the Anne Marie

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2014/11/09 By John Leave a Comment

Hearth

Every home needs a hearth. It’s the beating heart of a living space. Our bus is no exception.

Our hearth is almost purely for aesthetics. The Kimberly woodstove we’re using has ridiculously tiny clearances, and we have given it much more room than is necessary. In addition, the vent pipe we’re using only has a 1″ clearance to combustibles, so let me preface all this by saying the space we’ve allocated is overkill.

We left a nearly 3′ by 3′ space between the two starboard benches, with the plan of fitting our woodstove right in the middle. Since we’re in a relatively tiny space, I made a hole in the floor for external combustion air. On top of that, we cut and attached our cement board. While the cement board could be helpful to deal with the heat, in practice it’s really just to keep the masonry in place while the wood elsewhere expands and contracts.

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We’re using a thin cut brick for our hearth. They’re smaller than standard bricks, which works to our advantage. The thinner/smaller the building materials we’re able to use the more space we appear to have inside. We attached them to the cement board with Liquid Nails.

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While Nishi was able to space out the bricks on the floor without a guide, we needed to cut some small spacers for our walls. Neither of us remember figuring this out in advance, but our hearth measurements perfectly accommodate our bricks. We didn’t need to make any tough cuts.

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Our hearth looked pretty cool with bricks alone, but it still needed mortar between those joints.

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The joints between our bricks are smaller than most, in part because our bricks are narrower to start. We tried at first using a tiny clay sculpting tool to lay the mortar, but it was imprecise and slow. We just adopted the finger-painting method. A word of warning to anyone who decides to give this a try: do not take breaks. The mortar dries your skin really quickly and will wear through your fingers before you realize it.

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We let it sit a few days, then brushed and vacuumed away whatever was loose. It came out pretty clean.

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Our stove will be sitting nearly dead center in the square. Again, total overkill for both stove and pipe clearances, but it’ll give us a good spot to store other stove-related items.

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We had some brick left over, and used it to make a little accent wall along our counter.

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Things are coming together, and as soon as the stove is good to go, we’ll be secure in our ability to work through the winter. Nishi took this fantastic picture one night after work.

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Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: Brick, Hearth, Woodstove

2014/11/05 By John Leave a Comment

Trips and Progress

When we last left off, we still had water flowing uninterrupted into our precious living quarters. Well, maybe it was only a trickle, but it was still entirely too much. With the bus stripped back down to bare metal, we tried to figure out a solution. But the bus still had obligations to meet.

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Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in Oak Hill, NY. The bus was profoundly missed last year, and this summer was a welcome change of pace. The deck added a fun perspective to the weekend, and held a few brief jams. We’ve been nothing but impressed with its strength.

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We spent Grey Fox without a splinter of wood inside the bus, and when we returned home we went back to stopping the leaks. It was Nishi who discovered how to properly seal the windows. It doesn’t take too much caulk, but it does take a lot of time and patience – her prop skills continue to be valuable. After dealing with the worst windows, we reached a place where we were no longer concerned with water ruining our hard work, and resumed construction. In early October, some friends of ours were getting married, and we made that our deadline for a presentable interior of the bus.

We used new insulation on the walls, thinner than what we had before. Though the insulation I had scored off craigslist had been the right price, the fiberglass paper sides were a tremendous nuisance, and they protruded past the ribs making it impossible to square anything. These thinner, foil covered boards are a breath of fresh air, and will still keep us plenty warm.

Our old insulation fit easily in place on the floor, and we covered it with 1/2″ plywood this time instead of 1/4″. This does give us a more smooth and even subfloor to build on. We skipped the rosin paper entirely this time, as it seemed to provide no benefit.

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We insulated the wheel wells, and began the process of reinstalling everything we’d taken out. We were able to get the counter and the 13′ port bench installed by the wedding, and the two starboard benches were installed shortly after returning home.

