doing some nature boondocking. Let us know if you have any tips! thanks.

Out and About

2008-09-03T19:49:00.000-07:00

So, after battening down the hatches, we moved the bus out of what we have lovingly called "the hole."

This is a view from the hole...looking down the 90 degree bend in the driveway and out onto the street, where we have temporarily parked the bus.

As some of you know, this is what happened last time I tried to drive up this driveway:

(Note: Our fellow bus friend, Spencer, deserves a shout-out for his heroic manuevering skills that got us out of the hole in one piece this time around. Thanks Spencer!)

After taking her out of the hole, we went straight to Green Eye Automotive in Eugene, OR to have them give us an estimate for doing the veggie conversion. Spent the night. Turns out the dude who owns it sucks. Not only was he trying to rip us off ($3,900?!?!?!?!?????) but he made a point of being a flaming asshole to us while he did it. It was very disappointing to see so little respect for the ladies at such a "progressive" and "enviornmentally friendly" local business. F you, Clark! We're keeping our money and we decided to do it our own goddamn selves. And speaking of bullshit: before we drive it down to CA, we are going to need a new vent cap for the composting toilet. We discovered the hard way that driving with a vent open in 360 degrees causes a back draft. Imagine that...

So yeah, the new plan is to get new wheels and tires ($2200...yikes!) tomorrow at Wyatt's and leave Eugene and make it to CA on regular old evil diesel. It's not ideal. Truth is, we don't have the time or place to convert it here and we've got friends who are interested in helping down in CA so that would make it more fun/educational.

In other news, turns out the stovepipe industry is trying to poison you. After spending a lot of time last winter wondering "what's that other smell?" when I lit up my wood stove, a family friend (thanks, Greg!) let us know that they've recently started painting black stove pipe with nasty paint that releases noxious fumes when it gets hot. Real intelligent. When Greg was installing his wood stove, he spent a day calling around to find what he called "blue pipe" (the old school, non-noxious stuff that got replaced with black pipe) and was unable to find it anywhere. He settled for black pipe and spent an afternoon going over his new pipe with his propane torch to try to do its nasty thing before he put it in his house. After that, the smell went away.

We didn't think we could have enough patience to go over every inch with our torch so we decided to have a bonfire.

We left the pipes in there for a couple hours and made sure that every part of them glowed red by moving them around with sticks every now and then. Boonie, our spiritual leader/kitty also participated.

In still other news, the water mains up the street broke and created a river for a couple hours underneath our bus. Thank goodness for wheel chocks. Never thought I would see water move an asphalt street up 5 inches in the air or see an asphalt water volcano. It was pretty awesome. We also got to see a pageant of the city's International trucks in action. Very exciting.

Tomorrow: new wheels and tires! Bye-bye split rims.

adventures in making the bus SECURE...and cute

2008-08-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

So lately we've been securing the bus for MOVEMENT!

That means lots of this:
And this:

We also had yet another leaking incident. Same wall, different spot. Can't tell where or why but I can tell you that I caulkled the crap out of the left-hand side of my bus.

See each of those rivet lines? Well, there's caulk in them now.

We also finalized my sewing space!!

Can you believe I paired down my lace collection to just TWO tiny drawers? This down from 2 garbage-bags-full.

My treadle is secured with tie down points screwed into the floor joists and 2 tie downs through the cast iron base for driving. We had to choose our points wisely so that we didn't bend the base or put any undue pressure on sensitive parts of the cabinet. There's also a length of 2x2 on its side inbetween the two feet that rest along the wall. That should keep it from moving side-to-side (or from the bus' point of view, forwards and backwards).

Here is is with both tables open! A seamstress' dream. It's more room than most of us have to sew in "real" homes. I have an old cutting board to put on top of the opening in the treadle in case I want to put my electric machine or serger there instead.

I converted the 2nd sewing table (the plain one - NOT my redeye singer) into a storage cabinet. I found it - with old (*&#ed machine and all - on the sidewalk. Took it home, trashed the machine, put a false floor in it and now it's a table/cabinet. I have room for 2 baskets of notions underneath my thread holder!

We also made the wall opposite the sewing space GORGEOUS. Fabric on the right, coats, shoes and bags on the left:

From another angle:

Close-up of the purdy shoe holder I made in my new sewing space:

What it all looks like in context:

I also used my new sewing space to make cover-up curtains for the shelves. I think it makes it feel more tidy and organized. Out of sight, out of mind.

Here's another random DIY attempt of late: banjo case. Think fake velvet + cardboard + staples + old cushion insides + old towel + guerrilla tape + bent aluminum ribs + brads + webbing (for hinges) + ribbon (for closures)....the outside is even uglier than the inside but, hey, it works!

I'll leave you with a glam/bikerdyke shot of me next to our stowed table:

New Wrap Skirts at Patchwork Underground!

2008-08-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

Quick plug for the biz: I posted a ton of brand new, super-cute wrap skirts today!

Check them out here: http://www.patchworkunderground.com/skirts.html

Let me know what you think of the new site layout, too. I added a bunch of thumbnails to make everything easier to navigate. Hope you like it. =) Stay tuned for a new and improved gallery page.

Wishing you the best in late summer fun!

Shelves, walls and doors

2008-08-08T14:29:00.001-07:00

We've been busy bees these last few summer-end days. Getting out and working on the bus has felt really great after talking for weeks about the projects we want to get done but never having the time to do them. Every new thing we complete truly feels like a giant step towards getting our bus mobile. We've been focusing most of our energy on tying up loose ends, creating places to store all our "stuff" and securing everything for the coming earthquake of trundling down the road. We're gearing up to move to a new spot in Eugene hopefully within a few weeks.

In other news, we've been getting a chance to work on some exciting side-projects lately. Erin is writing a how-to article for Threads Magazine and she's also been working with Ecobuilding Collaborative of Oregon on a fiber-related research and design project. I've been doing some work with this website called The Point, dabbling in the world of online social network organizing - you can see my two campaigns on the bottom of our links, feel free to join if you're interested!

On to the pictures:

Here is part of our unfinished new wall. Drop dead gorgeous, right? =) We took out the three windows behind the wood stove and closet to help with keeping the bus cool/warm. Sheet metal on the outside again with our fancy recycled denim insulation and a moisture barrier. Then plywood. We'll put up more wonderboard before we use the stove.

Here's our new living room shelf.

Detail of our new securement for our main shelf. When we're driving, we'll put bungee cords up between these eyelets to keep all the stuff in. We have these funny metal grids we can weave into the bungees at certain spots, too. See all those sideways books? We'll put a metal grid over stuff like that to keep it from sliding inbetween the bungees. Erin wants to make some curtains to go over the shelves so that we don't have to look at piles of stuff all the time.

Framed in kitchen shelf!! We've been wanting this one for a long time. You don't realize how much of a difference it makes to actually have somewhere to put your things. We haven't decided how we want to finish it yet. Bungees? Doors? Hmmm....We have been wanting to invest in wooden plates and bowls for a while so that we don't have to worry about ceramic breaking. Yet to come.

Another angle of the kitchen cabinet.

The full "range hood" effect - we still need to replace the fan with a quieter one (ours sounds like an airplane taking off) and also install some mechanism for closing it off. We eventually want to decorate the heat shield....metal cutouts? Flowers? Circles? Decorative grille? Flames?

Our new bi-fold bathroom door that we got from Bring Recycling. The old one didn't work out too well because it was hollow, so the hinges didn't actually stay on. This one's solid wood and pretty classy. We even recessed the hinges into the wall. Oooo-ooo.

Interior view of our newly re-vamped bathroom. We put those cute shelves up (more shelves!) and fixed the whole composting chamber section (not shown). We basically had to re-do the whole thing. We took out the false floor that used to be there and lowered the buckets/trays to sit on the floor. That way, there was enough clearance for the whole funnel & fittings & hose apparatus for the diverter. Yay! Works a lot better. We ended up taking a gallon milk jug and cutting the bottom off, flipping it around, cutting off the handle and sealing off the hole and super gluing it onto a PVC coupler. Works good.

Summer Reflections

2008-06-23T07:01:00.000-07:00

Julia here. Not much has changed physically to our home-on-wheels since our last post, but now we are starting to experience more of the intangible dimensions of our adventure. What has occupied our days of late is working, saving money, and trying to find a new spot to park our bus. Erin has been busting out new products for the Saturday Market and online (a whole other mental conundrum we've been wrestling with is trying to figure out which directions and how far to take this business). I've been working in the shipping warehouse at mountain rose herbs to make some extra money. It seems to be taking up all my time - a hard thing on these summer days. Working a physical, full-time job is trying, but definitely a learning experience.

