The Build Continues

It’s kind of sad that after almost two months of the conversion we had hardly done a thing that would be VISIBLE.  So much goes into the ‘infrastructure’. 

We needed to be able to attach walls and a ceiling to the metal frame so we had to add wooden ribs and furring strips.  This meant a lot of rivnuts, weird angles, and using a Kreg jig.  (Jenni is the expert at the jig and I’m happy to leave that to her—basically it helps you connect two boards with a better angle on the screw and the screw is not visible.)

While we were doing the carpentry part of the install we were simultaneously trying to learn all we could about electrical and plumbing since most of that would need to be in place before permanent walls and ceiling.  We learned that there are as many opinions of how to do electricity as there are users on FaceBook.  Ultimately we found a couple people to follow on YouTube who seemed to know what they were doing and didn’t mind admitting/showing when they made a mistake.  I will confess that I picked one because I liked the font they used on their website—turns out I learned A LOT about electrical from them!

So at this stage I needed to run the wiring before we closed up the walls.  I felt very accomplished when that was done after a full day…..until a few days later when I realized half of it would need to be pulled out and replaced because I used the wrong wire.  As with many of our supplies we ordered online and waited for delivery.  We were getting UPS deliveries on a daily basis at that point.

It was about this time we decided we needed another, more extended, trip in the van but to do that we needed a functional bed, lights, running (and not dripping) water, and countertops.  This is when the ‘push’ began and our dog would have to come down to the garage to remind us it was time for her to eat.

But this was the exciting, visible and functional part of the build.  This was when we could see our progress and fall into bed with a sense of accomplishment.

 The build started to take shape.