So my skoolie project has been stalled out big time for a while now. I haven’t done anything major for about six months, shame on me. Time to kick my own ass into high gear and get this show on the road.

The next step is going to be to rip up all the rubber flooring in the bus. From what I have read and just from logic, I think that nasty rubber is the source of the “bus smell”. You know what I’m talking about if you have ever been on a bus. I was going to try to describe it, but it has to comparison. If you don’t know what it smells like you need to go jump on the next bus you see and give it a good whiff. Don’t call me to bail you out of jail. I’m broke.

Well that’s it for now. I really just wrote this little blurb to motivate myself into action. Here is a picture of the current state of the bus.

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!

 

Wow. The seats are a pain in the ass to get out of the bus. Ask any skoolie fanatic.
I bought my bus two months ago. I have removed all of the seats with the help of my family and fiancé. I think for my mum, sister and my sister’s two eldest sons it was a particularly great experience when we spent hours working on the bus. Mum hung out and did whatever I asked her to. My awesome sister got all gross on her hands and knees in the bus to remove bolts (and bled in the bus making her a part of the bus forever). My nephews got damp and gross and cold laying under the bus undoing nuts (and giving me some unforgettable times). And my fiancé has been there to make sure I don’t make a big uh-oh (more later). Basically my family was the greatest and helped to make a humongous dent in removing the old seats from the bus.
As it stands now, I have spent the last few times in the bus taking out the seats that could not be loosened by hand sort of on my own. I had to use at first a lot of elbow grease, and more recently, an angle grinder. If you have never used an angle grinder you cannot get how crazy scary it is. I have used several power tools in my life, but none as absolutely terrifying as an angle grinder. It cuts through metal and in the course of that, it throws tons of sparks.

I had a scare a while ago that really drove home for me that I was actually doing some serious work with power tools. I was alone in the bus, angle grinding a bolt. I paused to let the angle grinder cool and sat looking toward the rear of the bus, relaxing. As I took a deep breath, I smelled something strange. I looked toward the front of the bus and there was a lot of smoke. Like an amount of smoke that would scare anyone. I don’t think that I am generally very good under pressure, but this time I was.
The 37 year old insulation on the inside of the engine firewall was smoking after being lit by a spark. I was lucky to still be wearing my leather work gloves. To my own surprise I acted without thinking and immediately pulled out the part of insulation that was smoking and stood on it to put it out (it sort of stuck to my shoes).
After that, I decided I would not use the angle grinder again without another person present to look for sparks that caught. So since then I have not done much because my decision unfortunately coincided with my better half getting a new job. I am grateful for her job because the financial relief has been such a boon for her, but damn it is in the way of my bus project.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am seriously afraid of bugs in general. I give off a tough vibe, but I am only tough with people, not insects. The worst ones are roaches, with spiders as a close second, and basically anything that is not a ladybug right after that. The thing I think most people don’t know is that I have never been stung by any wasp/bee/hornet, etc. As such, I am extremely afraid of those kinds of insects. With luck as it is, the apartment complex I live in is close to the woods and red hornets are plentiful here. Basically I am nervous all spring and summer.

This morning (3/28/15) the weather was beautiful and I went out to my bus intending to get a bunch of work done. But as you can probably tell by the beginning of this post, I had a little nature to contend with. And Halloween came in March. Hornets. HORNETS.

(this is a Google photo)

Damn hornets.

If I may be so indulgent as to repeat myself:

Damn hornets.

So then off we went to Lowes to get some hornet killing spray. We came home and Caroline in her infinite bravery and selflessness killed the hornets inside the bus for me because I am the biggest sissy in the world. By the time we got all the hornets killed I was in such a state that I called off any further work on the bus for the day. I wish I had more balls, but alas, I do not. So the bus saga is to be continued.

The subject of this post is not necessarily a unique one in theory, and may even be something you are familiar with if you are a very unlucky individual.

Have you ever done something that resulted in some nasty boogers? You probably have and you are willing to admit it, or you do not admit it and you are a dirty liar.

I happen to have some intimate experience with this subject. I have been studying soil for the last two years and in the course of that study I have been well acquainted with what I dub “soil boogers”. Soil boogers are a product of many hours spent working with very dry soil that puffs up in clouds and invades the nostrils. But recently I have discovered a new species of booger that just plows down the soil boogers in the category of absolute nastiness.

BUS BOOGERS. (Should I copywrite the phrase?)

Close your eyes now and conjure up those deeply buried memories that I know you have of the smell of the bus you rode to school as a kid. Let’s not pretend that smelled like roses. Now imagine that instead of just riding it to school, you are tearing everything out of it. In the process of tearing it out, you are wading through years of filth. Keep that in your mind. But really, I know you didn’t close your eyes earlier you damn cheater, imagine this shit. As it turns out, when you buy an elderly bus, it brings a lot of years of grime with it.