To our suprise, it's been super tricky finding an affordable, formal new spot for our bus. Even though we are not 100% finished with our lady, we feel it's about time to get out into the world with her! We have found many wonderful folks who would be happy to have us park on their rural property - this is actually a dream come true, but not quite for this phase of our process, especially with gas commute costs. We've been trying to find a spot in town for now, but haven't had too many hits - maybe Eugene is already inundated with buses? Just the other day, however, a fellow crafter offered his place to us which is just about perfect for our needs right now! We are very excited to make the move.

We also almost have enough cash to get new wheels and tires and our veg-conversion! It is pretty crazy to us how our bus plan has gotten so entangled with the global energy crisis. When we started this project about a year ago, we had always intended to do WVO for economic/environmental reasons, but now it is an absolutely necessary factor for us. We just can't afford to move her otherwise! When we started, tire prices weren't nearly as much as they are now (truck tires are made out of synthetic petroleum-based rubber...who knew?). AND, when we first started, diesel was cheaper than gas! This one is a real crack up to me. It is somewhat disconcerting to be embarking on an adventure so entangled with the whole fuel issue, but I am still confident we can make it work and also hopefully educate about the issue along the way.

On a another note, lately we have both been feeling the draw of Portland. Our plan as of late is to head up there in a couple of months to see what that fair city has to offer us. CA seems too overwhelming and expensive, Eugene is too boring, small and economically broken. Portland seems to be right there in the middle in terms of diversity, community, economic opportunity and all those other good things. In the mean time, we are gearing up to fully enjoy the Oregon Country Fair with all our friends and family in a couple of weeks! Yay!

In terms of day to day bus-life, we are learning more fully the meaning of weather-proofing. In the winter-spring it was a struggle to keep her warm, but now we are faced with a whole new set of issues given these past few 95 degree days. We haven't fully dealt with our window screen situation so we've been living her mostly shut up during the heat of the day to avoid wasp infestations while we're at our respective work situations. Lessen #1: never leave a stick of butter out on your wood stove when your bus turns into an oven if you don't want melted butter all over your floor, etc. Yuck.

Erin's going to work on some new shelves and cabinets over the next while which will definitely help. Other tasks on the list: fix the grey water tank, finish the composting toilet, put down the hardwood floors, make her travel worthy, and hit the road!

Toward the fun!

-julia

Bus life and other oddities

2008-05-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

Here's what the bus looks like these days. We're living in it! Still haven't finished the bathroom plumbing but everything else is good to go.

Here's the lovely J with the freshwater fill hose we made. We used the polyethylene stuff they use for ice-makers in lieu of garden hoses (lead) or RV fill hoses (vinyl...SMELLS BAD...need I say more?) Here's a close-up....

Icebox in action! It works better with 2 ice blocks...in 90 degree heat we had to get new ice every other day. Fun bike rides!

Here's the table we made! We bought the laminated maple from our friendly lumber discounters. We got the legs at Bring recycling. We finished it with 2 coats of Bioshield Hard Oil. We want to do a 3rd coat but haven't gotten around to it. There won't always be blocks of wood underneath the legs! We propped them up because we haven't put the wood floor down yet. We also plan on getting small little feet for the bottom of the legs.

The table folds up so that it can be stowed along the wall, over the windows. This way friends can throw down sleeping bags in the space it normally takes up. Here's the hinges and the splash guard we made to go over the electrical bay.

And now, stuff that doesn't have to do with our bus......

Yay, I (Erin) got a banjo!

We learned how to silkscreen. We've been selling silkscreened panties and patches at the Saturday Market and they're going like hot cakes......It's so nice to try out a new craft for a change..........

This one says "I'm an Obama Mama".....ok so I'm more of a Kucinich woman myself....but hey....if it sells, it sells. =)

In other news. We had a failed vacation. We rented 2 nights in a fire lookout cabin called Bald Knob in the Siskyou-Rogue National forest for our 4th year anniversary. We drive up these BLM dirt roads for hours through miles of clear cut and get there to find that the lookout has a propane leak. So we drive back down the mountain and try to find a ranger at 4:30pm on Memorial Day. We found Ernie. He tells us to go home because nothing can be done that day. SO we decide to rough it and "car camp"....like...without a tent, in the car. We made this structure with the random Saturday Market stuff we had in the car:

Smokey Tarp

In the morning, after trying to sleep in the car, we opened our trunk to find that two mice had eaten their way through all the food we brought and crapped on our clothes. Sure made me miss my housebus. We went home.

But first we went to Powers, Oregon!!!

Broke omni bus of Powers, OR.

Camo skoolie with companion semi and shuttle just outside Powers, OR. Wow. We were very impressed by this collection.

Cool old buildings. Powers is an OLD railroad town built around the logging industry. We met a lady who said her Grandpa logged with horses. We met 2 ladies who said their dads were moonshiners. This was a really cool town.

Diner where we had breakfast.

Someone moved into the old school house and turned it into a home.

We also went to the Pioneer House in Powers, OR but we forgot to take a picture. We walked down to City Hall (which is also the Library and the Police and Fire station) and Elizabeth opened it up for us special. She said no one had been in there all winter. They had an awesome collection of all the old things from the townspeople. We really got a good sense of the history of the area and Oregon in general.

May not seem too exciting but checking out Powers, OR was the by far the best part of our vacation.

Totally worth a visit if you're in the area!

Pantry + Passover

2008-04-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

So, the kitchen is coming along......

We decided to rebuild our stove support in order to raise it up and make it so that our new vent could be routed out through the blocked-out window. It's all hooked up now and heating our tea water!

We also rebuilt the support for the icebox to make it tied in with the pantry above it. We added extra insulation around the ice box to make it extra efficient.

We also put a heat shield around the stove top and used pieces of copper pipe as spacers - just like we did with the heat shield around the wood stove only on a smaller scale. We sealed all the plywood with that Safecoat stuff to prevent off gassing. Eventually we will add a row of small, shallow over-head cabinets above the stove and the sink for extra storage of dishes and things.

We also hung up curtains all around the bus - three layers: top fabric + flannel sheet piece + regular sheet for the back. I added velcro tabs to the tops and bottoms so that they fit snugly against the window and help stop the convection current. There's been lots of time consuming odds and ends like this that we've been working on lately.

We have lots of safety gizmos now: a LP detector towards the floor (propane sinks), a smoke detector, a CO detector and two fire extinguishers.

We also re-did the gray water tank connection to smooth out the kinks that were happening in the hose. We also replaced the regular nuts that we shouldn't have used in the first place with lock nuts that won't rattle loose on us.

And yes....we replaced those windows we smashed up a while ago just fine. We ended up taking out two of the far-back windows in the bedroom and covering the inside up with cedar fence boards. We've been using lots of cedar fence boards for the interior lately - it smells great and looks pretty darn nice for $1.99 a board. Sometime soon we'll sand them and finish them but for now they kind of give it a rustic, cabin feel on the inside.

We're also in the middle of building our fold-out table right now. It's trickier than you would think! Pics on that to come.

We've been sleeping in the bus for a week or so now. It snowed/hailed/rained here for most of the time we were out there so we've definitely been learning how to work with our wood stove.

Heating and sleeping are a-ok. Cooking is another matter. Having discovered that our only local hose option for filling our fresh water tank is "drinking water safe" PVC, we've started to look elsewhere for a non-pvc (polyethylene?) hose. Looks like they only make them in Europe...arg. We may have to settle for a PVC hose for now and upgrade later. We'll decide what to do soon enough.

oh yeah....and HAPPY LATE PASSOVER!

we were very proud of our spread this year......

Mr. Toad's wild ride

2008-04-10T10:14:00.001-07:00

Well, we took her out. We decided it was time to overcome one of the last hurdles of this project - learning to drive the bus. After getting a handle on how the air brake system works and checking a few fluids, Erin got behind the wheel to take her for a spin. She sure is BIG. The lesson we learned: it's going to take some practice.

We just went around the neighborhood and it was pretty exciting. By the end of our session, Erin had started to master the left-hand turns. The trouble only came when we attempted to get it back up the steep/curvy driveway. We were doing fine until one of the sawed off branch stumps we had left took out a couple of our windows!! It was pretty dramatic. Next time I'll make sure to check both sides of the bus before I say it's clear to go - oops. But luckily we were planning on taking out a few more windows in the back, so it wasn't too difficult to swap them out. It made us realize that it would probably help to find a new situation for the bus that would make it more smooth to get in and out so we can practice more often.

In the mean time, we are finishing up as many odds and ends to get it self-contained before we officially move in. We're working on a kitchen pantry/cabinet, installing our range vent and hooking the propane up, making a table, and finalizing the composting toilet apparatus. More posts on these projects to come. In other news, Erin finished sewing the curtains up - lots of windows lots of curtains.

Hope everyone is enjoying the spring blossoming!

Composting toilet and more walls

2008-03-14T16:34:00.001-07:00

(Mostly) Finished composting toilet!

