I decided to put off doing the laundry until later in the week. Linda made a grocery shopping list while we had our morning coffee. I called Pat Davidson at Apex Roofing to discuss the installation of a roof access hatch. We did some online research for pest control companies in the Brighton-Hartland-Howell area and decided to call Best Pest Control LLC. I talked to the owner, Ryan, about his perimeter defense package, and decided to give his company a try. They will spray outside the house for ants, spiders, hornets, wasps, and yellow jackets. I called Phil Jarrell from Precision Grading and left him a voice message regarding some additional driveway work, a French drain for the west end if the property, and a hole for a ham radio tower foundation.
I showed Linda the pullout pantry slide hardware I found last night on the Rockler website, a German made top-bottom pair specifically designed for this application and able to support up to 450 pounds. It’s pricey, but it looks like the right stuff for the job. We also found some assembled pullout pantries online, including some that were 5″ wide, but they were not deep enough and getting just the right height looked tricky. We really want to maximize the use of our available cubic inches.
Keith showed up around 10 AM with his new Scag riding lawn mower. He is still going to have the Hustler repaired as a backup, but the Scag is a nicer/better machine. It is fuel injected, which should be more reliable, and it is faster, which makes more efficient use of Keith’s time. It also has a seat that can be adjusted from soft to firm, making for a more comfortable operator experience over the course of a long day.
As much as I need to work at my computer and drafting table I need to work even more in the bus right now. I started by reassembling the inside of the cabinet above the refrigerator, except for the liner carpet, and reinstalled the fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling. I am keeping the carpet pieces for now, but mostly to use as templates for new material. I would have preferred white Formica interior surfaces, as they are brighter and easier to keep clean, but the bus has a lot of curves and carpet is a very conformable and forgiving material.
The interior of the bus deconstructed in preparation for a new floor, seating, and custom desk.
My next task was cleaning out and securing the area under the bed platform. I removed the half box covers, the flexible ducts, and the floor-mounted cleats. I threw the ducts away and stored the other pieces in the garage. I then reattached the strip light on the top edge of the forward side of the base, reinstalled the two circular HVAC registers (so the cats could not try to get under the bed through the holes), put the cover plates back on the two duplex AC outlets and reinstalled the outlet expanders which also have dual USB charging ports. I need to put some sort of temporary netting over the port holes in the section of the HVAC chase under the bed, but I need to find a suitable material for that. The long term plan is to seal those holes and install registers in the sections of chase outside the bed base. I thought about disconnecting the lift struts for the bed platform so I could raise it higher and reinstall a drawer onto its glides, but decided to leave that for another day.
While I was working in the bus Ryan from Best Pest Control called me back and said he had a crew that could fit us in within the hour so I said “sure.” I closed up the house as they would be spraying around all of the windows, doors, and doorwalls. Two guys showed up a little while later and I walked them through the job, wrote a check, signed the work order, and they got busy. They found two hornet nests by the east end of our deck and destroyed them. I hate to kill even a hornet but they have been buzzing around our windows and doors, poking at voids in the mortar on the face brick, and occasionally getting into the house and we need to put a stop to their use of our residence as a place to build their homes.
The pest control guys were already gone and Keith was driving away as Linda returned from the supermarket. I helped get the groceries into the kitchen. After they were put away we had a light lunch around 1 PM of fresh baby carrots, mini bell peppers, sourdough pretzel nibblers, hummus, and red grapes.
The dinette seat used to fit in this corner The strip mirrors have been removed from the outside wall next to the window.
I have been taking a lot of short breaks while working on the bus. It was warm and humid again today and warmer still in the coach even with windows open and the roof vent fans exhausting air. But the breaks are not just to rest, they are also to ponder the details of how the interior will get rebuilt and what additional deconstruction still needs to take place.
In the front of the coach there was a 120 VAC electrical cable coming out of an access hole in the passenger side HVAC chase, passing through a 4″ flexible duct adapter, and disappearing through a hole in the floor. I originally thought the cable came from the duplex outlet on the wall just above the access hole but I discovered that it did not. It was routed through the chase from somewhere farther back in the bus. I determined that that the hole in the floor appeared to go into the OTR HVAC bay and sure enough, when I opened the bay there was the cable coming through the ceiling. It turned towards the center of the bus and then went through the wall into the bay to the front. It was then easy to determine that it was the power feed for the electric heater mounted on the rear wall of the front bay.
The storage area under the end platform with the 4″ flexible ducts and cover boxes removed.
