Adventure of the Blue, Green, Orange and Yellow School Bus

That yellow school bus is no longer yellow inside!  We painted it a nice blue, green and orange.  Jim Bob was worried that it would be too busy but I think it looks fantastic!  What do you think?  I think the sky blue really opens up the space.  (Jim Bob is laughing at me right now.)  The task was simple but daunting.  The ceiling took 2 coats, the green sides took 2 coats and the orange around the bottom took 3 coats.  We still have some cutting in to do but nothing crazy.  It sure feels good to have that done.  It took us about 4 days to finish.  We used XO-Rust oil-based enamel (the True Value equivalent of Rustoleum) and, of course, drying time was insane.   All is done and now it is time for a floor.  Check out the finished product:

We had to make some metal plates to cover interior lights and speaker holes. 

Interior before paint.  You can see in this picture that there were several of those metal covers.  We primed the galvanized metal to help the paint to stick.

Inside of the bus before paint.

The tedious job of cutting in.  Nice job Jim Bob!

We had an afternoon visitor in the bus today.  Pretty little butterfly wanted to help us paint.

Here it is!  Interior of the bus painted (except a few spots I have to touch up and cut in.)

Jim Bob sweeping the floor.  We are getting it ready for some flooring!

Where's the driver?

While I was scrubbing away twenty years of dirt, Jim Bob undertook the not-so-fun job of removing the driver's seat. We waited to take this out because we had to remove the air line and some electrical wires that were connected to the seat which would be, well, just a pain in the rear. But, once again, JB crawled under the bus and removed the nuts from the bolts that were holding the seat in place. Inside, he disconnected wires and taped them off and then man-handled that seat right out of the bus! Once the seat was out, it really opened that space up! We gained 4 more square feet (every bit helps!). The seat is now living on some plywood outside the bus. We are keeping it because we will have to put it back in when we drive the bus to another location. Although, it would be fun just to pull up the lazy boy to the steering wheel and cruise around in comfort. So why take it out you ask? Well, we removed it because: 1. Installing the floor will be so much easier and 2. We want that extra space when the bus is parked. So when we take it back out we don't want a dirty black square on the floor. We will just drill holes in the new floor to put the seat back in.  Next is paint!

Ripping the seat out.

Where does the driver sit?

The seats temporary new home.

Scrub-a-dub-dub!

That dirty old bus is officially clean as a whistle. Jim Bob and I (and Lena Marie) scrubbed every single square inch of that yellow monster. Good old Dawn dish soap and green scrubbies were the aids in this incredible feat (and the occasional chisel to help with the removal of 20 year old bubble gum)! It was a long nasty day of scrubbing but the end result was glorious. It has that "just vacuumed and mopped" feeling...you know the one that you get right after the house is cleaned and nobody has walked across that spotless floor? What a great feeling! Boy, was that yellow bus dirty. The water was nasty and our scrubbers were beat up.

Lena Marie was helping me (moral support) clean out the bus.

She is clean!

Nasty Floor is History

That nasty black floor that haunts every school bus is no longer in ours! Thankfully the floor came out willingly and without the use of rented tools and additional man power. All it took was your ordinary shovel and some elbow grease. It seems that this particular school bus did not have a plywood sub-floor that some other school buses sport. It had that rubber black floor stuck right to the metal flooring with some sort of glue. Over the years, the water made its way between the black flooring and the metal dissolving the glue and wa-la! off pops the nasty floor! I guess there are some benefits to buying an OLD school bus. What is underneath that nasty mess? Well, now we are looking at a rusty, old metal floor waiting for a good cleaning, insulation and a sub-floor. Along with taking the floor out, we had to remove the auxillary heater and the heater lines that contained the antifreeze. Sounds pretty straight forward but by watching Jim Bob take this stuff out - not so simple. The heater plus the heater lines contained about 4 gallons of anti-freeze! We are disposing it at a mechanic' s shop in here town - they said they would take it. It was kind of difficult finding a place that would take that toxic stuff too. So now we have the floor, the heater and 45 ft. worth of heater lines out of our future home. Moving on.

Seats-be-gone!

Yesterday we did the nasty job of pulling all the seats out of the bus. I think this is the worst part of the whole process. (This is actually our second school bus to renovate.) The first time we pulled the seats out of a bus, one of us was under the bus holding onto the bolt with a wrench and the other was inside the bus unscrewing the bolt from the floor. Major pain and super time consuming. This time we have moved up in the world (just a little bit) and used an air wrench. I say "we" when actually I didn't do any of the work. Our friend, Hunter, came over (thank you Hunter!) and was kind of enough to unscrew all the bolts from the floor using the air wrench while Jim Bob was under the bus (along with a whole bunch of chicken poo I'm told) holding the nut so the bolts would come out of the floor. Last time, it took us days to get the job done. This time around, we had all the seats out that evening. It was soooo much smoother! What do you do with 26 bus seats, you ask? Hopefully, we can sell them to the school district here in town. If not, we will put them on the Tradin' Post or the Brewster Free Cycle. We would like to sell them for $10 a piece and maybe buy an appliance with the money. Once all the seats were out of the bus, we were left looking at a lot of trash. The usual: candy wrappers, plastic toys, and lollipop sticks. But this time Jim Bob found a little stash of hash on the floor! I thought it was pretty darn funny that some kid was hiding his pot on the school bus!