Our vent is a total duct tape explosion. We made it out of an old dryer vent we had lying around. I wrapped it in duct tape because the exposed metal of the hole in the ceiling scraped away some of its plastic sheath and I didn't want to worry about holes in our ducting. It connects to the 12v nearly silent fan we bought for too much money from Sunmar. Switch on the wall to the right. The cabinet doors we got at Bring and the hardware we got at an estate sale earlier today! Still not sure how we're going to finish the top of the composting box - paint? Collage? Tile? Leave as is? Not sure. We are going to give everything in the bathroom a good coat of tung oil for water resistance and easy clean-ability.

Julia cutting a really nice hole for the vent with our new Jigsaw! So much easier than trying to do this with a sawzall...

Here's the vent snaking out of the bathroom and up out the roof. This comes out over our icebox, which is where we're going to build our pantry. The vent will live at the back of the pantry where you can't really see it. I used a little bit of pipe insulation to protect the vent from the exposed metal of the opening. Duct tape strap is temporary. =)

Here's me installing the vent collar... and trying to race the sunset.

There's the vent peeking out the roof. We found the cap at Bring and the collar at the Rebuilding Store in Portland. I think it looks cute! Kind of like the little cousin of our chimney. I'm pretty sure the cap was originally intended to be used for a gas stove but I think it'll work for our purposes.

Here's the inside of the compositing chamber. We are going to have three bins of that size. Each bin sits on top of a tray. The bottom of the bins are perforated and each bin has 2 perforated plastic tubes resting inside of them (and eventually inside of the compositing mass) in order to increase airflow from within. Before you begin to use a bucket, you line the bottom with a good amount of composting mulch and then after each use, you pour enough mulch on top to cover everything over. By the time the all the buckets are full the oldest bucket should be earth. We bought some mulch from Biolet for our first go-round but we plan on making our own mix in the future. #1 is diverted to gray water tank. We had a bunch of heater hose lying around from when we removed the coolant-driven heater original to our bus so we recycled it. You can see it here in our pee diversion system. =) Thanks to Sean for allowing us to borrow his design!

Here's what it looks like with the bathroom filled in! It has really changed the space for us in a positive way. We're going to wait until we build the pantry above the ice box to finish the rest of the exposed wall. Please excuse the mud we've tracked into the bus - it' s been raining a lot lately. =)

Here's the beautiful paneling we used to cover the exposed wall that stretches along most of the right-hand side of our bus.

Here's the cabinet we built to cover the electrical bay. You can barely see it in the pic but we used a nice bar latch to lock the doors together.

The outside of the bathroom/hallway to bedroom. You can't see it in this pic but we used this neat folding door for the bathroom. I think it was made for a closet but it works really well for our purposes. We put handles on both sides with a lock on the inside of the door for privacy. It feels great to have our bed in the bus!

Propane box, Ice box and the box

2008-03-04T16:58:00.001-08:00

Long time, no post.

Well, we're 99% finished with the propane box except for a few silicone touch-ups here and there. Phew...that was an ugly battle.

In other news, we decided to give up trying to resuscitate our broken fridge. In our year of collecting pieces, we had 2 back up ice boxes just for this sort of occasion! We plumbed the ice box in and even made a nice little s-trap for it by bending up the pex just so and screwing it down with plumber's tape.

We went to Portland yesterday to hit the re-building store there and also to visit the Bins. We scored some really nice hardwood siding at the re building store, as well as a weather collar for our bathroom vent. Oh yeah - I also made some curtains for the bedroom! We are going to move our bed in as soon as we finish the bathroom walls....call me crazy but I have a thing about sawdust in the bed.

Me battling it out with the sawzall....don't know why this was so (*&%ing hard.

Ooooh...propane box lookin' kinda pretty. =) We used lots of flashing around the edges in part because my cutting job was not that pretty and in part because it made finishing the whole thing a breeze. Dig the locking hasps. We used some old interior rubber stuff from the bus to create a little "umbrella" above the doors.

The inside. We are going to paint it. Matter of fact, we're going to paint everything - inside and out - white. We caulked the nuts off this box. Weatherization for this thing is turning out be a P.I. the A. because the metal doors we made bow out when we lock the doors. We're going to add some clasps on the sides to make them cleave a little more snugly to the bus.

We tested the propane lines the other day and they are totally holding pressure!! The kind folks at Collin's Bike shop downtown lent us a specialty bike pump that screws on (rather than snaps on...not tight enough for our purposes) and measures the PSI of whatever it's pumping. We did this before we did the old soapy solution test because we thought it was a bit more scientific and to the point. With capped pipes (not hooked up to appliances) our pipes held their pressure which means there's no leaks! We were able to make a bike pump adapter out of a bushing and a little bicycle tire sized nozzle thing from Jerry's.

Here's what the box looks like on the inside of the bus. We raised the bench up a bit so that it would clear the box and not rest on top of it - we thought that the added pressure of our butts might eventually contribute to breaking the seals in the box.

What a disaster area. =) Note the ice box to the right of the stove. Pantry to be built above it.

Drain line coming out of the ice box with home-made little s-trap. The second piece of plumber's tape has a little scrap piece of 2x2 supporting the underside of the pex hose, creating the the "s" shape. I wrapped the pex in little pieces of pipe insulation to keep the tape from cutting into it.
There's the ice box drain coming in on the right towards the bottom of the sink drain. It switches from Pex to PVC at the end because that's what we had laying around the house. =)

The bathroom begins!

More bathroom detail....storage for extra sawdust below buckets...we're planning on making ours like SeanF's on skoolie.net....time tested, bus-freak approved....he has a fan driven vent out the roof and lots of provisions for airflow through the compositing mass. He also diverts the #1 into another tank...in our case we're going to divert it into the gray water tank. More details on all of this to come.

Here's some nifty stuff we bought at the new green store in Eugene. It seals plywood and prevents off gassing. Even though the plywood in our bathroom is recycled, it's probably still got some more offgassing to do - which is why we sealed it with this stuff before we installed it.

Here's some of the simple curtains I made for the bedroom. Dumpstered the curtain rods a million years ago...finally got to start using them! Note the pile of stuff on top of the bed. =)

Here's the panelling we got at the rebuilding store in Portland - $30 for 30 boards! More than we wanted to spend but it's just too pretty to walk away from.

Next up....installing the vent for the bathroom and wrapping up compositing toilet construction! Woo hoo!

Gray water tank, etc.

2008-02-16T21:13:00.000-08:00

Finally starting to feel just a tiny bit like a home in here....

Finished the plumbing for the sink's drain. Used ABS and PVC for the s-trap. Braided pvc hose goes down into our gray water tank. PVC and ABS are yucky but there's not really any better options out there short of copper or galvy...and that's kinda crazy for our drain. Also, the sink came with ABS fittings and the gray tank has PVC fittings glued onto it so we just went with the path of least resistance there. At least it's not for drinking water.

Here's our gray water tank all bolted into place! We were able to position it right under our sink for an easy drain. Used more scrap metal from Shnitzer Steel to make the cage. Bolted the box steel onto the ribs underneath the bus.

We also built the skeleton for the bed. The whole structure (with the exception of the 2x2 ledges on the perimiter of the bed) is removable. This way if we need to take things in and out of the back door we can. We used some old plywood sliding doors from Julia's old closet for the platform.

Our fresh water tank insulated with foil bubble wrap. We had a problem with condensation forming on the outside of the tank. Hoping that this solves that problem.

More foil bubble wrap for the covered over windows. We figured out that the oven part of our stove operates with a direct vent system. This means that the reason there are 2 vents (one nested inside the other) is that the outer-most vent sucks combustable air into the appliance and the inner-most vent pushes combusted air out of the appliance. We can't just bend up some sheet metal around the outer-most vent and call it a day because it won't work....they 2 need to be separated on the way out and they need to terminate in such a way that they wont get involved with one another....hard to explain. Anyway, it's back to the drawing board with that. We are looking into ordering the parts for it right now. If it starts to look expensive, we are thinking of scrapping this thing altogether and pulling another stove out of the RVs they have at the pick n pull right now.

Found a bunch of this gorgeous tile at Bring Recycling!!! They match our woodstove! We're going to use this to tile over the kitchen countertop. Still hoping to do a swirly broken-pieces mosaic over the heat walls around the woodstove.

Also found these awesome pieces of junk at Bring. They are little archetechural thingies that I personally ripped off of a piece of rotting Victorian house that someone donated to Bring. Hoping to clean the up, refinish them and mount them somewhere in the corners of our bus...maybe making an archway in the hall? Not sure yet. I'm really excited about them though.

