Composting toilet and more walls

(Mostly) Finished composting toilet!


Our vent is a total duct tape explosion. We made it out of an old dryer vent we had lying around. I wrapped it in duct tape because the exposed metal of the hole in the ceiling scraped away some of its plastic sheath and I didn't want to worry about holes in our ducting. It connects to the 12v nearly silent fan we bought for too much money from Sunmar. Switch on the wall to the right. The cabinet doors we got at Bring and the hardware we got at an estate sale earlier today! Still not sure how we're going to finish the top of the composting box - paint? Collage? Tile? Leave as is? Not sure. We are going to give everything in the bathroom a good coat of tung oil for water resistance and easy clean-ability.


Julia cutting a really nice hole for the vent with our new Jigsaw! So much easier than trying to do this with a sawzall...



Here's the vent snaking out of the bathroom and up out the roof. This comes out over our icebox, which is where we're going to build our pantry. The vent will live at the back of the pantry where you can't really see it. I used a little bit of pipe insulation to protect the vent from the exposed metal of the opening. Duct tape strap is temporary. =)


Here's me installing the vent collar... and trying to race the sunset.


There's the vent peeking out the roof. We found the cap at Bring and the collar at the Rebuilding Store in Portland. I think it looks cute! Kind of like the little cousin of our chimney. I'm pretty sure the cap was originally intended to be used for a gas stove but I think it'll work for our purposes.




Here's the inside of the compositing chamber. We are going to have three bins of that size. Each bin sits on top of a tray. The bottom of the bins are perforated and each bin has 2 perforated plastic tubes resting inside of them (and eventually inside of the compositing mass) in order to increase airflow from within. Before you begin to use a bucket, you line the bottom with a good amount of composting mulch and then after each use, you pour enough mulch on top to cover everything over. By the time the all the buckets are full the oldest bucket should be earth. We bought some mulch from Biolet for our first go-round but we plan on making our own mix in the future. #1 is diverted to gray water tank. We had a bunch of heater hose lying around from when we removed the coolant-driven heater original to our bus so we recycled it. You can see it here in our pee diversion system. =) Thanks to Sean for allowing us to borrow his design!


Here's what it looks like with the bathroom filled in! It has really changed the space for us in a positive way. We're going to wait until we build the pantry above the ice box to finish the rest of the exposed wall. Please excuse the mud we've tracked into the bus - it' s been raining a lot lately. =)


Here's the beautiful paneling we used to cover the exposed wall that stretches along most of the right-hand side of our bus.


Here's the cabinet we built to cover the electrical bay. You can barely see it in the pic but we used a nice bar latch to lock the doors together.



The outside of the bathroom/hallway to bedroom. You can't see it in this pic but we used this neat folding door for the bathroom. I think it was made for a closet but it works really well for our purposes. We put handles on both sides with a lock on the inside of the door for privacy. It feels great to have our bed in the bus!

Propane box, Ice box and *the* box

Long time, no post.

Well, we're 99% finished with the propane box except for a few silicone touch-ups here and there. Phew...that was an ugly battle.

In other news, we decided to give up trying to resuscitate our broken fridge. In our year of collecting pieces, we had 2 back up ice boxes just for this sort of occasion! We plumbed the ice box in and even made a nice little s-trap for it by bending up the pex just so and screwing it down with plumber's tape.

We went to Portland yesterday to hit the re-building store there and also to visit the Bins. We scored some really nice hardwood siding at the re building store, as well as a weather collar for our bathroom vent. Oh yeah - I also made some curtains for the bedroom! We are going to move our bed in as soon as we finish the bathroom walls....call me crazy but I have a thing about sawdust in the bed.



Me battling it out with the sawzall....don't know why this was so (*&%ing hard.


Ooooh...propane box lookin' kinda pretty. =) We used lots of flashing around the edges in part because my cutting job was not that pretty and in part because it made finishing the whole thing a breeze. Dig the locking hasps. We used some old interior rubber stuff from the bus to create a little "umbrella" above the doors.

The inside. We are going to paint it. Matter of fact, we're going to paint everything - inside and out - white. We caulked the nuts off this box. Weatherization for this thing is turning out be a P.I. the A. because the metal doors we made bow out when we lock the doors. We're going to add some clasps on the sides to make them cleave a little more snugly to the bus.

