Well it has been forever since I posted. Partly because I have been bad about sitting down and writing it and partly because I have been bad about actually doing any work on the bus. I’ll quickly go through what has happened since my last post, and then skip to yesterday.

I finally finished removing all the bolts holding the seats on the floor sometime in April. Then I removed the padding from the seats which was easy on some and downright irritating on others. Then I hauled most of the padding down to the dumpster. My parents visited me soon after and helped me to load all the metal framing from the seats into their truck to take to a metal recycling place. I got $12.00 for 300 pounds of metal. Can’t complain since I just wanted to be rid of it. So as it is now I have a few pieces of random padding left in the bus and lots of loose screws. I was lazy as I removed seats and threw screws on the floor if they were blunt on the end. I have come to regret that for a couple of reasons. My mum always said to clean as you go and she was right; I wish I had thrown the screws away as I removed them.

I moved from an apartment to a house in the first couple weeks of June and kept putting off moving the bus to the house because the drive way isn’t large enough, but the landlord said we could put it in the backyard. The catch is that there was not a big enough gate to pull the bus through, but luckily the house is on a corner lot so we got permission to remove a fence panel to get the bus into the yard. It sounded easy enough. It wasn’t. We ended up finally deciding to do it a whole month after we moved in. We started at 4 pm, in July, in Texas. It wasn’t ideal, but with the holiday coming and my insurance on the bus about to expire, we were running out of time and had to get it done. The whole process took over four hours, and it was a beating.

The highlights of the day that are sticking in my mind are all the times I managed to hurt myself. I went a good two and a half hours before my first injury happened, but then they piled on after that. I had to use a saw for one part and it took a while. When I finished I had one of those dumb moments that you look back on and really wonder, why the hell did I do such a thing? I touched the blade and it was SCREAMING HOT. So I had a burn on my first finger and thumb of my dominant hand and a lot more work to be done. Then it was time to go pick up the bus from a friend’s house on the next street over and I offered to let the friend drive it a bit. We were about half way through a very jerky ride down her driveway when I realized she still had the parking brake on. I tried to yell at her to stop, but she couldn’t hear me over the engine (note to self: insulate around engine). I began crawling toward the front of the bus and the same moment that she gave it some gas and I was thrown forward, landing with my knee on one of those bolts that I neglected to clean up as I went. Cut on knee was injury number two. After I pulled the bus from the street into the yard (with many instances of stalling along the way), we headed off to Lowe’s to get some new fence boards to replace the ones I busted. As I was choosing my fence boards, I managed to drop two on my toe which hurt enough for me to tear up. By then I was really feeling done, but we still had to put the fence panel back. Luckily that was nowhere near as difficult as taking it down.

I will definitely not be moving the bus again either until we move out of this house, or we have a gate installed professionally (the landlord won’t let us put in a gate ourselves). Hopefully I get a good job soon so we can go with the gate option, which also happens to be the option that doesn’t involve me removing the fence panel. Now that I am staring at the bus every day when I go outside, I hope I will feel more motivated to really get some serious work done on it. Floor is next!