In other news....we've decided to put the propane tanks in a sealed box underneath the bench/couch. It's making the most sense to us right now. (Thanks to Richard for his encouragement on this topic!) It'll be a way for us to really shorten our run from the tank to the appliances which is always a good thing - less pipe, fewer connections, fewer places to leak. It'll also be cheaper than buying a super-expensive under-mount tank. We found a couple used under-mounts from the 70's with no OPD valves...that looked kinda rusty...and decided that we'd be better safe than sorry on this one. Pretty sure that's what we're going to start working on tomorrow. =)

Odds and Ends

2008-02-12T08:36:00.001-08:00

Weatherized chimney in all it's glory. It is detachable at the seam above the boot. Had our first fire 2 days ago and it worked beautifully! Bought fire extinguishers. =)

Here's the shut offs for our propane lines - fridge and stove. We hid them underneath the sink so that we have easy access.

Here's the flex hose we're using to connect the propane to the stove. We'll use another one for the fridge. It's plastic coated steel.

J replaced the gaskets on our stove. Nice. Good seal.

Co-pilot chair - so we can both ride shotgun! Ripped it out of a van at pick n pull. Smells a little - will need to be annointed with some kind of essential oil? Cleaned it up and sawed off it's arm rests so it can snuggle up against the driver's seat. I'm going to make a nice fabric cover so that they'll match.

Here's a partial solution for our woodstove security project - plumber's flanges. This keeps it from sliding but not from jumping up and over. We find jumping hard to imagine but we're going to bolt down some u-bolts so that we can ratchet a tie down over it on the road just in case. In the pic it looks a bit like the legs aren't seated on the ground - they are. The flanges are just surrounding them tightly.

Ripped out two windows yesterday! They come out so easy. Sheet metal (aluminum?) from Shnitzer steel.

Top vent is for the range hood fan, bottom vent is for the pilot of the oven. The duct tape is temporary, folks. =) We are going to paint the sheet metal white to match the rest of the bus.

I ripped this ugly 12 volt fan out of the old ugly range hood that came with our stove when we scored it free. The hood is too big for our space so I salvaged what was useful in it. Haven't hooked the fan up yet so I don't know if it works. If it does (I think it does), we're planning on bending a sheet of pretty, decorative metal grill over the front of it. Difficult to explain effectively but it will look cute, godammit. The sheet metal covering the windows still needs to be caulked and insulated. We're going to use that foil/bubble wrap stuff in several layers and then cover the whole thing over with wood. Still need to fabricate some kind of heat-guard for the back of the stove.

Blocking out those 2 windows has really changed the space in an exciting way. For some reason I was getting an Austrailian vacation feeling in the bus now. I've never been to australia but it seems like a good theme to roll with for now. =)

You might have already been able to tell from the pics: it finally stopped raining for a minute! YAY!

Pictures!

2008-02-03T11:43:00.000-08:00

Here's Julia's hilarious photo essay of our wood stove installation.....maybe it's only funny to me but here it is. I think the pics speak for themselves.

It's in! Don't worry - the gray cement board look is temporary. We are going to do a tile mosaic over it in time. The very top part of the side wall above the heat barrier is going to be filled in with wood, too. We're thinking metal blinds (not fabric curtains) behind the wood stove. The window that gets cut in half by the side wall is going to be blacked out.

The chimney is secured to the roof but we still haven't weatherized the flue collar. What with snow and rain we're worried that the silicone won't cure right. We're waiting for a dry, non-freezing day. In the meantime, we uesd good old duct tape to hold down the collar and weighted down a tarp over the top of everything. Of course, we can't really light it up with duct tape wrapped around the flue and a tarp over it. Which means we haven't been able to test the stove - there are still questions about whether the stove will have enough draft to work in our bus. We also need to replace the braiding all around the stove door and in some other places (if we're keeping it). Once we decide what stove we're going with we'll still have to tackle the fun challenge of how to secure it in place!

Here's a pic of how we did the heat walls:

Here's me re-wiring our salvaged RV propane oven with high temp wire. The previous owner - some weirdo McGyver - got in there and did some real funky wiring.

Spencer came over today to help us test out the propane part of our stove. It works! I tested and there are no leaks, either. We plumbed the main lines for the propane this afternoon. Working in groups is fun! We still need to figure out the venting situation before we can situate the appliances and hook them up.

We aren't planning on mounting the 2 BBQ tanks under the bus anymore because I've decided it's dangerous. I've been looking at side-mount tanks meant to live underneath RVs. They're about $300. I'm planning on buying one off eBay when Mercury stops being retrograde on the 18th.

Pics of propane progress to come!

Woodstove

2008-01-26T08:30:00.000-08:00

The latest revelation: building in the Oregon winter is a serious matter. The rain is pretty manageable (except when we're trying to saw holes in the roof), but the bitter cold is a more formidable problem. The small space heater we've trucked in has been helpful, but even still we've had to learn to master the art of dressing in so many layers we start to look like marshmallows. It has been a day-to-day challenge, but one I feel like we're facing admirably (especially considering Erin's sunny California roots).

Considering these icy and clouded conditions, what better goal to set than install a warm and welcoming hearth in our home! The last couple of days we've been learning much about wood stoves. It's been important for us to keep in mind that our wood stove is going to serve more as a crucial tool, rather than a pretty showpiece, as it will be our only source of heat. We've been reading up on the guidelines for installation for our particular wood stove (Vermont Castings Intrepid II) in the manual that's online. We've been trying to follow the codes for safety as much as we can while also balancing the uncommon fact of being installed in a school bus. Here's what we came up with so far. Good thing that we scored our wood stove for free on craigslist because all of the other pieces ending up costing more than we had expected, almost $400 in all.

The stove is sitting on the bulky box built over the wheel-well across the way from the kitchen. We positioned it here originally because it would be right next to the shower for our wood-fired hot water heater plans and because it is pretty centrally located for more even distribution of heat. It also felt right because it sort of bridges the kitchen and living spaces (which seems appropriate for a working hearth). We need to send out many thanks to our friend Spencer for helping us get the 250 lb. behemoth in the bus - quite a feat indeed. We picked up some fire and heat rated 1/2" cement board at Jerry's called Wonderboard that we're using as a hearth pad and for the wall shields (eventually we'll tile over these). For the walls, we cut up some of our left-over copper pipe into 1" pieces and used those as spacers between the wall and the cement board. We also left a 1" gap at the bottom and top of the wall shields for air-flow. According to our manual, for a corner centered stove, we are supposed to position it 10" from each back corner to the walls. Since we have such a limited amount of space to work with, it was a bit tricky to get it in a good and safe position, but we worked it out in the end.

For our flue/chimney arrangement, we're using standard single-wall stovepipe going up to about a couple inches below the ceiling, then transitioning to special insulated double-wall chimney. The two are connected by a thing called a dripless chimney adapter. The hole in the ceiling has an extra 2" air space around the chimney for safety purposes. We are a bit concerned that if we leave the actual chimney at the height we had originally envisioned (2' about the roof), we will not achieve adequate draft for our stove to function properly. However, the kind of chimney we purchased (Selkirk Metalbestos) conveniently can twist on and off if we decided to have a removable extended chimney down the road.

We spent all day yesterday cutting a 12" hole in our ceiling. Erin used the reciprocating saw for most of it, but we also used a tin snips cutter and good old fashioned ripping with a wrench. It took a while and a lot of arm muscles. The edges of the hole are not the prettiest, but luckily it'll all be covered over over in the end. Next we secured the chimney to the roof using these special brackets and then waterproofed it all with hi-temp silicone. We finished this at about 6pm when the light and temperature started dropping precipitously and our fingers were not responding as well to the delicate job we were trying to accomplish. The top of the bus where we were perched started icing over as well. So we frantically got a tarp over the hole and called it a night. Of course when we woke up today it was raining! I suppose we'll have to wait to finish the chimney until it stops. In the meanwhile we'll get started on the propane.

Pictures of the wood stove set-up coming soon...

--------------

Erin's Update #1: In addition to rain it is now snowing here in Eugene. I mean, like, many inches, non-stop, covering everything. This forth-generation Californian is very impressed. It's magical and silent. I don't think we'll be getting to that chimney weatherization today.

Erin's Update #2: Our housebus compadre, Spencer, recently agreed to trade his help with the propane system (stove/oven, fridge) for a few hours of child care, burned CDs and a pool cue bag. =) We got together, planned out our system and bought all the components yesterday. Exciting progress on several fronts!

Plumbing

2008-01-17T19:27:00.000-08:00

We are back in action again after a restful two-week California vacation! We didn't wait more than a day to jump right into the next phase of construction on our bus: plumbing. After much debate about what would be easiest and most non-toxic, we decided to go with copper pipes for the freshwater (kitchen sink) system instead of galvanized steel. Since our goal of the moment is to finish the bare minimum basics of our conversion first, we decided to forgo the shower installation for this phase of construction. (Eventually we plan to install a wood fired/solar hot water heater!)

Diagram of our plumbing system (click to see a close up).

