Freakishly Happy

It seems entirely impossible that it has already been a month since I last posted, but as I’m looking at the last post I see that it’s only three days shy of a month. It’s incredible. Needless to say, we have been busy and time has been flying.

Since the last time I wrote, we installed walls,made it up to Bristol to pick up our floors, laid the floors and even hard-waxed them! Like I said, it’s been a busy month.

Right after we finished the floors, we began working on the walls. For this we bought more Advantech plywood-like substance, which is low in chemicals, is waterproof, and has a 50 year warranty). We decided to put an extra layer of insulation on the walls, in addendum to what we’d already done. We cut and wrapped huge 4 foot-long (or longer) sections of foam board in Red Rosin paper to keep it from squeaking. We had to do two pieces for every length of wall for both the foam and the Advantech, as there is a metal lip running down the length of the bus, about a foot of the floor. So there was one piece of foam/Advantech that would be over a food and a half for the top part, and one that was around 10 inches for the bottom part. Then as someone said, we “screwed the holy hell out of it.”

We really wanted our walls to be solid, and solid they are. After John cut the boards to size, we took a drill with a counter-sinking bit, and bored holes in the wood where it would be able to screw into the metal bars under the windows and in the center of the wood just for good measure. We used hex-headed self-tapping screws. For those of you like myself who have no idea what those are, they are screws that have a head that is about 3/8 of an inch tall and hexagonal in shape. Unlike a normal screw with a Phillips head, these are much stronger and won’t strip out as easily. The self-tapping part just means that it has a small drill on the end of each screw, so that you do not have to pre-drill the holes. Unfortunately for us, we often had to pre-drill, because the screws would begin to melt once they got through the wood to the metal. We bought a box of about 1000 screws, and I’d say we used just under half of it. I have pectoral muscles of steel from boring holes!

All of the walls are the same height, except for a piece in the middle of the bus, which is four windows long. Eventually this will be where our kitchen counters are. Even though we’re really trying to keep the space open we decided it’d be ridiculous to try and do them the same height as everywhere else, as we’d basically have to get down on our hands and knees to cook. This wasn’t an option we liked and we decided we could sacrifice four windows.

During the first week in July we took Tim’s pick-up, “Ben,” as it is larger and able to bear more weight than the truck we’d been using. Unfortunately, unlike the rental car, this meant no Bob Marley for us.

It was a rough trip up and an even rougher trip back. We went to pick up the wood late in the week, because the place that we bought the wood (Lathrop’s Exclusively Vermont Wood Products), would be closed over the weekend and the entire next week. It was threatening to rain as we left, and we encountered some heavy-ish rain along the way. As usual, when we are working under someone else’s schedule, tensions were a little high.

Even though we left in plenty of time, we made it up to Bristol only 45 minutes before they closed, and just after a huge downpour of rain. One of the workers, a great guy named Jody, helped us load the wood into the bed with a skid loader. We put a tarp over all the wood, and tacked a red plastic cup to the back (it was the only red thing in the truck that we could use as a caution) and were on our way home and our tension began to subside.

This was short lived. After pulling out on to the road, we realized that what we really needed, and had failed to bring was a tow-strap. Even though we had it tied down with ropes, every time we hit a bump the wood would bounce, and every time we went up a hill it’d slide toward the rear and the open tailgate.

We crawled back towards Middlebury, the nearest sizeable town with stomachs in our throats, on a windy, hilly and bumpy back road. Then we had to merge on to a busy intersection that was uphill and nearly lost the wood out the back. At our wits end we stopped at the nearest building, a hotel, to find whether there was a hardware store nearby where we could by supplies. Unluckily, there wasn’t. But there was a large gas station just up the road which serviced semi-trucks that would likely have what we needed. And as an added bonus, the road to it was mostly down hill.

We crept back on to the highway and backtracked, inching our way along. When we finally got there, I pulled in and began to fill the truck with gas while John went in to see what they had. He came back out within minutes, as they had nothing that we could use. We went back in to talk to the girl behind the counter, to see if there was a hardware store or auto-parts store anywhere in the next town. She looked at us rather blankly, chewing her gum, and said that there wasn’t. We tried asking her several different things, trying to convey to her our desperation, and still she looked at us blankly. John quickly gave up on her, and went out to the parking lot to see if anyone had a strap that we could buy from them. As they say, the third time’s a charm. After asking two people, John struck it lucky, and a very kind and generous man said that he had an old strap that we could have. He refused any money for it, and even helped us tie everything down. It restored our faith in humanity for the day.

It was one of those things where he was gone as quickly as he came, and we didn’t even catch his name so that we could write him a thank-you note. I went back in to the station, to ask the girl behind the counter if he was a regular, and if she maybe knew who he was. She said that he came in for coffee almost every day, if not several times per day, and I was astonished when she told me that she had no idea what his name was.