We tested the propane lines the other day and they are totally holding pressure!! The kind folks at Collin's Bike shop downtown lent us a specialty bike pump that screws on (rather than snaps on...not tight enough for our purposes) and measures the PSI of whatever it's pumping. We did this before we did the old soapy solution test because we thought it was a bit more scientific and to the point. With capped pipes (not hooked up to appliances) our pipes held their pressure which means there's no leaks! We were able to make a bike pump adapter out of a bushing and a little bicycle tire sized nozzle thing from Jerry's.


Here's what the box looks like on the inside of the bus. We raised the bench up a bit so that it would clear the box and not rest on top of it - we thought that the added pressure of our butts might eventually contribute to breaking the seals in the box.


What a disaster area. =) Note the ice box to the right of the stove. Pantry to be built above it.

Drain line coming out of the ice box with home-made little s-trap. The second piece of plumber's tape has a little scrap piece of 2x2 supporting the underside of the pex hose, creating the the "s" shape. I wrapped the pex in little pieces of pipe insulation to keep the tape from cutting into it.
There's the ice box drain coming in on the right towards the bottom of the sink drain. It switches from Pex to PVC at the end because that's what we had laying around the house. =)



The bathroom begins!

More bathroom detail....storage for extra sawdust below buckets...we're planning on making ours like SeanF's on skoolie.net....time tested, bus-freak approved....he has a fan driven vent out the roof and lots of provisions for airflow through the compositing mass. He also diverts the #1 into another tank...in our case we're going to divert it into the gray water tank. More details on all of this to come.


Here's some nifty stuff we bought at the new green store in Eugene. It seals plywood and prevents off gassing. Even though the plywood in our bathroom is recycled, it's probably still got some more offgassing to do - which is why we sealed it with this stuff before we installed it.


Here's some of the simple curtains I made for the bedroom. Dumpstered the curtain rods a million years ago...finally got to start using them! Note the pile of stuff on top of the bed. =)


Here's the panelling we got at the rebuilding store in Portland - $30 for 30 boards! More than we wanted to spend but it's just too pretty to walk away from.

Next up....installing the vent for the bathroom and wrapping up compositing toilet construction! Woo hoo!

Gray water tank, etc.

Finally starting to feel just a tiny bit like a home in here....


Finished the plumbing for the sink's drain. Used ABS and PVC for the s-trap. Braided pvc hose goes down into our gray water tank. PVC and ABS are yucky but there's not really any better options out there short of copper or galvy...and that's kinda crazy for our drain. Also, the sink came with ABS fittings and the gray tank has PVC fittings glued onto it so we just went with the path of least resistance there. At least it's not for drinking water.

Here's our gray water tank all bolted into place! We were able to position it right under our sink for an easy drain. Used more scrap metal from Shnitzer Steel to make the cage. Bolted the box steel onto the ribs underneath the bus.


We also built the skeleton for the bed. The whole structure (with the exception of the 2x2 ledges on the perimiter of the bed) is removable. This way if we need to take things in and out of the back door we can. We used some old plywood sliding doors from Julia's old closet for the platform.

Our fresh water tank insulated with foil bubble wrap. We had a problem with condensation forming on the outside of the tank. Hoping that this solves that problem.


More foil bubble wrap for the covered over windows. We figured out that the oven part of our stove operates with a direct vent system. This means that the reason there are 2 vents (one nested inside the other) is that the outer-most vent sucks combustable air into the appliance and the inner-most vent pushes combusted air out of the appliance. We can't just bend up some sheet metal around the outer-most vent and call it a day because it won't work....they 2 need to be separated on the way out and they need to terminate in such a way that they wont get involved with one another....hard to explain. Anyway, it's back to the drawing board with that. We are looking into ordering the parts for it right now. If it starts to look expensive, we are thinking of scrapping this thing altogether and pulling another stove out of the RVs they have at the pick n pull right now.


Found a bunch of this gorgeous tile at Bring Recycling!!! They match our woodstove! We're going to use this to tile over the kitchen countertop. Still hoping to do a swirly broken-pieces mosaic over the heat walls around the woodstove.


Also found these awesome pieces of junk at Bring. They are little archetechural thingies that I personally ripped off of a piece of rotting Victorian house that someone donated to Bring. Hoping to clean the up, refinish them and mount them somewhere in the corners of our bus...maybe making an archway in the hall? Not sure yet. I'm really excited about them though.