First we picked up all the tools and materials that we would need to do the plumbing at our local hardware store, Jerry's: a small propane torch, flux, lead-free solder, a pipe cutter, copper pipe and fittings, two dielectric unions, a check valve, a shut-off valve, teflon thread-seal tape and a few galvanized steel fittings for the 55-gallon drum and pump. To actually learn the technique, we found a couple of copper sweating demonstrations on YouTube that were highly informative. It turned out to be easier and less dangerous than we had expected and we got a water tight seal on our first try! In the end, it also turned out to be way less strenuous than manhandling the galvanized steel fittings with vise-grips and plumbing wrenches, etc.

Sweated copper joins.

Because our system involved such a variety of pieces (copper, steel, brass, threaded, non-threaded, dielectric, etc) that each have their own set of unique needs, the most challenging part of the whole process ended up figuring out which pieces to put together first and in what order so that it was possible to put them together at all. We were working in tight places and everything was all relative to everything else. But once we had thought it out enough, it all just sort of came together. It sure was satisfying to be able to pump water out of our faucet at the end of the day with absolutely no leaks!

Shut-off valve near tank.

Check-valve below water pump.

The other piece of the plumbing involved a pretty massive bushing/bulkhead contraption that will double as a fill hole and a vent for the tank.

Our 55-gallon drum freshwater tank.

Fill hole and vent.

To secure the 55-gallon drum, we screwed down 2x2's on either side to act as a sort of cradle. Then we put four hefty screw/eyelets in and secured two tie-downs across the tank. Eventually we will put in front and back supports as well. We also plan on insulating the tank with that thin foil-bubble wrap insulation to cut down on general condensation and the possibility of freezing.

Up next: propane and woodstove!

Wait List Suprise!

2007-12-09T20:49:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to say that Julia and I were stoked to learn that we got in on the waitlist for next weekend's Eugene Holiday Market (Decemeber 15th and 16th)! This means another week of busy busy sewing and another week of non-bus related work. So for all of you wondering if we're still building the bus -- we are!....just not this week. =)

Though we haven't been doing any hands-on work in the last few weeks, we've been learning more about how the bus relates to the seasons here in Oregon. For one - there's moisture. Lots of it. We are going to invest in a dehumidifier pretty soon and turn it on every now and then to cut down on the condensation on the inside of the windows and on the ceiling. We are also planning on putting a space heater inside the bus for the time being and turning it on first thing in the morning along with our black-tea-and-mate ritual so that by the time we're ready to start work it'll be nice and toasty in there.

The bad news: the vent on the ceiling escape hatch started leaking. We caught it early and sopped it up with the usual towel-and-bucket routine. Fixing the leak is obviously the first thing on our to-do list when we start up on buswork again. The good news: The doors and windows are solid. My caulking paid off!

Holiday Market & Magic

2007-12-01T16:36:00.000-08:00

Hey folks,

Erin here. J and I have been super busy this last month stitching together tons of new clothes to sell over the winter season. It's been difficult to put the bus work on hold for the time being and invest all our energy in a different direction. We are looking forward to getting back to work on the bus plumbing in the coming weeks.

Our two-week run at the local Holiday Market was a huge learning experience for us. Learning to be effective craftswomen is an ongoing process and we've been lucky to receive a lot of advice and encouragement from old-timers in the Eugene craftsperson economy/community. Lately, I've been struck by the magical quality of craftswomanship and the magical prowess of my fellow craftspeople. Handmade things are a novelty these days. They are unexpected, vital little anachronisms. The main reaction I get at crafts fairs is disbelief ~ "Do you make all of this?!" or "Is this handmade?!" and then, "How long does it take you?!" and "Where do you find the patience?!" ~ which to me indicates that what craftspeople do - or what craftspeople are - somehow blurs the lines of reality for a lot of folks. We are so used to being alienated from the magic of creation ~ not knowing how our homes are made, not understanding how our cars work, not knowing the name of the person (or persons) who made our toothbrush in China, not even really knowing how they made that toothbrush in China.

It's funny to think that the basics have become magical. The hand-knit sock is the new unicorn. Yeah, maybe you can find those in darkest India but here? In Oregon?!

A plug for a good book: I was lucky enough to find a book called "Women and Craft" at my local used bookstore the other day. It's a collection of short pieces (essays and stories) by a bunch of women from the 80's in the UK edited by Gillian Elinor, Su Richardson, Sue Scott, Angharad Thomas and Kate Walker. It was awesome. Everything I've been trying to rant about in the last couple years - gendered ideas about art and craft, magical crafting, women and making stuff and how important it is, the history of women's work, what it means to sell your craft - it was all there. Good luck finding it...looks to me like it was released in the UK only. Where was this book when I was teaching my section on feminism and crafting?! The UCSC library didn't think any book like this existed.

Warm holidays to all who read this. Check back for more bus updates later this month. More new clothes will be posted at The Patchwork Underground tomorrow!

Couch, cabinet and water pump beginnings

2007-11-01T11:47:00.000-07:00

Along with all of the involved electrical work we've been doing lately, we have had a little time to start on building a few of our house fixtures. Much more on these to come.

Below are a few photos of the frame of our couch. Eventually it will have nice wood panelling and of course be cushioned, etc. Check out the handy hidden storage space within!

Below is our kitchen sink cabinet that is undergoing some refurbishment. We got this unit at Bring Recycling, and in order for our scavenged sink to fit in it, and for more comfortability, we decided to raise its height. We are planning on covering the mis-matched raised portion with tiles to match the counter top. Thanks to my Dad's extra big cabinet vices, it wasn't too hard to attach the extra pieces. Next comes putting the sink in and getting some water to it!

One last development - after discovering that our electric ShurFlo water pump was designed to use plastic Pex tubing, we decided to rethink our plumbing system a bit. We have been trying our hardest to use the least toxic materials and processes available throughout this whole project, so we weren't too fond of the plastic water pipe idea. We thought about doing a gravity-fed water system, but decided against that because we felt it might get a bit sketchy with a big ol' 55 gallon drum rolling around on the roof. Erin did some research and found a sleek all-metal and leather Fynspray hand-pump that we finally settled on. It's made for yachts. :)

Energy from the sun!

2007-10-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

It has been quite a while since our last (delayed) post, but that is not for lack of activity. Erin and I have been super busy finally putting the crowning touches on our electrical system, as well as trying to sew up a storm for the upcoming Holiday Market. But we finally made a breakthrough and got everything hooked up and juiced up - as Luna waits patiently out in the driveway, every tiny sun ray is generating energy! It is quite a feeling to truly be power-independent.

I have to say that at the beginning of this project, I was proud of learning such simple things as the differences between types of screws or lumber, but it was seriously a mental hurdle to now come away with a relatively competent understanding of electrical wiring and all the intricacies therein. Erin spearheaded the hard science learning and planning, and we are now blessed to have a working system in our bus, without any serious injuries along the way.

Above: our bus-wide master plan.

Below: detailed info on how the solar controller is hooked up. The solar controller switches the panels on and off depending on how charged the batteries are and does other mysterious things, too.

Our electrical gizmo "bay" which will be built into the wall under the kitchen table with a door to access it when need be.

On to technical details... The first thing we did was plan out our various AC and DC circuits and wired them into our respective 12 v. fuse block and 120 v. circuit breaker panel.

An example of some of our circuits - (DC) light to light and (AC) outlet to outlet. Library books helped us figure out how to wire the AC circuits. DC information was harder to find in print. We are going to cover all the wires with those little plastic sheath things.and paint them the same color as the ceiling (which is going to be a creamy butter color).

Our overly large but functional AC circuit breaker panel. We will try and get a picture of the wiring going on behind the scenes later. It looks pretty cool in there.

Our DC fuse block - room for more circuits if need be.

Next we installed our four 6v. batteries in their snug little box and wired them together - two in series and two in parallel to make a final output of 12 v.

This is how our battery bank is wired. We took pairs 6v batteries and wired them together in series to make 12v. Then the 2-battery units were wired together in parallel for more amperage.

One of the biggest hurdles in accomplishing this whole mess was figuring out the proper gague wires, connectors and all the other doohickeys that are used. It was hard to find concrete, applicable information for extreme novices doing such an obscure project at the library or on the internet. We also found that most of the various folks we talked to at the many electrical/RV/auto/hardware stores that we visited had divergent answers as well! We ended up contacting the specific manufacturers of our inverter, converter and solar panels to get the intended specifications. We also were able to track down a few folks at some stores who really demonstrated that they understood what we were trying to accomplish and had some awesome suggestions. (Like the people at Northwest RV Supply and Surplus and the Knecht's out on West 11th)

Anyway, after getting the batteries wired together with 4 gwa, we hooked our 1000 watt inverter in between our battery bank and our AC circuit panel. We used a heavy duty extension cord to plug into one of the AC sockets on the inverter and power our 120 v distribution panel. We took a lead from the positive terminal of the inverter and ran a 15 amp in line fuse straight to the DC fuse block and grounded it all from the negative terminal of the inverter straight to the chassis. After this was accomplished, we could actually turn on our DC lights, and plug into our AC outlets.

