like a fucking wainwright

Zero dollar day.

A productive day. First this morning I had to repair my bread-maker. It’s on it’s last leg. I’m not going to buy more bread flour after what I have runs out. I do like having a helpful robot baker, but the energy draw is significant, and this one is dying now, so the timing seems portentous. It did give me a loaf of rye today. March on, valiant robot.

That done, I headed out to the van. I cleared everything out of the house area, and pulled up the 1/2″ plywood sheets that make up the sub-floor. Because this sub-floor was installed almost a year ago now and was never sealed, I wanted to have a look at the steel underneath. The plan was to remove all the foam board insulation and paint the wooden joists with an outdoor deck sealant, but I quickly realized I wouldn’t be able to get the majority of the the foam board panels up without destroying them. I did manage to get at least one up from each “row,” going across (port to starboard), exposing a portion of each of the 3 deep channels that run the length of the van in the steel floor. This is good, as one of the things I bought yesterday is some desiccant powder that I plan to pouring into each of those three channels, so that any moisture that makes it’s way under the sub-floor will be absorbed by the desiccant. I do plan on sealing the sub-floor with silicone too, so hopeful there will be little to no moisture to begin with. But I’m paranoid about rust eating away at the steel where I cannot see.

Since I wasn’t able to pull up the majority of the foam panels, I just painted my outdoor deck sealant on the tops of most of the joists (painting the sides where I could). I never planned to pull the joists up, so the bottoms were never to be sealed. I also painted the sealant on the top surfaces of each of the six 1/2″ wood panels that make up the sub-floor surface. I would have painted both sides of each of these panels, but I ran out of the stuff. I did paint the edges of each, and painted both sides of the 2 foremost panels. The panels are propped up in the van now, drying, and I’ll screw them back down tomorrow.

I also plan to use my new router to create small impressions where I can install some small steel plates I bought, to hopefully make the panels in the living space sit more flush with each other, so that the floor is flatter and I can install my peel and stick floorboards more easily.

Once the panels were set up to dry, I had to find more work to do for the rest of the day, so I did some repair/renovation work on my trunk. I’ve been carrying around this trunk since I was a kid. In fact, all of my siblings took this same trunk to camp when they were kids (I’m the youngest of five, with the oldest being 20 years my senior). It’s got all five names under the lid. It’s become something of an artifact to me, and I want to give it a home in the van. It’s been my toolbox for a while, and now, with my expanded tool collection, it’s going to be one of many. So I build a square frame in the interior of the base of the trunk to reinforce it and to give me something to mount drawer slides too, and also reinforced the material where the hinges connect, and added a cord that holds the lid open just past 90 degrees. The hinges clearly being the weakest point, it would make me wince every time the lid flopped all the way back and torqued on em good. It’s in much better shape now, and is ready to take it’s place in the van.

Tomorrow is June 1st. I have June and July still in this apartment. I hope to have the floor, walls and ceiling done by the end of June. That includes insulation and lighting at a minimum. Also some conduit in the ceiling with some spare wire running port to starboard. And I want to have the heater installed by the end of June as well. That would leave me July to do the interior–all the framing and finishing. There can be some work left for August, but I’ll have to focus some on course planning in August, and I’ll be traveling and visiting folks then too. There could even still be some work to be done deeper into Fall, as long as I can live and work out of the van at that point.

I need to order drawer slides sooner rather than later, as Amazon is taking a while to get stuff to me. (What’s the deal guys? It’s not like there’s a global pandemic going on.) I’m planning on doing more detailed designs of the interior on rainy days this Spring, and that will give me a better sense of how many slides of each type I need. If I order the slides by mid June I should be in good shape to be doing interior work by July 1.

Some days I feel overwhelmed by the project, but today it’s feeling doable. And that’s exciting. I feel like a fucking wainwright.