At that point I knew which circuit breaker to turn off and was able to cut the cable in the living room without risking an electrical shock. I slipped the 4″ duct adapter off and set it aside. We don’t generally use the electric heater in the front bay, and certainly do not need it this time of year, so I wire-nutted the ends of the hot and neutral wires, coiled them up, and stowed them in the HVAC chase for the time being. I coiled the end of the wire coming out of the floor around one of the Aqua-Hot coolant hoses so it would not drop into the bay below.
The area of the bus that was the outside rear corner of the dinette kept drawing my attention. That corner was decorated with vertical strip mirrors with beveled edges. There are also strip mirrors used as wainscoting on the lower portion of the outside wall of the hallway and at the end of the hallway opposite the bathroom door. The strip mirrors are the one thing in this bus we have never liked but they did not bother us enough to not buy the coach. Now that we are involved in a major interior remodeling, however, we are looking for ways to remove them or cover them up. We really do not like them.
In the case of the former dinette mirrors, I had previously determined that the ones against the wall of the coach were mounted (glued) onto a sheet of plywood that appeared to be mounted to a pair of cleats along the two vertical edges. I tried prying under the bottom of the first strip but it cracked and chipped. It quickly became apparent that removing these strip mirrors from whatever they are glued to was probably not a viable option.
The beveled strip mirrors in the hallway of our bus. We really do not like these things.
[p4 R] After removing a 1-1/4″ wide piece of thin trim wood I was able to loosen the left (forward) edge at the bottom. The walnut trim around the fixed window just forward of the mirrors, however, prevented me from pulling it out any farther. I had a reasonably good idea how the window trim was attached but first I had to remove another piece of 1-1/4″ thin trim that covered the gap between the window trim I needed to remove and the trim for the next window forward. With Linda’s help I removed eight screws and the 3-sided window trim came right off. We set it carefully aside and returned to the mirrors.
With the window trim removed we were able to pull the left (forward) edge of the plywood mirror backing out enough to see behind it. Our lucky “break” (no pun intended but, whoops, there it is) was that the screws holding the plywood to the left cleat pulled out of the cleat. I say lucky because the screw heads were under the glass mirror strips and none of the mirror strips broke. We kept working it out until the upper edge bumped into the return air grill trim on the underside of the upper cabinet. We removed the grill and set it aside. We were then finally able to pull the left edge out far enough that I could remove a couple of screws that were holding the right cleat to the panel that forms one of the back walks of the pantry. Something was still holding it and when I changed position I saw that there was another screw near the top. I removed that screw and the whole panel came out with the right cleat still attached. Three more screws and the left cleat was also out. We reattached the return air grill to the underside of the upper cabinet and then reattached the window trim.
The wallpaper behind this panel was in very good shape except for the screw holes where the cleats were attached. We plan to put shelves in this corner to utilize the space and they may get used for some ham radio equipment. Regardless of what ends up there having the mirrors out gives us more room for the shelves and will just plain look better.
A view from the kitchen of the dinette corner and hallway. A custom desk will go where the dinette seating used to be and double as work surface for the kitchen.
The mirrors on the other wall of this corner are glued directly to the walnut panel that forms one of the backs of the pantry. I tried loosening the bottom edge of the one in the corner and it cracked. That area will be concealed by the desk, but we will cover all of the mirror strips with some sort of thin panel. We have the same problem with the mirror strips across from the bathroom door and may just have to live with those as I have not come up with an attractive way to cover them. I need to investigate the strip mirrors in the hallway. There is a good chance that they are glued to plywood panels that are screwed to the wall at locations covered buy wood trim. If we are lucky removing the trim will allow us to unscrew and remove the mirror panels. If not, we will just put the trim back on.
I have had the idea for a while that we could make another low pantry or shallow storage area along the hallway wall above the HVAC chase where the strip mirrors are currently located. Linda does not like the idea as she is concerned it will make the hallway to narrow. The storage would not be any deeper than the HVAC chase is now, and would not be any higher than the wood trim along the top of the strip mirrors, which serve as a kind of wainscoting.
By this point it was 5:30 PM. Linda headed inside to fix dinner while I got trash and materials out of the coach and carried them to the garage. Linda let me know that a severe thunderstorm watch had been issued effective until 10 PM. It rained lightly off and on until we sat down to eat and then the downpour came but we did not have anything severe, just heavy rain for a while. She made a dish using garbanzo beans, garlic, kale, salt, pepper, and fresh lemon juice. It was delicious and the fresh lemon juice really made it sparkle. She also served the last of the risotto she made for dinner when Steve and Karen were here on Saturday. We had strawberries with Lotus brand Biscoff cookies for dessert. I worked on this post on my iPad, took a shower, and went to bed. I never did make it to my office today.
