The Bus Capades: Week 2
Boy am I excited to begin this new series, documenting a new chapter in my life. I bought a bus! After years and years of waiting for the perfect bus and saving all my pennies, I have reached that step. In these first few weeks of being an official school bus owner, I feel as though I have made so much progress and simultaneously not enough. I could have the bus completed and living in it by tomorrow, and it still wouldn't be quick enough. But hey, the best things take time– at least that’s what everyone tells me.
When I wasn’t caught up telling everyone I know (And even people I don’t know) that I bought a bus, I was actually getting all the nitty gritty things done. The very first thing I did after getting the title transferred to my name, was call my insurance company to get that figured out. By this point, I had already let my agent know what I was doing, and picked his brain about cost, what kind of insurance I’d need, what it would cover. Since this is a bit of new terrain for most insurance companies, I was expecting some push back. For those of you who are also looking into Skoolie life, you might have heard the horror stories of people having to lie to their insurance companies to get it insured, only to pay an arm and a leg for their policy. That was not the case for me. The first place I called was State Farm, and they are the ones I ultimately went with in the end. While I was converting my bus, I had to get what is called ‘Commercial Vehicle for Private Use’ insurance, since it technically isn’t a motorhome yet. While it is a little pricier than what I was expecting, it’s still doable (it will go down once it becomes a motorhome).
Once I got the boring legal stuff out of the way, the exciting bits of the build came next– the demolition. The previous owner had already taken out the seats, so we could jump right into ripping the floor to shreds. We wanted to take out the rubber flooring to get an idea of the rust situation underneath, and because I didn’t want to build on top of an uneven floor. Using a drill, I took out all of the screws in the floor– probably close to fifty of them. I was one of the unlucky ones whose floor didn’t come up all in one piece. I had to use a mini crowbar and scrape the rubber away bit by bit. After almost 4 hours of releasing my frustrations on the floor, I was just about done. The only section left was the middle runway which was proving to be a worthy challenger. Because my hands were left all bruised and scratched, I made the decision to hold off on that part for another day.
All in all, I’d say I had a pretty good time with it. It had been a while since I really worked on a physically demanding task, and it was refreshing to have the chance to release all that energy. I was definitely drained by the end of it. It was pretty exciting to see that the bottom of the bus was pretty rust free, and only had a few holes from stubborn screws. Up next, I will seal up the holes and throw down some Rustoleum to get it looking good as new again, but that’s for another day.
