Shopping, Caulking, and Building

SATURDAY

The weekends are when the big(gest) gains are made and this past weekend was no different. We spent all day Saturday shopping in Chattanooga. We decided to hit a couple of different salvage/discount places to see what they had to offer. We really didn't have any one particular thing in mind, but we were hoping to find some decently priced flooring at some point.

The drive to Chattanooga was beautiful. The weather was perfect, the sun was shining, there were huge fluffy clouds in the bluest sky you've ever seen.










Somewhere throughout the day, a huge thunderstorm with matching clouds moved through and the drive back wasn't quite as spectacular. Or at least not in the same way.












Our first stop was at the Chattanooga Habitat for Humanity ReStore. This is really an awesome place to find reusable items and even extremely discounted surplus items for building a home (or a converted bus). We ended up looking around and realizing that they had quite a few items of interest once we reach certain other stages in the bus development, so we will definitely be returning at a later date to check them out. We did walk away from them on Saturday with about $46 worth of stuff. We ended up with the following items:

• ~100ft of copper wire for $2.00 (Jim needs this to run his welder and said that this was a killer deal. It would have cost us well over $150 or so to buy it direct from a seller.)
  
• 2 fire extinguishers for $40.00/total (They are the heavy duty ones that normally go for about $100 a piece.)
  
• roof top bike rack for $2.00 (We hope to make this work for either my vehicle or Jim's truck. If not, it will be easy to take the metal alone and use it for the bus at some point.)
  
  

Next, we stopped at Southeastern Salvage where we made the biggest and most significant purchase of the day: bamboo flooring. I was super excited to find this and the price was really hard to beat: $1.29 per square foot. If we've been lucky enough to find any sort of bamboo flooring around here at all, it's been outrageous on the price front. So we swooped in and took advantage of this deal. I feel much better knowing the flooring is coming from a renewable resource since we are trying to be very conscious about such things in the building of Resurrection Fern.

Check it out:




We also stopped at Harbor Freight so Jim could walk around and touch everything and daydream about owning one of everything and then eventually decide that we really can't afford such a daydream so we pay for the handful of items he needed (don't ask me. I don't know.) and left.

I won't tell you about the amazing root beer float I had at Steak 'N Shake. Just thinking about it makes my mouth water. *Yum*


SUNDAY

As is the case with projects such as this, things change. After much discussion, Jim and I decided to go with our original plan of separating the toilet closet and the shower stall. Remember the previous entry? Yeah. Umm. Scratch that!

So the new plan is to use less space in our master sleeping quarters (this means that we will downsize from a king to a queen) in the back to give us a little more room to put the toilet closet on the backside of the passenger's side wheel well and the shower stall on the backside of the driver's side wheel well. This will actually give us more leg/storage space in the toilet closet and more elbow room in the shower stall. It's a win/win situation.

The main reason for making this change was Jim coming up with a killer way to install a complete composting toilet system that will work on a bus without costing a fortune. It will include a large holding tank, much like a black water tank but without all the ewwwwww! that goes with it, that will eventually be mounted underneath the bus. In order to make it work, we needed to move the toilet to the other side of the wheel well. This didn't quite jive with our previous idea so we just decided to separate the shower and toilet to make it work.

That being said, we set out to put up the initial frame for the toilet closet on Sunday since this is one of the first things we want to accomplish with the rebuild. Before we could do that, however, we really needed to take care of the four windows that are going to be involved in the toilet/shower area. The caulk around the window frames was all dried up and cracking. So we decided to clean it out and put some fresh caulk in before doing anything else.



This is what the dried up caulk looked like surrounding the entire window before we cleaned it out.


This is what it looked like with all the old caulk removed.


Jim then applied a fresh layer of caulk around all the windows.



Once that was done, we went to work on building the frame for the toilet closet. Jim didn't want to use 2x4s for the wall frame because they are so heavy and just take up unnecessary space. And instead of purchasing the smaller pieces of wood at Home Depot, we simply bought the 2x4s and cut them in half. We ended up saving quite a bit of money doing it this way. Of course, this meant that we had to drag out the saw and get noisy and dirty with it. But that's half the fun, right?


Jim is getting ready to measure and cut.


The first boards are put down and are the beginning of the first official structure inside the bus.


The toilet closet frame is taking shape right before our eyes. I can almost see it now.


By the end of the day, this is what we had.

We still have to build a platform that will fill in the space right at the back of the wheel well, but for the most part the frame for the toilet closet is done!

Next on the agenda is to get the frame for the shower stall done and add the walls. And then there is the looming task of finishing up that caulking thing for ALL the windows on the bus. That should be LOTS of fun.