How to Build a Bus! Episode 12
Living in a bus; as if it was not odd enough already, it has become considerably more so in recent months.
Interpretation
My family has been without a home for quite some time now. To clarify, our home for the past 20 years has been various motor coaches, the most recent of which was a 45-foot-long MCI bus. In December 2015, that bus got into a minor wreck and subsequently was totaled not long after by our insurance company. The bus we currently own we have been building for the past seven or eight months from literally the ground up.
Imagine you are moving into an unfurnished apartment, however, by unfurnished I mean empty. You walk through an opening that should be a doorway, but has no door, or frankly any walls on the sides where a door should be connected. Really, you just walk and are suddenly in an open space. Your apartment is essentially a steel frame with rotted wooden planks on the floor so you don't fall through to the apartment below. There's no electricity whatsoever, which means no power, which means no light, which means no air-conditioning. There is no plumbing, there is no smooth surface, nothing comfortable or convenient in sight. You now have somewhat of an idea of what this bus looked like when we first got it. For those of you who have been along for the ride for the past episodes of the series, you've seen the bus being built, the progress we've made thus far, what it used to look like and what it looks like now. Well, this series is winding down as the bus comes to a completion. Enjoy it while you can.
This the bunk room, the major difference between now and the last pictures you saw is that the trim around the edges of wall and the facing for the beds are mounted, stained, and varnish. Actually, not in that order exactly; we stained and varnished these before they were mounted.
These are the open-faced cabinets where the majority of the children's personal items are kept. These are necessary for storage because there is only so much space on your bunks to store things. These bunks are 6-feet-long and at least two of us are taller than that, three others are very close to that; so, really there is no space at the head or foot of the bunk to store things. Which wouldn't be so much of a problem if there was any room on the back wall to store things. However, the bed is only so wide, so if you store things against the back wall there is a strong possibility you will fall off the bunk. (Trust me, it's happened before.)
Well, if you paid attention in the first picture you would've seen this random electrical wire hanging down form the side of the bunks. This is the switch for the lights in the front bathroom. It's just hanging down currently.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with how power works, the green cord has two wires inside it, a ground and a hot wire. The hot is the power current. This switch is tethered into the wires running to the light. When the switch is flipped the two wires connect allow the signal of power to pass through and onto the light.
The two drawers out front final were completed. The top drawer is for silverware and other cooking utensils, the bottom drawer is for the garbage can. The facing for these were taken out of the bus, stained and varnished, then mounted. However, all of the frames for these drawers and the cabinets beside them, being already mounted had to be stained and varnished while in the bus: that was an adventure.
This is something new that we did not have in our previous bus. For the most part the layout is similar, but little things like this were innovations for the new one. There is only so much space to go around you know. This is an office area. A small desk and a cabinet space above so that my sister and mother can do the office and ministry work there.
Next to the work area is this gorgeous piece of work. Mostly we're down to aesthetics and flooring, which happens sometime after aesthetics. But I think it's coming along nicely and there isn't much left to be done. This journey is almost over, now it's time for another adventure. Are you with me?