The inverter has a pleasant little hum when it is turned on.

Next came the final step: mounting the solar panels and wiring everything through solar charge controller. Luckily, the kind people at AM Solar in Springfield made things super simple for the DIY-er by providing clear instructions on how to wire everything together. When the first sunny day rolled around, we were up on our bus roof mounting the panels and wiring it all through the roof-top combiner box and down through the ceiling and into the charge controller. We got all the other wires hooked in and without one spark we now have power!

The two 100 watt panels basking in the Oregon shade. The combiner box with the whole down into the bus interior is underneath the right-hand panel.

The hub of it all: the solar charge controller.

Wires entering the battery box from the charge controller, inverter and engine batteries.

More holes into the floor of the bus.

We have to give serious thanks to our friends Yona and Zeke who were generous enough to come over and do a safety check and help us put the final touches on everything. It was all very exciting and quite satisfying to finally have that most crucial element complete!

We have decided to forgo the converter/charger element in our electrical system for now. We bought a huge old used 50 amp ferroresonant converter and we'll keep it around until we decide whether or not it's going to be a necessary part of our system. We didn't like the idea of a sparking, arcing box in the all-wood interior of our bus and we've started to hear there are other ways of going about charging the batteries directly with shore power without the need for a permanent box. For now the solar is meeting all of our electrical needs so we'll see how that goes.

On to the plumbing!

Battery Box!

2007-10-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

The battery box construction, though it would seem to be a simple and unremarkable thing, was actually a super exciting and challenging endeavor. Erin designed an immensely solid box that involved salvaged angle iron, plywood, extra long and sturdy bolts and lock-nuts. We finally got a chance to test our true construction skills by sawing up metal and drilling fatty holes in the bus frame :)

We started by measuring out how much room the four batteries took up and the space we had to work with between the two L-shaped beams underneath the bus. We put it on the right side (facing the bus) directly in front of the wheel-well. We arranged it so it would be in a direct line from the solar panels and charge controller to minimize wire runs. Next we cut two strips of angle iron to be the two side supports that would hold the bottom of the long threaded rod that we would suspend the whole box from.

Meanwhile, I drilled a bunch of holes in the angle iron using our nice cobalt bit and my dad's old drill press. We cut up the 1/2" plywood sides to the box - two thicknesses for the bottom plus two strips of steel for extra security. Erin drilled a bunch of holes in the back piece for a vent. Then we mounted four pieces of angle iron to the inside bottom of the box that would hold the batteries exactly in place so they wouldn't slide around, and planned two pieces that would also run along the top sides of the batteries and be bolted down as well

Once we got the whole box screwed together, we cinched up three of the lock nuts - one underneath the box, one on top, and one that would go under the L-shaped bus beam. Then Erin sawed a square out of the side of the bus and we put a couple of hinges on it to make an outside door! We had also put a couple of hinges on the front of the box itself and a locking piece so that we can throw a pad-lock on there just in case.

Next came the tricky part - trying to hoist the massively heavy box underneath the bus and shove the long bolts perfectly into the pre-drilled holes we had made, with just two people. To say the least it was a challenge, but we got it in there and cinched down the last of the lock-nuts, the ones that will actually keep the whole box from falling out beneath us. We were quite proud once we have finally got it up there!

Electrical Part 1

2007-09-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

Well we have been busy beavers since Julia quit her job at Tsunami Books! *yaaay* It has been so wonderful to have more time to work on the bus. Now that Fall has descended on Oregon it's not a minute too soon to really start crackin' at getting this project to the livable phase. We are trying to have all the main systems in before Winter so that we can flee further south for that dark and desolate time.

Our progress on the electrical system has been awesome these last few days!

First, I wired up all the outlets for 120v (there's 4 of them on 2 different circuits ~ 1 near the sewing machines, 1 near the table, 1 in the kitchen and 1 in the bedroom). I used Black and Decker How-To books that I got at the public library to figure out how to wire the boxes together. I have a surprise for ya - it was ridiculously easy, folks!! Really. We bought 14 gauge Romex for the job...this is the stuff you find in your house...it looks like a fat white wire from the outside but it's actually a bundle of 3 wires all wrapped in a white casing. I already had a wire stripping tool from a garage sale. So there's three wires in there - one exposed copper wire (ground) and 2 other wires - white (neutral) and black (hot). We bought some outlets at Bring Recycling. Some outlets have little screws on them but we just got the kind where you push the exposed wire into a little hole and a spring inside the box holds it in place. Worked great. If ya get confused there's even little markings on the back of the outlet box that says where to put each wire. Figuring out how to wire together a couple boxes to share one circuit was beyond me but there were pictures of a whole mess of different configurations in my handy Black N Decker book so I didn't even have to think about it too hard. Sweet.

So all these wires are coming out of our 120v Circuit Breaker Box - at first we got the Mains Lug kind (no beefy off switch to kill the power coming into the box) but then we decided to go for a Mains Breaker Box for safety. Unfortunately, we could only find a ridiculously big one at Jerry's that's rated for 100 amps...way more than we'll ever use but whatever. Then we got 2 circuit breakers for it - one for each circuit, smarty! ;) They snap into place on the box.

The DC side of things is a little more tricky for us because we haven't been able to find as much information on how to wire it all up. We bought a 12v Fusebox and we have a bunch of 14ga AWG and all the nice little DC lights we could ever want for the bus (and the water pump and the composting toilet fan) but we're not 100% on how it all goes together. We have some guesses but nothing official. Our friend Spencer who wired his bus together successfully is on vacation right now so when he comes back we are going to pounce on him and make him tell us everything he knows about DC wiring.

In the meanwhile we got to work on our Battery Box!!!!

((A note to RVers and buspeople of the Eugene/Springfeild area - avoid KC RV Supply like the plague!! I was told they have the best prices but I could not believe how rude, hostile and condescending they were in there...and folks, just about every time we go to buy anything for this project we hear "do you have a permit for that, little girl?" about 2 or 3 times in 2 or 3 different ways so you come to expect a bit of bullshit but KC RV Supply really took the cake for disrespect...as a result, I took my business to The RV Store in Springfield instead and they were much more helpful/respectful. It's a bit further to go but I didn't notice any price difference between the two places AND The RV Store had a heck of a lot more stock. ))

Ok back to the Battery Box. So I bought 4 6v Interstate Deep Cycle batteries at The RV Store. It set me back about $380. Of course on the way home one of them ^%$ing tipped and spilled acid in my trunk. (First thing written on the top of the batteries? DO NOT TIP) We're hoping that it's still good. We built a nice underbay vented box for them with hold-downs and a locking front out of plywood, angle iron and steel stock. We haven't bought our inverter yet but we hope there's going to be room for it on the side of the box. I was excited that we finally got to use the bed frame I got out of the Goodwill dumpster down in Santa Rosa! We were able to scavenge the plywood for the box, too. Our next post will go into more detail about how we made the battery box, so stay tuned!

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UPDATE: For additional safety, we switched out all the push-in type outlets and switches with the screw-on type. These are better suited to withstand the vibrations of the bus.

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New Pics

2007-09-11T09:59:00.001-07:00

Step 00: Level the bus. This took a couple tries to get the right number of odd pieces of 2x4 under each tire. The tiny-ness of the pieces is bad for the tires because it puts too much pressue on too small a part of the tire....but we're replacing all the tires anyway so it's all good for our purposes...please don't do this to your good tires, though! In the future we're going to make a little elongated 2x4 pyramid and roll up on that instead.

This is what she looks like when you walk in right now.

Detail showing how we did the side walls. We used all 2x4s because our insulation is THICK. Two long metal screws secure the longer piece to the wall along the rivet line~ make sure you don't hit the rivets...gotta go in between them. Then two wood screws to hold the little piece of 2x4 onto the bigger one. Then a long 2x4 over the top and a long one along the floor.

Some closeups on how we did the walls. We looked all around the internet and no one had closeups or very detailed explainations of how they did theirs....I imagine there's a couple different ways. Wood-to-metal screws didn't work in this situation (not enough bite in the thread of the screw?) so we used metal screws. Pre-drilling was key. I think we're going to put an extra 2x2 along the inside of the outer-most studs to give them a little extra support. We don't really know how "real" walls are made so we kinda made these ones up....they do work, though!

The box over the wheel well that will support our range/oven and our fridge. Bathroom to the right.

The super overbuilt beefy box over the other wheel well that will support our woodstove. It's bolted into the floor and the top of the wheel well. I think we're going to put cement board over it and the surrounding walls and then bolt the woodstove to it.

I can barely read this....drats. I'll put another copy on here soon. This is the wiring diagram Spencer helped us draw/figure out. More on this to come.

Mess 'o wires near the dash.

