Night and Day

Much has been done in the past few days, but little time has been available to update this log. The house is shown at LEAST once a day, which means we have to run around in a mad scramble for ten minutes a day to get the place staged properly, then disappear into the bus until everyone leaves. Of course we get busy out there, which means we often end up working until twilight, then we slog back inside, fix some food, and flop down in front of the telly (or read) for an hour or so before bed. There's some other stuff going on that gets in the way of progress on the blog, too, but you really don't need to know about that.

The bus interior is fully and completely painted...well, except for the dashboard, and as that's both clean and the treatment is still undecided, I'm not terribly concerned.


The lights and speakers are all back in place, which means the interior no longer looks like a plane that hit a particularly bad air pocket, AND there are no longer frequent expletives issuing forth from inside the bus when one of us whacks our head on the danglers. All in all, it looks really good. Next week we lay flooring!

The outside of the bus has a full coat of primer and Hy-Tech additive. The ceramic additive may be a wonder product in terms of its insulating properties, but it is a BEAR to paint, for it thickens the paint and dries almost on contact with the brush/roller.

I have discovered a few things that make the process a little easier.

First of all, add a little water to your paint. I add about a cup of water per gallon, sometimes more. You don't want the paint drippy, but thin enough to easily paint is essential to a smooth coat. The additive tends to clump, so make sure your brush is well loaded when you stroke, or you can create nasty lumps and thin spots. Same wisdom for multiple strokes over semi-dry areas...only do it if you want a thinner spot you'll have to recoat with fresh paint.

Second, keep a container of water handy, and dip your brush into it just before every fourth or fifth time you reach for paint. Don't swish it around, don't soak the brush, just dip and get out. Basically, you're trying to moisten the brush so it will load easier and brush smoother. Peter doesn't agree with this technique, but he constantly battles the clumping problem, and I don't.

Third, know that paint with this additive dries pretty much as quickly as you lay it down, at least in the conditions with which we were saddled while painting - 90 degrees and humid. A cooler clime may change the behaviour of this stuff for all I know.

And finally, be prepared for how much top coat paint this stuff soaks up. I want Towanda to have a shiny finish, and I planned two coats of high gloss paint atop two coats of primer with additive to accomplish that. EEENNNNKKK! Thank you for PLAYing. NOT! I used both brush and roller inside the bus to get very good coverage on the ceiling, and in spite of that, the finish is semi-gloss at BEST. Turns out I'm happy with that finish INside, but I still want SHINY outside, so I'm examining my options. The plan at this point is to lay on the two coats of high gloss paint, then cover THAT with a final coat of high gloss water-based (because all the paint underneath is latex) polyurethane. Think of it as "Clear Coat."

So we've ALmost gotten a full first coat of primer on the outside of the bus. The roof has two full coats, and the sides and snouth have one coat, but the doors are yet to be done, and then it all gets done again. You can see from the masking job where we are leaving the black of the original paint job, and the band between them will be embelished with a pattern of some kind, TBD. The biggest problem I'm having with the design is in how to deal with the odd segues between various areas of the bus. From the sides around the back, for example, or the sides across the lift and front accordiant doors, or from the sides to the hood and around the front. But I AM an artist, and thus all WILL be figured out and lovely when I'm finished.

The best news in all this is because the bus is mostly green and white now (looks like a Church Bus, doesn't it?), it's no longer the neighborhood eyesore. Woo hoo!

Oh, more news! Because Peter was having some trouble visualising my interior cabinet design, he requested I build a working model out of foamcore. So of COURSE I went straight to the FoamCore Goddess, Pen. My intent was to get her help in building one, but incredibly generous soul that she is (you would not BELIEVE how generous and dear this woman is), she took on the project herself and presented us with a scale model of the bus. Now all I have to do is build little cabinets in it so Peter can use the model to build my dream.

We decided to open the access port from the cabin to the gas tank, just in one more effort to understand the workings of Towanda, AND as part of planning for the installation of flooring. Had to take the cover off the hydralics of the lift in order to access the final screw on the port, so I got to see how all THAT works, too! Pretty cool. An added benefit? More areas get to be DEcrusted from their years of dirt.


Yesterday was a loss due to health problems and Peter's utter lack of interest in dealing with another day of heat and sunburn and painstaking painting with clumping material, but we did manage to get the two headbangers (my term) installed. Today I MAY have time to caulk the floor in preparation for laying substrate next week, but as I have to focus on getting ready for a major garage sale, caulking takes lowest priority.