We did run into one mechanical issue – the lift pump in our engine stopped working. In brief, the lift pump is what supplies fuel from the tank to the high pressure pump on the engine. Luckily, it was a relatively easy fix, and we were on the road in no time.

Charlie came along to the wedding, and it turns out he’s quite the bus-dog. Though he doesn’t much care for the highway, he’s pretty happy lounging around on the benches and looking out the windows.

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Passive solar heating continues to impress me. We have the entire port side of the bus facing South, so sunny days heat it up nicely. 40 degree differences are common so far, and it’ll be interesting to see how that holds up as the outside temperature drops.

And one last note, we’ve officially changed the domain of this site to bus.life (much better).

Filed Under: Adventures, Updates Tagged With: Festivals, Flooring, Insulation, Leaks, Roof deck

2014/06/17 By John 1 Comment

What’s the hold up?

It’s been a rough spring for the Anne Marie. As the weather warmed up, we started spending more time in there, and began construction of a new unit. It came together quickly, and we set our eyes on installing the woodstove. Taking a closer look at the section set aside for the woodstove, we noticed some water damage on the plywood subfloor and water marks on the insulation on the walls.

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Oh crap. What’s going on?

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Alright – everything out! Yes, that is mold you see growing on our plywood. We yanked out the subfloor and the insulation underneath, then the insulation and spray foam in the walls.

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It turns out we have leaks at most of our windows. It isn’t clear from the photo, but water was getting in from the sides and bottoms of the windows where 25 year old caulk had just given up. We had a taste of this back in the fall, but we were pretty sure the worst was behind us.

The water runs down the ribs to the floor, where it sat underneath the insulation for long after it had rained. At the edges, it would travel up along the sides of the insulation, and reach the plywood subfloor. Bad news.

The good news is that it seems the water is only coming in from the windows and below. We have zero signs of leaks from the roof, and our ceiling still looks great! I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t make us reconsider the whole project. If we had leaks coming in from the roof, I think we’d have thrown in the towel.

As it is, we just have to yank out the windows and put some new caulk in around them.

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The windows come out surprisingly easily, which is a relief. Sealing them up again has been a bit of a challenge. This brings us up to date: we’re still re-sealing the windows, and parts of the walls that are leaking. We’ve had some success caulking windows, and some failures. We’re not really sure what causes the newly caulked windows to leak, and that’s a huge frustration.

I really dislike doing things twice, and this has been a rough few months on us as well, but there’s no way around it if we want this to work. There is an unacceptable amount of water coming into our living area, and we have to stop it.

Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: Anxiety, Construction, Demolition, Insulation, Leaks, Walls

2013/11/04 By John 4 Comments

The ceiling is complete!

We finished the ceiling! After much deliberation and research on how best to secure the wood to the frame, we wound up going with plain old screws. The hardware isn’t as visible as we had feared, and gives us some peace of mind that the wood hanging above our heads will remain there.

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We started just above the starboard windows, working our way up one row at a time. The tongue and groove boards made it so we didn’t have to screw into each and every intersection with a rib. There isn’t a pattern to the screws, we just put them where they were needed.

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There is, however, a pattern to the boards. It’s too subtle to see, but each row of boards starts one rib back from the one before it. It repeats four times across the ceiling.

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We added insulation above us as we went along. We mostly reused the stock batting that was there when we took the ceiling down, and added new batting where it was needed. It’s hard to express how happy we are to have most of the insulating behind us.

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We still need to trim the two rows immediately above the windows, but the bulk of the work is done. It was a straightforward and simple process that took a week or so to complete. And as you can see, totally worth it.

Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: Ceiling, Construction

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Categories

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Tags

Anxiety Bed Brick Ceiling Chimney Clearance lights Compost Construction Cooktop Counter Demolition Desk Festivals Flooring floorplan Fridge Hearth Inspiration Insulation Kitchen Leaks Lights Performance Port Bench Roof Roof deck Rust Sink Snow Toilet Tour Upholstery Video Walls Water Heater Woodstove
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