The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 412)
Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.
TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.
The Fantastica Chronicles Day 412!
Working On The Bus Project & Having A Long Productive Day
I woke up long before the sun once again and spent the early morning hours writing and also reviewing some more video footage. I tried doing both of those things at the same time for a little while but I had to keep pausing the video because I kept tending to lose my train of thought. Generally I can multi-task rather well but at five in the morning I just think that my brain is not awake enough to be doing multiple damn things at once no matter how strong my espresso is.
Anyway, once all the writing, editing and posting was finished I gathered up some tools and hiked down to the homestead proper to start getting myself setup to work on creating that room in the bus that I mentioned a few days ago. It actually took me a few trips to get all the tools together for the project, get some electricity ran to the bus and get a pair of sawhorses setup for cutting material on. The building materials got delivered super early in the day and since it was raining some of my fellow homesteaders had stored them inside the rear of the bus to keep them dry which made things a bit cramped but I still had plenty of room to work in there so it was no biggie and much preferred to having a bunch of wet material.
Personally having lived in a converted bus for an extended period of time before and having done a lot of remodeling in it... I have to say that I am not really a fan of buses or building stuff in them especially if the rear door is used as the main entrance/exit. It might seem like a trivial thing but I frigging abhor ducking every time I go through the doorway and failing to duck... racking my head on the top of the door frame! Why the folks that designed all the damn buses with such a short rear door did so still boggles my mind but it is what it is.
Since the bus is not sitting level where it is parked I knew that building a wall inside of it would be a bit tricky and I quickly determined that instead of following the out of plumb (and out of level) contours of the bus that I would just save myself the headache and build the wall plumb and level. I also decided to build the wall in such a way that if the bus is ever moved (which seems unlikely) that the newly installed wall would be able to flex without totally destroying it. Sometimes it is just better to work with things the way they are and not over complicate things to make them 'perfect' which is basically what I decided to do in that instance.
The wall building in the bus went rather smoothly and I only hit my head twice on the rear door frame while going in and out of the bus. I had initially wanted to get plywood to cover the wall with but am glad that the person whose project it is went with a cheaper paneling instead because having that flexibility in the sheets made the entire task of sheeting the wall much easier. Since it is a bus with a curved roof I had to of course duplicate the curvature in the top of the wall (and the sheeting) which was no easy feat. What I wound up doing was to first find the center of the bus, build the wall accordingly and after taking lots of measurements of the ceiling's curve and using a small piece of the paneling... I made a template that I could use to duplicate for the other three pieces of paneling that the wall required. All in all that worked out rather well and by the time that I made the last piece it was of course nearly a perfect fit.
I spent roughly six hours on the bus project but it was a good feeling getting the framing built, insulating the wall and applying expanding foam to all the gaps and cracks around the wall where it met the walls, ceiling and floor of the bus. I even had a little foam left to fill the gaps around some of the missing rear windows that I had previously filled with sheets of aluminum earlier in the year. When the windows were originally patched a fellow homesteader had caulked around the aluminum patches but the caulk in some places had already shrunk and created several large gaps. The foam should also help hold the aluminum patches in place in case they get bumped or leaned on from the interior of the bus but I should probably test that theory before I wrap the project up.
Anyway, it was a super productive day and of course I found it mostly enjoyable because I actually had 'real' materials and fasteners to work with and was not faced with the aggravation of cobbling things together with a bunch of junk which is all too often the case with the stuff that I wind up working on. I know that folks love up-cycling, re-purposing and having to use ingenuity to work around having limited building materials and although I am pretty good at do so... nothing (for me) will ever compare to having the right materials for a project and me being able to sidestep all the damn aggravation along the way.
Well, that is enough rambling for one morning and I am just going to call this good enough and wrap it up. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
More about me: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.
A little over three years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!
The way that the Fantastica Chronicles came about is that I was living at another place when I started chronicling and sharing my days but eventually I wound up moving to a new place. The new place is a homestead named 'Fantastica' so I started with 'Day 1' upon my arrival here and just kept documenting my days much like I had done for the previous nine hundred and fifty-seven days at the last place that I lived.
I have mostly done that 'documenting' at Fantastica exclusively with words (and pictures) opting not to do the videos because as I learned at the last place, sharing videos over an intermittent and slow internet connection is horribly time consuming and what I often think of as an 'ulcer inducing' experience. All that said, I opted for simplicity with the documentation and have no real regrets for doing so.
The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.
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