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.
Next job was to build the vanity cabinet. Such a basic little cabinet, you would think it would be easy to build, but it proved quite a challenge due to all the different curves and angles in this corner of the bus.
I’m happy with the way it turned out though. I still need to paint / stain it and I want to put a mirror on the front eventually too.
The toilet underneath will be on some sort of slide so it can pull out to use. Not entirely sure how best to do this yet as standard drawer runners won’t work.( I need the toilet base to extend 700mm beyond the cabinet and I only have 610mm depth inside so even fully extendable slides won’t be enough).
I’ve made a few enquiries and you can get drawer slides with greater than 100% extension, but these need to be custom made and are quite expensive, so I think I will end up choosing a cheaper option.
Thinking maybe small castors or making a frame that sits directly on the floor with felt or something underneath.
I’ll also have a few bolts in the floor under there for the water tank that will have to be navigated around.
Always a challenge in every bus project 🙂