We awoke to a decidedly different air mass than we have been experiencing the last week or so; cool with noticeably lower humidity. Linda turned off the air-conditioning and we opened up the house for the first time in a week. We had a light breakfast of grapefruit and cinnamon raisin toast and then spent an hour enjoying our coffee. I finished the little treatise on cryptology yesterday at Panera and started reading Oystein Ore’s “Invitation to Number Theory.”
Linda needed to make a quick grocery run for miso so I worked for a while on the sofa design, laying out the pieces that will be cut from a 48″ x 96″ sheet of 3/4″ plywood. When she returned from her errand she went for her daily walk while it was still cool. After her walk she made a cold black bean salad and then made roll up sandwiches using multigrain pita bread. It was delicious and healthy; the bread alone had nine grams of protein. After lunch Linda attended to some nutritional calculations related to the dinner she planned to fix and I gathered up the tools I thought we would need to take care of some things in the bus. That included some small zip lock bags for small parts.
My first task was to remove the screws that secure the shorter head end of the bed platform to the foundation. The platform is in two pieces joined by a piano (continuous) hinge. After doing this I lifted the other end and was reminded that I had already disconnected the two gas springs that normally hold it open. I also realized that the wires which supply 12VDC power to the two compartment lights on the underside of the platform were routed under a fixed cross member and cable-clamped to the other piece of the platform. I already knew, or assumed, that they were hard-wired and had spade lug crimp connectors ready to go.
\With Linda’s help I was able to detach the wire loom at several points to create some slack. The +12VDC wire was connected to a microswitch with a spade lug so it was easy to unplug. I clipped the neutral wire, stripped both free ends, and attached an insulated male spade connector to one and an insulated female spade connector to the other. With that the entire platform could now be removed from the bus to get it out of the way while we install the new floor tiles.
In the kitchen area of the bus we unscrewed and removed the walnut trim around the fixed window on the passenger side. I reinstalled all of the screws so we would not misplace them while Linda took the trim to the garage to store it. I removed the screws that held each of the three reading lights to underside of the upper cabinet in front of the fixed window. They were wired with very clever little insulated terminal strips which made them easy to disconnect and will make them equally easy to reconnect. Linda bagged each fixture and its parts separately in one gallon zip lock bags.
The AC light fixture was trickier to remove. First I turned off the circuit breaker on the inverter sub-panel and verified that the light no longer came on. By lifting the false bottom of the cabinet I could see that the fixture was installed onto a ceiling junction box. That meant there was probably a post threaded into a cross bracket with the post protruding down through the center/mounting hole in the fixture and held in place by the decorative nut.
I was not able to turn the decorative nut by hand so I got the faucet wrench. I have had this unique and specialized tool for a very long time. It is designed to reach up behind a sink and grab the retaining nut on the underside of a faucet 12 inches away. The head is spring loaded and flips over to allow the wrench to be used to tighten or loosen the nut. Occasionally, like today, it finds an alternate use. I like it when that happens.
\With the fixture loose I was able to color code the neutral wires with white tape, untwist the wire nuts, and then put the wire nuts back on the two supply wires. Linda took the fixture to the garage and figured out way to store it safely using an unused waste basket. We talked about the built-in sofa and some HVAC details for the passenger side of the cockpit before wrapping up our bus work for today.
While I put the tools away Linda started working on dinner. Tonight’s special creation was vegan Pad Thai. Regular Pad Thai was a favorite of ours for many years even after we switched to a vegetarian diet as we were still eating eggs. The dish has a lot of ingredients, so it is a lot of work, and a good vegan version is a real challenge, but Linda executed the dish quite well. We finished up the watermelon for dessert, which was sweet but light and refreshing.
I try to write every day while the sequence and details of the day’s events are still clear and my thoughts and feelings about them are somewhat “in the moment.” But I don’t usually finish a post and upload it the same day. I often finish it the next morning which means I have a chance to sleep on in it. We have been so busy with the bus remodeling project that I have barely had time to write the drafts of my posts and I have not had the time to transfer them, edit them, select photos and post-process them, and upload everything to the blog. I don’t like getting so far behind, but there are only so many hours in a day and I do need at least seven hours sleep a night.
After dinner I e-mailed Josh to see when we might get the extra fabric we ordered to make seat and back cushions for the sofa I am designing for the bus. I then settled in to read about number theory before drifting off to sleep.