But really, what is that????

In the process of clearing out the bus you stir up that grime and you get bus dust. All. Over. Yourself. All that junk manages to find its way up into your nostrils and, BAM! You now have yourself some seriously funky boogers. They are black and contain  some seriously suspect stuff. Say seriously suspect stuff five times fast. No really, try.

I wish I could go back in time and take down some proper statistics on peoples’ reaction when I told them I bought a bus. But lacking that, I feel pretty confident throwing out a number off the top of my head. I would guesstimate that the initial response of about 75% of the people I told was, “That’s so cool! But…where will you park it?”

Wow, did they manage to hit the nail right on the head. This question plagued me and really was the main reason I dawdled for three weeks after first seeing my bus before I finally bought it. In the world of school bus renovation, few are those undertaking this task without owning a driveway or yard to park the bus in. School bus renovations take anywhere from a couple months for the ambitious to several years for the tinkerers. Either end of the spectrum is a pretty big chunk of time and as such many people drive their bus home in a less than legal state of affairs and park it until the renovation is complete. I live in an apartment and no one I know near me has a good place to put a bus, plus I am on a budget. So the option left to me was to park the bus on the road. In order to park a vehicle on a public road it has to be current on registration and inspection and be operable. Plus I wanted to use the bus to haul lumber and such so it needed to be street legal. I had heard horror stories online written by other skoolie owners about how difficult it was to get their bus legal so I wanted to make sure I had the process figured out before buying the bus.

Here is the part where you want to skip to the end if you aren’t interested in the process of making a bus legal to drive before it is converted to a motorhome.

Here’s how it is in Texas as far as I know. First of all, the best thing to do would have been to stop being antisocial trying to figure all this out online and just call the county tax assessor in the first place to see how to go about titling and licensing the bus. It doesn’t hurt to check on the law for what type of vehicle your bus qualifies as in your state just to make sure the person you deal with at the tax office isn’t grossly misinformed. This could happen since not many people drive a former school bus as a personal vehicle or motorhome. Texas required me to bring the old title, bill of sale (this may be optional?), title application, my ID, and insurance. I was really nervous waiting in line because I was sure there would be a problem. Nope. Handed my info over, answered a couple questions, and walked out a couple minutes later with regular passenger vehicle plates, a new registration sticker, and this weird sort of rush because it felt like I just got away with something. Apparently if a bus is not actually used as a school bus then, BAM, magic happens and it is just “bus”.

Insurance turned out to be the sticky part of this whole situation and the part that made me want to give up a little. There are only a couple of insurance companies such as Good Sam that will insure a school bus after it has been converted to a motorhome and I sort of already knew that after stumbling upon forum posts about that. The sticky part is they will not insure the bus before the conversion is complete. There is a whole story to that upon request. So I turned to regular insurance agencies. After lots of looking I found that Progressive would cover me, but not as a private vehicle. I had to insure the bus as a commercial vehicle for private use only. Basically they get to charge me more because commercial vehicles are required to have more coverage. It goes back to the story that requires requesting.

The best parts for me (though not for people with larger busses) were the inspection and driver’s license. The mechanic I took the bus to for repairs offered to do the inspection. The driver’s license was a nonissue because my bus is under 26,000 pounds so no special license required and it has hydraulic brakes (like a regular car) so no air brake endorsement. Easy breezy.

Now I am glad that my lack of parking options forced me to get the bus legal so I can do fun things like drive it to friends’ houses and to school. Plus the peace of mind that comes with being ready to drive it at any time is worth a lot to me.

What is a short bus you may ask? Short busses should be allowed to post their relationship status to Facebook because “it’s complicated”.

When someone says “short bus”, they are normally talking about a group of school busses that are shorter than the standard full size school bus. The term “short bus” may refer to a couple types of busses depending on who is saying it.

There is the Type A school bus which is basically a bus build on the chassis of a van but that also has a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) of less than 10,000 lbs. These busses are easily recognized by the van-like front end and the lower ground clearance of the vehicle.

Above: Type A School Bus

Another bus type that may be colloquially called a short bus is the Type B school bus. These busses have a GVWR of greater than 10,000 lbs and are designed to carry more than 10 passengers. This bus is either a longer version of a Type A bus or one that would be more recognizable as a school bus. They generally have the higher ground clearance, longer nose, and continuously boxy feel of a full size bus. If they are not the extended Type A bus look, they look as though someone took a full size bus and chopped off the end of the passenger compartment.

Above: Type B School Bus

Since this blog is ultimately geared toward me eventually buying a bus I will be clear that I am looking for a Type B bus that is not built on a van chassis, but rather one that looks like a conventional school bus  because I want the traditional school bus look, without the length of a full size school bus.

And now the hunt for a bus begins!