After spending weeks focussing on painting the bus roof, I am back to building the inside, and it feels good to be working with timber again.
Now I am turning my attention to the bathroom/laundry area which will be at the very back of the bus.
Most of my time has been spent just pottering in the bus, measuring, looking at the different options and working out how I will build it all. It’s not an easy area to frame with all the different curves in the walls and the roof. And of course I’m trying to fit a lot in – vanity, compost toilet, washing machine, and storage.
Plus I also need to allow space for plumbing pipes and the toilet vent to pass through floor here. And make sure I can still access the taillights if I need to.
I have changed my mind about the layout here so many times, and most of my challenges were due to the fact that I was trying to fit in the washing machine I already bought for the big bus. It’s a Camec 4kg front loader and would have been awesome, but I eventually had to admit that it is just too big for the coaster. It weighs 54kg and is almost the size of a household machine, so takes up a lot of space. I could have fit it under the vanity but would have had to move it out if I ever needed to access the taillights and I could barely move it in my living room, let alone in the confined space of the bus. Trying to figure out how to safely secure it for driving, in an area with limited heavy duty attachment options, while also making it semi-removable, was doing my head in. In the end I decided to ditch it and to buy another smaller caravan washing machine instead which will not only save weight, but also be way easier to build in and gives me the added benefit of freeing up a lot more space for storage.
So now that I have finally settled on a layout that I’m happy with, I can start building it.
First of all, I clad the back wall on the driver side. This is where my sink and compost toilet will go, and a lot of this wall will be visible. I used the tongue and groove pine boards from Bunnings and stained them with various mixes of walnut, jarrah and teak stains to match the other walls in the bus.
I love how it has turned out.