Flooring 1/3 Complete

To my great personal suprise and delight I was able to get a bit done on the van this weekend. I did most of it on Saturday, with only a bit today. Today required a trip to Lowes (they were sold out), followed by a trip to Menards to get a few more panels of Dricore. They also had rolls of Reflectix for $9 off normal price, until September 9th. I bought two for now.

So yes, in the end I went with a Dricore subfloor. It's 2' x 2' tongue and groove OSB with a hard plastic underside to act as a moisture barrier. Intended for concrete basements. Compared to the alternatives it was a pretty expensive route to go but it went down pretty easily and I have to hope that it will have benefits down the road. If not, who cares. I went a slightly different route than normal and I'm happy with that. I used 20 of those for my 11' x 6' space.

That's the first third done. I consider putting a 1/4" underlayment on top of that to be another third. And then the final third will be when everything else is laid out and I put down vinyl planks in areas still visible at that point.

I suppose I should mention that before I laid down the Dricore I removed all the original wall panels and old insulation. The old insulation was often piled up at the bottom and useless. I also removed the AC ducts that were in the walls and put sheet metal over the associated AC holes in the floor. The metal walls with no insulation or panels to cover them really radiate heat in the sun. It was a real lesson for me and now I'm thinking about beefing up my insulation plans.

My van is a 15 passenger so had real wall panels. It's amazing how much taking those off changed the van. It changed it from an old 15 passenger van to a blank canvas. And then to have the subflooring installed. Very inspiring and I can start picturing the rest.

I really wish I had some pictures to show of the work done so far but I don't. Instead I will leave you with some long overdue pictures of what the interior originally looked like when I bought it.

 

 

A Slow Start

Van things continue to go slowly, if not entirely non-existant.

Yesterday I was able to get most of the items being stored in the back of the van out of there. Sadly, this means my travel trailer now has more junk in it. I still need to find somewhere to put the two bench seats I'm removing. I should probably just get rid of them. Craigslist or free or whatever. I guess there's still enough doubt in my plans that I feel like I should keep them around.

That's basically all I've done. I went around to some self serve junkyards yesterday looking for power window switches for my sister's car. One of them had a bunch of old vans, and even a class B motorhome. It was an old Transvan and it was nasty and scary inside. I poked around but didn't see anything too worthwhile.

Right now I'm researching flooring and wall insulation options.

Oh, I guess I did rip out all the back carpet yesterday. It's been kind of rolled up towards the front for a while but I finally cut it out. I left the carpet up in the cab area.

Anyway, back when I used to own a house the basement would leak when it rained. Basically the slope away from the house wasn't there and the water would pool in the window well and then leak in the window. This caused the entire finished basement to be ripped out. I researched a lot on subfloors for basements back then because I planned to eventually refinish everything. Never did.

I'm toying with the idea of the basement subflooring systems in the van. Simply, they're a layer of dimpled or designed plastic to create air pockets for moisture to evaporate in, and also act as a moisture barrier from the actual plywood on top. I've seen no mention of this on any van sites or groups. I like the idea, especially since I've already been putting  sheet metal down over rusted through holes in the metal floor of the van. My main hold up is not knowing the insulation situation in that setup.

Research continues.

It's been a while.

Hello, there. It's been a while since I've been around these parts. I'm probably not back for very long.

Last time I posted I was working a terrible job at Toys R Us. But it made me enough money to scrape together a cheap van purchase as my previous entry showed. And I had just been changed to 'permanent' employment instead of 'seasonal'. Turns out 'permanent' at TRU after the holidays means one day a week, and only 4 hours. Luckily a few weeks after my last post I was contacted by a company I had applied for back in November. I got the job. It's not a great job, but it's good enough to make me stick around for a while I guess.

That said, I didn't make it to Yellowstone this summer. They apparently had issues with a van being an 'RV', or at least the one lady on the phone did. So I would have had to take my car and travel trailer and in the end I backed out due to 'car issues'.

So I'm still back living with my parents. I work so far away from here that 20% of each paycheck goes directly towards gas for my car to get there and back 5 days a week. That frustrates me. And there's some other forces happening that make me put a lot of thought into the van these days.

Basically, the van has just been sitting there for the last 6 months. The extent of any work I've done to it is limited to putting some sheet metal patches over holes in the floor in the back. Lots of holes. Rust. Blech. The tires were also junk. Two of them were pretty much separating and I'm just lucky they never blew apart on the handful of times I drove it around. I found a really nice pair of Michelin's on craigslist for $100. I'm still looking for another pair of the same tires for the front. This past week I bought a new battery because the old one turned to junk in the last 6 months. And yesterday I put a new belt on because it had a very minor squeal/squeak. The old belt had cracks all over in it.

Another project this spring was stripping an old vehicle of mine to put the engine and everything in a different body. Well, this has left the van with a wide assortment of parts inside with no where else to store them. Kind of hinders any forward motion with the van until I can get those out of there.

The main plan I want to start pursuing and getting serious about is the van. Custom build the back of it into a living space. I think for now I'm planning to keep my current job, even though I'm getting frustrated and restless there. But overall, I don't have much of a plan. Living with my parents has drained the life out of me or something. I see no future now. My job doesn't make enough to move out on my own, but I'm pretty sure I don't plan on staying here forever.

The van seems to make the most sense.

A New Van

Obviously I wiped this blog and haven't posted anything in it in a very long time. To be honest, I'm still not sure if I'm going to keep this blog up, or if maybe I want to come up with a new name. But right now I'm just too excited.

I'm getting a van! I'm equal parts nervous and excited about it. It's an old beast at the ripe birthyear of 1994. It's not my normal Ford. I've owned almost exclusively Fords up until now. It's a Dodge B350 15 passenger with a raised roof. 119k miles. It does have rust issues and I'm hoping there aren't even bigger rust issues that I didn't notice.

I still have to go pay the man the money and pick it up hopefully in the next few days, but it's only about 15 miles away and was a local craigslist deal.

Funny enough, I got a call from West Yellowstone, Montana last night 10 minutes after I emailed the guy my offer on the van. I have a phone interview for a position for the summer with them next Tuesday. This timing seems too intense to be a coincidence.

Here's a craigslist picture of the van!

The family that I'm buying it from calls it Moby. I'm not really one to name vehicles or actually use the names I come up with but Moby is just the perfect name for this thing and I think the name will stick. It used to have a wheelchair lift in the back but they took it out. They seem to be some sort of foster family or something and have multiple children with disabilities. Really nice people. I have yet to meet the husband face to face but he seems like my grandpa in the fact that under the hood he has little stickers telling when he did such and such repairs to the van.