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.

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!