Hey, gang! Another happy Housebus Update today. So far this week I’ve mostly been taking care of small things out in the housebus, starting with adding some horizontal 2×2 runner ‘studs’ to the metal sidewalls, and on into picking up a decent collection of free plywood!

So yeah, earlier this week I went out with my pullsaw and a bunch of self-tapping wood-to-metal screws and mounted most of the rest of my 2×2 pieces to the walls. I put one at the baseboard level as a sort of ‘bottom plate’, and another at the window sill level, about 3/4″ below the edge of the removable window frames. This leaves me space to put a nice finish piece on top that’ll be visible in some spots as a shallow window-sill.

I’d started off also putting a 2×2 runner along the Chair-rail near the bottom of the wall, but eventually realized this isn’t going to be especially necessary, except in locations where I’ll need a piece of wood to mount an electric junction box, for an outlet or switch. And I have plenty of 2×2 cutoffs to use for those, so I decided to hold onto the other long pieces for the footer and window sills.

The last runner I’ll need to do on the walls is the Header, going along the top of the windows. I had planned to use 2x2s for this as well, but realizing that this piece is probably going to be tied into the whole attic construction process, I decided that it would probably make sense to use 2x4s for this instead. So, that will wait until I get some good reclaimed 2×4, maybe later this weekend.

Because I’ve moved all my building material to the back of the bus, I wasn’t able to really get at the walls past the wheel well, so I let that be my stopping point. Then I went in and filled the bottom gap between the bottom plate and the chair rail with cutoffs of the foam panels I used in the subfloor. I still have stacks of these things left, I kind of want to use them wherever I can. But also, it’s not great insulation. It helps knowing that the gap behind these panels in the walls will be filled with better insulation later on.

Today, my primary goal was sweeping and vacuuming up from the last work session, and after that to plug in the super Radial Arm Saw I picked up for free like eight months ago (?), and see if it actually worked. To my amazement, it totally does! It’s a bit rusty and hard to adjust, but I sprayed all the movable bits with WD-40 and worked them back and forth for a while, so I hope it’ll ease up a bit. I had no idea when I got this saw just HOW versatile it is. I’ve found a couple videos on how to use one basically as a table saw, among other things, and I gotta say I am actually really excited to start using it for pretty much everything in the build.

After that I completed one critical step that’s an integral part of any skoolie build – TAPING OUT THE FLOORPLAN. Yep, got out a couple rolls of masking tape and my computer model, and measured out all the main appliances and furniture in the front 2/3 of the bus – everything from the wheel wells forward. Check out these pictures, with all the stuff labeled:

The big white door that sitting there is going to be the dividing wall behind the driver’s seat, after I strip the paint off and repaint it.

And, the last exciting thing today was I found a great local source for free plywood scraps! I responded to an ad on Craigslist for some free plywood from a ridiculously solid shipping crate, and it turns out they get crates like this every couple months or so! They agreed to let me know when they get more, it saves them the trouble of having to dispose of it. Most of the pieces are fairly small, but it’s almost all 3/4″ cabinet-grade plywood, so I’m looking forward to breaking it all apart and seeing what I can do with it. I’m thinking the big piece there will become the beginnings of my kitchen cabinets.