My family owns a country store, and we know probably 95% of our customers on a first name basis, especially our regulars. I felt really sad and frustrated about the corporatization and de-neighbor-fication (a new word I just made up) of our country. We left without being able to say a proper thank you, but with a resolve to help others out in the future.

We made it back home safely although slowly with out much incident. As soon as we rounded the bend at Lake St. Catherine, and headed for home the skies turned black and they opened up with full fury as soon as we pulled in the driveway. We sat in the truck for a few minutes watching the rain and then went and sat in the bus and waited for it to subside.

As soon as there was a break in the clouds, we ran back to the truck and started undoing the strap and the tarps and the metal bindings that held the wood. We began trying to stack the wood in the bus, two pieces stacked together at a time, as quickly as we could before the rain began again. Our friend and neighbor Jason was really sweet and jumped in to help us. John took the brunt of the labor of hauling over 600 pounds of wood from the truck to the bus and stacking in a neat pile. It was well after dark after we finished and we were pooped.

Unhappily, at this time we only had the walls partially finished, so in the end we had to move the wood to the other side so that we could complete our walls. We also had to finish up some of the subflooring in the very front, and in the driver’s area and along the wheel well before we could lay our floors. John again did the majority of this task.

Finally the day came last week when we were able to begin laying our floor. And just like anytime we start anything, it was the hottest day that we’d had in weeks. My dad went out to help John and Juli’s contractor, John (who is working on her house)while I took his place in the store. By the time I got done with work at six, John had almost half of the floor laid.

We borrowed a floor-nailer from our friend Josh, who is a great carpenter and cabinet maker. The nailer isn’t an air-powered one, but one that you strike with a hammer. You have to line the nailer up with the tongue of the board, keep it steady as you bend over it, and whack it soundly several times with the hammer. “Whack, Whack, Whack.” The thing that you are striking is spring loaded, and drivers further and futher down into the machine, pushing the nail in until it reaches then end when it pops back up for you to begin with the next nail (does that make any sense? Perhaps John, who did the nailing can describe it better?).

The next day we got up and started the whole thing again. I had bought some “green” floor adhesives from a place on line (www.ecoiwse.com), but instead of sending us the 4.5 gallon container they sent us a 1 gallon container. This mean that by the end of the first day, we were not even half way done and out of adhesive. (I did call and they did refund us, no worries). It had taken over a week for the stuff to get to us in the first place, and we weren’t about to wait a week to continue with our floors. We bought some conventional stuff from a hardware store and were about to set forth when I read the cautions on the bottle. It was really horrific. I really have a lot of trouble using anything that is a neurotoxin and so I was really torn about what to do. I didn’t want to stall the project, but I didn’t want to put us in danger either. I called one of our local hardware stores to see if they carried anything that would be suitable. Now, Upstate New York and rural Vermont are just beginning to ride the “green” wave, so I was pleasantly shocked that our local guys had just started carrying an eco-friendly line of products. We rushed right over, (much to my father amusement I think) and bought six tubes.
Now before nailing the floor down, we first put down an adhesive. This will keep the floor from buckling and from squeaking. This was my job. We also had to use a miter saw to cut the ends off of each board, so that they’d have a flat edge and make a snug fit. My job was to hold the ends of the long board while John or my dad cut the other end, so that the board would be flat all the way across(t). Then the board would go into the bus where John and I had chosen, we tried to lay similar boards together. Then came the difficult part, because each board had to be laid with its groove in the previous board’s tongue, and had to be pounded tightly against the previous board before it could be nailed in. This often proved tricky because either the board would be slightly warped, or the bus would be cured and once you got one side pounded in, the other side would pop out. John and my dad rigged up a great system using some large wooden posts, scrap pieces of flooring and a car jack and a person (usually me) standing on the board. It was quite a thing to see. John really did a beautiful job, and we only have a handful of gaps to speak of. The pieces against the final wall were tricky, and had to nailed in by hand and then screwed down because the nailer couldn’t fit that closely to the walls.

On Friday John cut out the pieces to go around the wheel well and the driver’s area. I really can’t remember what I did…. But I know that we worked until 8 o’clock at night. After working, we went up the road to Tinmouth, Vermont to SolarFest, an eco-minded music festival that they hold every year. It’s held a place called the Forget-Me-Not Farm. There is a huge sound stage, with a full light display, many vendors of solar systems, sustainable living things, and of course hippie clothes, which are all powered by solar! We ate some really great food provided by none other than our favorite Samosa Guy (of Farmer’s Market fame) and talked to a guy about power systems.

Many people come to the event and camp for the three days, but we had too much to do so we went home.