Bi-fold door for our bathroom! $10 at Bring Recycling with all the hardware for it, too!

Scavenged this door from a remodel a few streets down. Free! This is going to be our front door.

Water pump. It's smaller than I imagined it would be! Came with a wiring diagram and all sorts of useful info.

Our barrels. I LOVE the red....not that it will show or anything....just saying...RED! Note the molasses all over it.

Another Bring Recycling find....talked them down to $10...think it was originally for a bathroom but I like it for our kitchen just the same. We're going to build the top up a bit so that we can fit our scavenged pull-out cutting board and double-basin sink on it...we're going to do a nice tiling job for the counter.

My new treadle!!!!!!!!!!!! She's a Singer Red-Eye born in 1931. I love her. I replaced her belt and she runs LIKE NEW....no BS plastic parts either....perfect as a back-up machine in case we get left with no power. Our friend's mom didn't want this baby anymore so she generously passed it onto me in exchange for some baked goods. WOW! I'm so thankful for this machine....can't stop looking at her most of the time....

Much Progress

2007-09-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

This post has been a long time coming...sorry to leave everybody hanging! We have our subfloor screwed down now. Feels good to walk on something solid. Before we put it down we actually decided to paint low-VOC Safecoat metal primer over the whole rusted mess....this is a partial solution that felt right to us. Our friend Anna was a sweet heart and helped us do the whole floor. Our walls along the sides are all framed in now and so are the walls to the bathroom and one wall to the shower. They look awesome! We couldn't put the final shower wall in without blocking off access for actually getting the shower into it's spot so we're waiting until we have that aspect of the plumbing job more finalized and planned out. =)

We went to AM Solar here in Eugene the other day to chat it up about our plans for solar panels. Looks like we'll be buying our assorted solar panels accessories like wiring, battery bank, controller box, combiner box, inverter, etc later on this week (Friday) and waiting to get the panels until AM Solar's panels go on sale at the end of this month. We're planning on doing all the house wiring later on this week too. We've planned where we want all our outlets and switches and our breaker box and all. Right now it's just sharpie marks on the walls but pretty soon it'll be actual electrical stuff. More on the details of that later. Luckily, our friend Spencer did all the wiring for his bus and he's happy to help us out in exchange for canned goods and babysitting. We sat down with him a few days ago and clarified a lot of our electrical grey areas with helpful diagrams he drew on the bus' subfloor.

In the purchases category ~ we bought 2 used 55 gallon food-grade drums that used to be filled with mollasses for our freshwater tanks/veggie tanks. They still need to be cleaned out but at 6$ a pop we thought it was worth it. We also bought a standard shurflo pump on eBay for $65 including shipping. We also bought a ton of 2x2s for framing in the walls ~ unfortunately, we couldn't find too many reclaimed/recycled ones so we had to go with new ones. We did find a bunch of recycled 2x4s, though, and that's what we used for framing in along the sides of our bus. Looks like today we might hit some junkyards around River Road and look for stuff like side-mount propane tanks (spencer told us that forklifts have them), 12-volt lights and those shore-power placket thingies that come on VW buses and other stuff like that. AND a bench seat! We want a bench seat ASAP. =)

Joists are down!

2007-08-01T19:36:00.001-07:00

Yay! It's so exciting to see visible progress on the bus - esp. after all that tedious prep work! We put our joists down with fatty self-tapping wood-to-metal screws. Those suckers went in real nice - we didn't have to pre-drill or anything. We did, however, break our drill towards the end. We brought it back to Jerry's and they gave us a new one. =)

Our skyboard got delivered, too - and they gave us a pallet to boot! I think we'll be able to use the pallet as a support under our raised bed. Awesome.

Bought a $20 pair of heavy-duty nippers to cut the staples off the recycled tounge and groove floorboards. I nipped while J and Lara washed and dried them.

Fresh delivery - dig the free pallet...

Julia resting after putting in the last of the joists!!

Skyblend subfloor coming today!

2007-07-31T09:28:00.000-07:00

Our subfloor is getting delivered today! Before we go and meet the guy, I wanted to post about this stuff...it's 1/2" particle board that doesn't have formaldahyde in it. It's made from 100% recycled wood...pre-consumer but still better than nothing...and it's made here in Oregon! Neato!

You can check out our all the nifty stats about our new Skyblend subfloor here. I don't mean to advertise but I'm so excited to have found this stuff after being told by so many hardware store folks that it didn't exist.

Lara got rid of her twins for the week ~ she's celebrating her newfound freedom by coming over today to help us take the staples out of our recycled tounge and groove floorboards. :)

We're hoping that we can put down the joists and subfloor today and maybe even get some of the T & G down....I guess we need to rent a floorboard nailer thingy? More research needed - I'm going to look that up now.

Exciting!

pictures!

2007-07-29T19:30:00.002-07:00

A sea of tiny holes all caulked over....

Here's that "little loop" I was talking about....note that there is no heater box in sight.

Here's that grinding attachment thingie before and after grinding...

Here's the awesome low-toxic, non-smelly, non-lightheaded caulking we got!! I heart this company....

A mountain of cotton denim insulation! These bags are heavy and awkward to move but very comfortable to lean against. We got 4 but I only see 3 in this picture for some reason...

OK, enough about the bus - Here's some totally off-topic pictures from the ever distracting and inspiring Oregon Country Fair!!!!!!

Me and J at our campsite in the 8!

Me loving my hyper-real fakedreads...

Main stage!!!

Me learning to juggle clubs in Chela Mela! Awesome!

I studied this guy's set up in energy park long and hard - its a foot powered skillsaw that really does work ~ and FAST! Now if I could only have a dual-use foot-powered saw/sewing machine....

