Yoga...help me now

Another weekend, another two days of cramming myself into small quarters armed with a chisel, a hammer, and a crowbar.

And my face within 3 feet of a sewer opening at all times.

Wee fun.

So I crossed most things off my list that I had scheduled for the weekend. Things west smoothly...a little toooooooo smoothly. I've grown somewhat accustomed to major roadblocks getting in our way as we embark on our projects. A day with nothing but what I expect and am fully prepared for is somewhat confusing if not downright concerning.

Could it be that we're learning and getting better at this?

Eh. Not likely.

So anyway!

I chiseled the teak floor up. That was tedious and easily comparable to the amount of fun derived from cleaning the grout in your shower with a q-tip. But hey. It's done now and I'll never have to do it again.

And now I can say I've removed a teak floor.

Cuz that's totally one of those skills my resume was lacking.

For those of you who are visually stimulated:

Sunday I spent the day cutting and fitting 1/8" plywood sheeting to go down as the subfloor. I know, I know, there's already a subfloor. But it's sticky and not level and not appropriate for applying tiles to.

Once the new subfloor went down I caulked it and primed it in preparations for the new tiles.

Notice how I didn't prime the wall? Yea, cuz I'm smart like that. I thought I'd prime the floor first so it would be wet and make it impossible to prime the wall.

Guess I'll add that to my to-do list for Saturday morning.

While I was busy getting intimate with the poop-hole in the bathroom, Trevor spent the weekend outside pulling out the old in-house vac system so he could get at the blackwater tank.

And it fell in the dumpster. How sad for it.

Suppose we'll replace that with a much smaller and uber-cooler wet/dry shop vac.

The intent was innocent enough. We needed to get to the blackwater tank so we could inspect why the tank gauge is reading the tank as perpetually full. By the time Trevor got to the gauge at the top of the tank it broke off in his hands from all the years of corrosion.

Guess we know why it's not working.

And while I'm in the middle of trying not to drop important tools down the toilet shoot, Trevor comes to me with this hairbrained idea that we should pull the blackwater tank out (fun!) and give it a good cleaning (more fun!) and then we can re-pipe the sewer lines and deal with some leaks we suspect exist.

I can't tell you how excited I am with this plan.

The anticipation with which I am racked with at this very moment cannot be summarized. I exude delight with this idea.

And the best part? By re-doing the sewer lines I will be able to pull off the toilet flange (previously referred to as the "toilet shoot") that is in the bathroom floor and replace it with a less-urine-soaked one.

In fact, I believe the ones they give you at the store are urine-free. I'll have to check on that.

Oh oh oh - but that's not the best part...the best part is that, well, did you look at that pic? Go back and look...see how there are lines in the new subflooring? The ones filled with caulk? Yea, those are cuts.

Cuts I made to get the flooring around the toilet hole.

Cuts that were a PAIN IN THE ASS to make because you are doing them with a utility knife because there's really no good way to cut 1/8" plywood other than with a fricken' box cutter.

It took me, like, 3 hours to painstakingly measure, cut, and lay that little piddly floor (no pun intended).

And now I'll be able to just remove the flange.

The very item that required that I spend 3 hours measuring, cutting and caulking for.

Wah wah wah.

Ok, I'm done griping.

So I guess the plan for this weekend is to lay down the tile in the bathroom...and get intimate with a big black metal box that has contained my family's shit and piss for many many years.

I'll be sure to post lots of pics for that.

drip, drip, drip, pour

A couple of weeks ago when we took the coach home for the weekend to start on the interior improvements I noticed a small spot on the concrete under the front of the bus. I checked all the fluids and everything looked normal. I figured it was most likely either power steering fluid or maybe a little water possibly a small leak from the hot water that circulates up to the from of the bus for the heater. There wasn’t much so I added it to my list of things to watch and investigate when I had the time and desire. Well last weekend the coach decided I was to work on it’s terms not mine. While parked in front of our house I noticed a much larger puddle and when I started the engine it was a steady pour. I took a 2X4 and reached it under the coach to sample the fluid and sure enough it was bleeding ATF (it was the power steering). We could not work on the coach in front of the house (already received a notice from the HOA for having the bus in front of the house over 24 hours) so I had to get it back to storage and work on it there. I topped off the fluid and headed back to the storage. By the first turn the power steering was completely inoperable. We made it back to the storage lot and I was exhausted, not an easy vehicle to steer without power steering.

The next step was to figure out a way to assess the damage and fix the beast. We created a ramp to drive up on out of stacked 2X8’s.