On Saturday, we rented a huge pad sander from Wendy at American Hardware, and set to sanding the floors. I had the honor of doing a lot of this, although John helped considerably, especially toward the end. On Saturday I sanded the whole floor down several times with 36 grit paper (a really really rough textured sand paper), to get as much unevenness out of the floor as possible. Then I did the whole thing over again with a 60 grit paper. By the time I finished it was dark, and we headed back up to Solar Fest. We walked around for a while, I bought a great Rose Quartz necklace, and we listened to some great blue-grass music which was being played away from the main stage. Then we ran into our friend Kate and Adam, who were exhausted after being there all day. We talked with them for awhile before wandering around some more. We came up over a hill, and found that there was contra-dancing going on! Contra-Dancing is sort of like square dancing, except way cooler. You stand in long lines (not like line-dancing though), and face your partner and move through a series of steps that you learn at the beginning of each step. It was so fun to watch, because the dancing was being done out doors, under colored lights and everyone was dressed like hippies, so it gave the impression of faeries out for a frolic. We joined in several of the reels, and I tell you what, I need to get into better shape! I was winded and breathless within a few iterations of the dance! Now, one would think that with my history as a ballroom dancer, that contra-dancing would be no problem, but this is not so. I have a lot of confusion when it comes to right and left, and when I don’t have a lead partner there to direct me, mayhem ensues, the hardest part was when we had to face the other two partners, clap opposite hands, and then turn to our partner and do the same… But things began to look up just before the dance ended. It was so much fun! I am really excited to do more of it in the future!

On Sunday, we finished up with the final floor sanding. We first did the whole floor with an 80 grit and then John and I finished it together using 100-grit paper. Now the floor feels like a baby’s bottom. It feels amazing on bare feet! Yesterday, under the recommendation our building guru, John Richardson (my sister’s contractor) we mixed some wood glue with sawdust and filled the holes along the walls where we had to screw the floor down. Our friend and foreman, Rich stopped by after being mysteriously absent for a few weeks. We were really glad to see him, especially because he proved knowledgeable about what we were doing.

this morning I had a few minutes of freak-out, as the wood glue dried much darker than it started, which looked really awkward against our untreated and lovely floor. This brings up an interesting point. I LOVE OUR FLOOR! Every piece is unique. Some are light with dark streaks, other have what looks like licks of fire running through them. I could wax poetic all day about it! It is magnificent…. We got out the sander and started again with 36-grit, working our way back up to 100 grit, going over each screw hole multiple times. In the end John got it looking really good (he’s the one who did most of the sanding, while I worked on the outside of the bus and made phonecalls).

After he was finished, I vacuumed the whole floor several times, but still couldn’t get it clean, so I got out a dust mop and dust mopped it before going over it twice with tack cloth. When I was finished it was like butter under my feet.

Under the recommendation of some fellow bus people, Moss and Pixie (www.enchantedgypsy.blogspot.com) we decided to use a finishing product on the floor called OSMO Hardwax. Unlike a polyurethane finish, which makes a plastic-y build-up on the floor, OSMO leaves the wood feeling natural. It’s also water-resistant, and can be used on children’s toys as it’s non-toxic. It’s also a German product, and we figure that the Germans know a thing or two about dealing with wood. : ) Late this afternoon, as the sun was getting low we did the first coat of it on our floor. I must admit, that after two weeks of looking at the natural wood, and falling in love with every board, it was a bit shocking to see it turn a different color. Even though I love the color, I think it’s going to take a while for me to get over the natural boards. The natural boards were really light in color, with almost pink and red under tones. The finished product, although beautiful is darker, with butter-scotch and cherry (wood) tones. Don’t get me wrong, I adore it, but it’s going to take a while to get used to.

In other news, we’ve order several accoutrements for our kitchen, namely the cooking stove and a refrigerator. We ordered the kitchen oven/stove from a marine place. It’s much shorter than a regular stove, but just as deep and as wide. It even has a broiler! Hooray! It’s being built in California by a small family operation. I also ordered the fridge today. It’s one that runs well with solar-electric and has amazing efficiency. It should arrive next week from Massachusetts.

A few weeks ago we also ordered a few small boxes of tile. Rich definitely called my bluff on this one, because even though we bought it locally, it did come from Brazil. But really, it was too cool to pass up. It’s similar to this http://www.intrepidrocks.com/sitetools/product.php/view/detail/id/512/prd/0 , but much much cooler when you see it in person. We will find a use for the local slate that comes from Vermont, Rich. Don’t worry! : P

Well, that’s about all for now… I just got some residual sunscreen in my eyes, so it’s time for bed. I am still working on photos, but now that the webcam is up, you at least have something to look at!

I hope all is well! For those of you in Iowa, we look forward to seeing you soon!

Love,
J,J&j