J working at the fruit booth in Community Village!

~~~~~~~~~~

Stay tuned for more updates - we'll start putting joists in on Tuesday!!

floor floor floor

2007-07-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody,

Long time no post! J and I have been working on the bus in starts and fits but honestly, with festival season here and custom orders heating up at the Patchwork Underground, we have been stretched a little thin!!

After much much debate, we decided to go ahead with our plan to plug all the holes with bolts and nuts and screws of various sizes. We're done! We plugged all 220+ of them. Next, we sanded all the rust around them with a drill attachment ~ we went through FOUR attachments - expensive! We started caulking the windows and we're about to start caulking around the bolts just to make 'em extra water tight. Julia's dad also came down and cut us nice joists for the floor out of pressure treated 2x6s.

Finally, a floor seems to be in our near-future!!!

When our mechanic friend David came down, he helped us make a nice little loop out of the heater. We drained the tubes of coolant and then disconnected the heater box that lived near the rear of the bus. Then we made a short loop with some of the left over rubbing tubing so the coolant just flows through a short loop rather than an extra long one - this made the bus seems so much more spacious. We'd had a giant octopus-like mess of rubber tubing and heater box all draped over the front cockpit until then.

We've also been busy cleaning the interior of the bus so that we can paint the ceiling. It is so dirty! Cleaning above your head seems ok until you clean a whole bus ceiling...then your arms tell you that its not ok.

In other news, we scored a nice step-up fiberglass shower enclosure that some guy ripped out of an RV and put on craigslist for $20. Woo hoo! Once we get the floor down, it'll just be a matter of throwing all these parts and pieces together, boltin em down and hooking them up. We still plan on moving into the bus in about a month....we gave notice at our apartment so we'd better get crackin. Of course, we don't expect to be "all done" by then but it would be nice to have our bed area framed in and our basic water set-up happening.

Wish us luck!!

~i'll post pics of all this activity tomorrow~

Enviornmental road block...

2007-06-23T06:51:00.000-07:00

Hey all

We've hit a little road block: how to deal with the holes in the floor in the least toxic way possible.

Jerry's - our local giant hardware store - had lots of suggestions...glue flashing down over them with liquid nails, coat the whole floor in tar or some other roof sealant, fill in the holes with some kind of putty. Upon further investigation, we found that all of these ideas involved applying toxic crap to our home so we kept looking...

Turns out that Eugene doesn't have a green building supply store. The closest one is in Portland - 2 hours away. We went there yesterday and discovered that they have a lot of the stuff we want.....and that only a fraction of it will fit in the Honda. F*&$!

While we were there we were only able to get some no-VOC paint for the ceiling (a nice sandy mellow color) and some low-toxic caulking for the holes. After talking to the people there, we decided not to coat the metal floor with anything. Yes, there's a ton of toxic concoctions on the market that claim to deal with your rust for you. David visited us a few days ago and suggested that we just get the rust all the way off the old fashioned way: by sanding the crap the out of it. He clued us into the fact that there are neato attachments for our drill that would do this for us - imagine that! Lol....this is turning out to be an awesome learning experience...goodbye hand-held bristle brush. Before his visit, we spent an afternoon sanding the floor by hand and our progress was pitiful.

Long story short -we're going back to the green building supply store on Tuesday. This time we're renting a U-Haul. (Of course we would take the bus but it's not registered or insured yet and it can't be until it has been converted into a motor home.)

That way we'll be able to get the 4 bundles of this R-13 Bonded Logic insulation that we really want. It's made out of recycled denim and has none of the toxic stuff that other insulations do. You can even touch it with bare hands and install it without a respirator. It's old blue jeans! As a fiber-loving person this was a no-brainer for me. :)

We'll also probably be picking up 6 sheets of low-toxic plywood for the subfloor...unless we find another solution. For a while we toyed with the idea of foregoing a subfloor for our T & G and just putting the joists (no, they're not called studs when they're on the floor!) closer together - like maybe a foot apart instead of the usual 16". Then we got to thinking and we decided that if we were going to be bolting stuff like the our gorgeous 350-pound woodstove down that we'd better be biting into more than just some 3/4" T & G. This is still up for debate.

Anyway, these last few days have been frusterating but very educational. Once you start learning about how nasty modern building is its hard to stop thinking about it. I realise every other place we've ever lived in - or shopped in...or worked in - was built using lots of toxic stuff. We've found that most people are very sensitive to this fact and that they do NOT want to be reminded of it. Rightfully so - its freaky and people feel that its out of their control (often it is...). And yeah, toxic stuff is a bit cheaper than non-toxic stuff but since we're building our housebus from scratch and we've been lucky enough to have saved up a bit of cash for this project we feel good about trying to do it right the first time. There's something really vital about green building stuff...no, it won't "save the world" by itself or anything like that but it sure is more fun and reassuring to work with stuff that you can feel solid about.

Finally - pictures!

2007-06-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

A stack of bus seats - bubble gum and ketschup packets everywhere.

Bus before floor demolition....

and after...

Here's the gear we used for ripping up the floor...screwdrivers, mallets, crowbar....elbow grease and goggles highly recommended....

Our technique: wedge screwdriver under plywood w/ mallet. This prys it up just enough to bang the bent side of the crowbar under there. Now rip that thing as hard as you can. Repeat all along sides of each piece of plywood....

Twinky broken crowbar vs. new burly crowbar.

Stay tuned for floor sanding and priming....

Floor Part 1

2007-06-11T16:38:00.000-07:00

We're back from vacation!

It was hard to leave the bus for 2 weeks but it was really refreshing to get out of Eugene and see our very dear friends and family.

Even though we've only been back for a few days, we've already made a lot of progress. We scored a Honda Civic-full of recycled red oak tounge and groove flooring from Bring Recycling for $70. We spent an afternoon sorting the flooring into three piles: perfect boards, fixable boards and totally hopeless boards. We think we might have enough perfect and fixable boards to cover the whole floor! Of course, since it is a used floor there are big long staples sticking out of it that I think we'll have to cut off. Tounge and groove flooring is delicate and I worry that trying to bang out the staples will destroy the joins.

Today we finished ripping out the rotting plywood that was nailed and screwed into the metal floor of our bus. It was really hard! In the middle of the day I had to bike down to the hardware store because I actually BROKE a crowbar trying to get this stuff up from the floor. Yikes. We prevailed in the end, though. We also took up the rest of the heater encasement and we finally ripped the pole-dancing poles out from the front of the bus, too.

Next: sanding the rusty floor down and plugging up all the holes with some kind of putty stuff. Pictures of all this and more to follow. :)

Floorplan!

2007-06-02T12:30:00.001-07:00

This is the current incarnation of our floor plan - we expect it to change as we get a better feel for the space. If you click on the image, you can get a full-sized view.

Rippin' Out the Seats and other delights....

2007-05-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

We got the bus right before we went our vacation to California - so that's where we are right now.

In the few days that we've had it, we've managed to rip out all the seats and un-bolt the heater system from the left-hand side of the bus. We found a pretty awesome tool chest in the bus under one of the seats. It has a lot of the right-sized tools for the various screws and bolts in our bus. Nice! Of course, we also have a garage-ful of Julia's dad's tools at our disposal, which is real handy. He's more of a carpenter than a mechanic, though, so we'll have to pick up some extra things for our conversion.

In other news, we developed a woman-approved system for removing rusty bolts and screws without the use of toxic crap like "liquid screwdriver." You take your appropriately sized screwdriver and attach a vice-grip to the handle. Then you have one woman balance all her wieght on the screwdriver while the other one yanks real hard on the vice-grip. Most all of them gave under this system. The ones that didn't got smacked with our mallet until they fell into line. ;)

We bought a corded electric drill for this purpose too. It's not a champ at loosening the real stuck ones but it is good for run-of-the-mill unscrewing. It'll come in handy for drilling holes for the various pipes that we'll need to run to the outside of the bus, too. We almost bought a Sawzall but we're holding out until we make it to the used tool place outside of Eugene. They run about 60-80 new...of course you *can* pay more....but we'd like to pick up a quality used one if at all possible.

The heater is an interesting doohickey to play with because it runs off of the engine coolant - it's just basically a big loop of hose that runs the engine coolant down the left hand side of the bus and uses a fan to blow it out at the far end of the loop. We haven't capped the system yet but we got it and the housing for it up from the floor so it's free-floating and able to just perch on the driver's seat while we work on the floor. Since the veggie oil conversion is going to probably use the same lines (since it uses the coolant to heat stuff, too) we're leaving it until that aspect of the project begins to take a more concrete shape.

We've ripped up part of the vinyl floor, too. There's funky plywood under there - screwed down with disintegrating screws. I think we'll just take a crowbar to it and see if we can't rip them up in one go....that's for when we return!

Also- scored some angle iron out of a dumpster behind the goodwill here in Santa Rosa! Woohoo...only got a small scolding as we were driving away with it.... :)

J's boss also happens to be a reclaimed wood-dealer who resells dismantled school bleachers so he's looking into our wood floor while we're away. Hopefully he'll have it for us when we get back...he thinks he can hook it up for $1 a square foot plus $50 to plane it. It's either going to be ceder or southern yellow pine. Nice!

Pics of the gutted interior to follow when we return from our Californian vacation.

-E and J

It Begins!

2007-05-12T17:38:00.000-07:00

After a year of planning and saving, Julia and I finally bought our bus yesterday! A pretty sweet 3rd anniversay present. :) She's a looker....

Found her on craigslist. It's a 1988 International Harvester with a transplant Cat 3208 Diesel engine and Allison (automatic) transmission. Perfect length for our purposes - 32 feet bumper to bumper and it has an extra-tall ceiling. Paid $1750 for it. Our bus is at Southern Oregon Diesel right now in Roseburg getting a basic service before getting picked up by our seller and delivered to our house in Eugene this Wednesday! WOW! Still in a little bit of shock.

We went down to Southern Oregon Diesel yesterday nervous out of our minds about our pending purchase. We scheduled a 30 minute inspection before we committed to buying it but we ended up spending 3+ hours with the guys there listening to country music, learning how to drive the thing, getting oriented under the hood and rolling around the underside checking out the air brakes and everything. They were over-the-top helpful, very generous with their time and only a little condescending... ;)

I spent today hacking the bushes and trees back from J's mom's driveway so that we can actually park the bus in the spot where we're going to work on converting it. She is 8 feet wide after all. In order to fit the bus up there, we're also going to have to move the mailbox. Of course, moving the mailbox from it's spot has proven harder than we originally thought - more digging and jiggling scheduled for later this evening.

Once we get it up there, first thing's first : removing the seats and cleaning our baby out! She has a minor wasp/spider problem that needs to get taken care of for sure. Still not convinced that we'll need a bolt cutter to get the seats out but we'll see. After that, we're going to tape out our floorplan and see how it feels.....

Since J and I have been planning our conversion for a while now, we've had time to gather up a lot of the parts and pieces for our future house. We have a really pretty apartment-sized, blue Intrepid woodstove, a mid-sized 2-way RV fridge, a propane RV stove/oven, an RV kitchen sink, an RV bathroom sink, wooden toilet seat for our composting toilet, two wooden corner shelves and a kitchen cabinet. Everything except the fridge we were able to score FOR FREE (thank-you universe!) so the total cost of the conversion so far has been $20...for our used RV fridge.

Before we start making it too cozy, we need to install the main systems - photovoltaics, internal electrical wiring, plumbing (fresh and grey water) and propane. We haven't gathered any parts for any of this so far. I have priced many of the components and we expect the main costs of our conversion to be in the installation of these systems so it'll feel good to get them over with first! Since BioDiesel is available in Eugene right now, we're thinking of holding off on the veggie conversion until we reconnect with some of our Vegadvocates back in California. (I'm thinking that putting the veg in after the fact of the conversion should be OK as long as we plan for veggie oil tank placement and fuel line placement ahead of time....)

Woosh! Lots to do, lots to learn and a whole summer of hard work ahead of us. It feels great to finally get the ball rolling......

More updates to come!