This whole process started on October 18th, 2003; which also happened to be my 50th birthday. My sister's husband, Larry, and I flew to Denver that day to pick up the bus and drive it home. We got home just before midnight the next day after 1500 miles of straight-through driving.
As I didn't know I was going to create a web site dedicated to this process some of my early dates are estimated; a couple of weeks after I got the bus home Shelley and I started removing the seats...all 22 of them! Shel held the bolt heads from the top (3/8" wrench) and I crawled under the bus with my air impact (small model) and spun off the nuts (7/16"). It went pretty quickly and we finished half the bus the first day; the following weekend (we only have Sundays off together) we finished up the other half and had a 'stripped' bus...yea! I got really busy at work, the weather got ugly and I got sick; so work almost came to a halt although I did get the cover plates off the coolant hoses running back on the left side of the bus for the under seat heaters, which I'm now getting ready to remove.
I did have time in the evenings to do a lot of work on the computer with a program called Delta Cad; which is the one with which I did all the drawings on this site. It allowed me to work out the floor plan and all the systems (AC wiring, DC wiring, plumbing and coolant heating). It was great to have Shelley look at the plans and then be able to change them in a few minutes on the computer to incorporate our changes. The perspective drawings came about when she 'didn't get' the floor plan and couldn't visualize where things really would be. I laid one floor plan out in the bus using easy-release masking tape and that gave us a good idea of what the real thing might be. I know I saved a lot of head scratching and much time during installation by working out all my wiring and plumbing ahead of time. Here's the wiring diagram:
The next step is to cover the rubber bus floor. Once the new plywood sub-floor is down I can start the interior work. I'll use some cardboard to make temporary walls according to the floor plan to make sure this is really what we want to live with. I'd rather go through that process then to start building 'for real' and have one of us decide it isn't "quite right".