Last month we brought you fine folk up to speed on our bus renovation project, and how we hope it will fund our cycling trip of a lifetime. Since that post we’ve been at it full tilt, installing the downstairs ceiling, finishing the wiring and lighting, and starting to prime everything.
When we were working on bus #1 we used bus #2 as a workshop, with all our workbenches and materials in there. You can get a sense of this from the start of the video above. After turning poor Desmond into a building site for a very long time, it finally feels like things are starting to take some shape, and he’s beginning to look somthing akin to what’s in our heads. Something that can be lived in.
When we got to this point with Dervla we drafted in the help of a carpenter for two weeks, and we worked with him on finishing the ceilings and partitions. On Desmond we decided to take on all of this work ourselves, and even though it’s taken us a bit longer, we’re pretty confident that we’ve done a decent job of it. In fact, we reckon the work on this bus is a notch above Dervla. We’ve been learning a lot as we go. See if you can spot Ellie’s César Manrique-esque cubby holes, and my pirate cupboard built from old wardrobe doors rescued from a skip.
We get to talk at length while we’re working, and something we’ve discussed is what skill we’d like to attain if we had a whole other lifetime to start over. Ellie opted for musician, and film maker as a second choice. If I had another lifetime I’d like to be a carpenter. There is something incredibly satisfying about building things with wood, polishing and varnishing them, making something beautiful, or at least something with a lasting utility. There’s something even more rewarding about pulling wood out of a skip and shaping it into a wanted and useful thing.
If we’re being perfectly honest here, all the stuff we’ve built benefits from trim, filler and finishing to make it more presentable. We haven’t quite nailed down precision joinery just yet.
A friend of mine, Podge, builds stages and sites at festivals. If you’ve been at a festival in Ireland in the last ten years, you’ve probably had some of his work holding you up at some point. He told me a great story about being in a hardware shop a couple of years ago. He was standing in front of shelves of silicon, filler and adhesive tubes. A dizzying array of fixings to choose from. As he was standing there, a dusty and well-seasoned tradesman stood in beside him. Podge said to him “What did we do before we had all of these to choose from?” The seasoned hand had a simple and succinct response: “We did it right.”
When it comes to the woodwork, we might not be doing it exactly right, we still need the adhesive, caulk and filler, but we’re getting better. I’m all in for trying new things and making plenty of mistakes along the way. It’s not learning from those occasional f@€k-ups that I’d be worried about. Auld Sam Beckett put it very well when he wrote “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” When we come back from cycling around the world, I’m getting a daycent mitre saw. That should help me fail better. At least on the woodwork side of things anyway.
It’s been tough over the months of summer seeing people head off on holidays, on cycling trips, and hitting up festivals. From this video you’ll get a real sense of what we do at evenings and weekends. EVERY weekend! In an effort to protect our dwindling sanity we’ve booked ourselves a weekend off next month to go and visit a good friend of Ellie’s in Copenhagen. We’re going to catch one of our favourite live bands at the moment, Ezra Collective, while we’re there. We’ve earned that.
Although we’re really looking forward to the trip, we’re conscious that our deadline for finishing work on Desmond is November. We’ve made a list of all the jobs that still need doing, and it’s a very long list that we’re struggling to make a dent in. Will we deliver Desmond to his new home in Co. Meath in two months time? Stay tuned to find out.
Hold her steady and keep it between the ditches!
Oh, what a feeling. Installing a ceiling.