Once I got underneath I investigated where the fluid was coming from. I was worried the master cylinder had blown and would need to be rebuilt. That piece alone was nearly the size of a normal car axle. Best case would just be a hose or fitting. Turned out it was a hose that blew. I was relived; it was a challenge to remove, but could have been much worse.
















































Now where to go to get a replacement power steering return line for a 1960 GMC PD4104 bus? I took it back to San Jose and would try my sources there. It’s not like you can go to the local corner Kragen Auto Parts and get the part off the shelf. First I went Specialty Truck Parts in San Jose, they usually have everything for large trucks and engines. They took one look at my hose and said, “we don’t have anything like that, you will need to have it custom made” Specialty sent me to a custom hose fabricator in San Jose called Royal Brass Inc. I went to Royal and gave them my hose. Fifteen minutes later they came out with the new hose made to order. I couldn’t believe it! And it cost only $40.00, now I know where to go if I ever need a custom made hydraulic hose in the future.



























Next weekend I will install the new hose and bleed the system. To see all the photos click here

They're back and they're wielding crowbars...

Not to neglect my other blog or anything but...that's what I'm totally doing.

Providing much of an intro on our current project would be vast and wide, long, boring at times, and rather bothersome to follow. So I'm not going to. I'm just going to dive right in and if there are questions - by all means, tip-tap-type a little comment in the box below.

I will, however, provide all of you with this little vital bit of info: we inherited an old converted GMC bus over a year ago. And now we are getting around to renovating it.

Meet The Coach:













Looks innocent enough doesn't she?

Yea, not so much.

She's a bit of a pandora's box with the mildew and old wiring and saggy headliner and broken appliances and leaky gaskets and and and...

But that's exactly what we bargained for. We knew what we were accepting and now begins the fun part of fixing her up and challenging ourselves.

So last weekend...

We circled back to the bathroom since the bedroom was providing a couple roadblocks and rather then throwing pissing tantrums every ten minutes I decided that new scenery would be a good idea.

This is the new scenery I'm talking about:















Again, looks innocent...not so much.

Don't let the outdated appearance persuade you. What we did to the bathroom this weekend was mostly out of necessity.

There was water damage, and leaky toilet gaskets, a malfunctioning toilet...

And look at the YELLOW people?!

YELLOW.

I care not to elaborate much further because if you just can't understand why we did this, then, either you're biased by nostalgia (cough mom cough cough) or you have scary old school taste and I don't care what you think anyway.

And here we go...Sunday afternoon, 3 hours, one jigsaw and two crowbars later...
























Sorry Mom.

The more we dug into it the more we realized we could rebuild it so much better.

Bigger! Stronger! We have the technology!

That and the jigsaw was just lying there not going to any particularly good use at the moment.

So, as you can see, we have some work ahead of us.

And this is just the bathroom...you should see the state the bedroom is in right now.

Ahem.

For those of you interested in further detail...

You can experience the whole exciting process by looking at our photo documentary here:

We tore out the mustard yellow toilet because it had "issues".

We pulled out the sink faucet because it, too, was having "issues".

The sink has been preserved considering you can't go wrong with stainless steal. Seriously, it was, like, the ONLY thing in there that wasn't yellow other than the walls. Those are just Poo-brown. Sigh. So, I'll be polishing the sink up and putting it back.

The entire vanity had a nasty run-in with the jigsaw and is now sitting in two pieces in our garage. At first I thought we might keep it.

Ahem. It's yellow.

People? We went over this. That and there was extensive water damage on the counter top and as I have no desires to learn how to re-laminate a surface, seeing as how I have no desire to learn how to laminate in the first place...

Out it came.

Here's what we are planning - so you can snicker when we don't follow through and end up doing something totally different:

- build new bathroom vanity, probably out of Oak or Birch veneer stock wood, and stain it a light shade.
- replace counter top with new! fancy! corian! yea!
- re-use original sink basin, put in new pretty shiny nice faucets.
- don't cry I'm pulling out the teak flooring and putting in these new fancy vinyl tiles that look like REAL ceramic tiles. Seriously - the teak floor is urine soaked from roughly 20 years of pissing on. Wanna argue about it now?
- putting in new fancy schmancy higher profile toilet!
- possibly adding more vanity lights to help brighten up the room, it's quite a cave in there as it is.

What I'm going to do this weekend:
- pull out teak floor (preserve what I can from the area that is not quite so, ahem, close to the toilet area - to save for a rainy day. The stuff's not cheap!)
- clean clean clean
- build up sub-flooring since the vinyl tiles are significantly thinner than the teak flooring that's there now
- and if I'm super slick and fast and no more crazy shit happens that keeps me busy...lay the new floor!
- oh, and make the husband replace the cold water pipe since some previous "plumber" wrenched the crap out of the sink's pipe when putting on a new fitting. Bad bad bad.

Keep posted, I'll be blogging on this regularly.

Any if you follow my other blog you'll know that's a lie.