In other news....we've decided to put the propane tanks in a sealed box underneath the bench/couch. It's making the most sense to us right now. (Thanks to Richard for his encouragement on this topic!) It'll be a way for us to really shorten our run from the tank to the appliances which is always a good thing - less pipe, fewer connections, fewer places to leak. It'll also be cheaper than buying a super-expensive under-mount tank. We found a couple used under-mounts from the 70's with no OPD valves...that looked kinda rusty...and decided that we'd be better safe than sorry on this one. Pretty sure that's what we're going to start working on tomorrow. =)

Odds and Ends

Weatherized chimney in all it's glory. It is detachable at the seam above the boot. Had our first fire 2 days ago and it worked beautifully! Bought fire extinguishers. =)


Here's the shut offs for our propane lines - fridge and stove. We hid them underneath the sink so that we have easy access.


Here's the flex hose we're using to connect the propane to the stove. We'll use another one for the fridge. It's plastic coated steel.


J replaced the gaskets on our stove. Nice. Good seal.


Co-pilot chair - so we can both ride shotgun! Ripped it out of a van at pick n pull. Smells a little - will need to be annointed with some kind of essential oil? Cleaned it up and sawed off it's arm rests so it can snuggle up against the driver's seat. I'm going to make a nice fabric cover so that they'll match.


Here's a partial solution for our woodstove security project - plumber's flanges. This keeps it from sliding but not from jumping up and over. We find jumping hard to imagine but we're going to bolt down some u-bolts so that we can ratchet a tie down over it on the road just in case. In the pic it looks a bit like the legs aren't seated on the ground - they are. The flanges are just surrounding them tightly.



Ripped out two windows yesterday! They come out so easy. Sheet metal (aluminum?) from Shnitzer steel.


Top vent is for the range hood fan, bottom vent is for the pilot of the oven. The duct tape is temporary, folks. =) We are going to paint the sheet metal white to match the rest of the bus.


I ripped this ugly 12 volt fan out of the old ugly range hood that came with our stove when we scored it free. The hood is too big for our space so I salvaged what was useful in it. Haven't hooked the fan up yet so I don't know if it works. If it does (I think it does), we're planning on bending a sheet of pretty, decorative metal grill over the front of it. Difficult to explain effectively but it will look cute, godammit. The sheet metal covering the windows still needs to be caulked and insulated. We're going to use that foil/bubble wrap stuff in several layers and then cover the whole thing over with wood. Still need to fabricate some kind of heat-guard for the back of the stove.

Blocking out those 2 windows has really changed the space in an exciting way. For some reason I was getting an Austrailian vacation feeling in the bus now. I've never been to australia but it seems like a good theme to roll with for now. =)

You might have already been able to tell from the pics: it finally stopped raining for a minute! YAY!

Pictures!

Here's Julia's hilarious photo essay of our wood stove installation.....maybe it's only funny to me but here it is. I think the pics speak for themselves.





It's in! Don't worry - the gray cement board look is temporary. We are going to do a tile mosaic over it in time. The very top part of the side wall above the heat barrier is going to be filled in with wood, too. We're thinking metal blinds (not fabric curtains) behind the wood stove. The window that gets cut in half by the side wall is going to be blacked out.

The chimney is secured to the roof but we still haven't weatherized the flue collar. What with snow and rain we're worried that the silicone won't cure right. We're waiting for a dry, non-freezing day. In the meantime, we uesd good old duct tape to hold down the collar and weighted down a tarp over the top of everything. Of course, we can't really light it up with duct tape wrapped around the flue and a tarp over it. Which means we haven't been able to test the stove - there are still questions about whether the stove will have enough draft to work in our bus. We also need to replace the braiding all around the stove door and in some other places (if we're keeping it). Once we decide what stove we're going with we'll still have to tackle the fun challenge of how to secure it in place!

Here's a pic of how we did the heat walls:


Here's me re-wiring our salvaged RV propane oven with high temp wire. The previous owner - some weirdo McGyver - got in there and did some real funky wiring.

Spencer came over today to help us test out the propane part of our stove. It works! I tested and there are no leaks, either. We plumbed the main lines for the propane this afternoon. Working in groups is fun! We still need to figure out the venting situation before we can situate the appliances and hook them up.

We aren't planning on mounting the 2 BBQ tanks under the bus anymore because I've decided it's dangerous. I've been looking at side-mount tanks meant to live underneath RVs. They're about $300. I'm planning on buying one off eBay when Mercury stops being retrograde on the 18th.

Pics of propane progress to come!