All About The Bird

Birdie, aka "The Bird", is my 2000 TC1000 Bluebird school bus. She hails from Alabama and is slowly but surely being converted into a home on wheels for me and my animal crew. I flew 1,400 miles to a state I'd never been to to pick her up sight unseen (except through photos and videos). Pre-purchase I had a local mechanic check her out for me just to be safe. He liked the look of her and she checked all my boxes, so I decided to go for it. My gamble paid off- Birdie is a solidly built girl with a strong engine (Cummins 5.9) and excellent transmission (Alison). She had zero rust on her undercarriage as she'd been in the south for her entire career. Below is a sort of photo journal of my progress with building her out so far. The most recent work is at the top, so you’ll need to scroll all the way down if you want to start at the beginning of our story! (I'll learn how to set the page up better eventually- I'm still learning coding basics so ya get what ya get for now 😅). Enjoy, and thanks for your interest!

Proof that sometimes I just have to learn through mistakes! 😅

YOU GUYS!!!!! I STARTED THE ELECTRICAL!!!! Huge shout out to my new friend Jeff who came out for a day to be my moral support and knowledgable guide as I started this endevor. It is going to take what feels like forever, but feels significantly less scary now that I've taken my first steps.

The closet has been "wallpapered" and the shelves have been sanded and stained! Fun fact about those shelves: they're made out of repurposed shelves from a bookcase that lived in my grandparents' house since my mum was a kid! I claimed it when their house was sold years ago and it's been waiting in storage to be worked into my bus home!

I finally bit the bullet this weekend and painted the roof. I had sanded and washed it about a month ago but have been putting off painting because... yaaawn- boring! But it needed to be done in preparation for mounting the solar panels, so done it got!

The Dog Spot is coming along nicely. This whole back area will be covered by my bed, so this little corner will be like a doorless kennel for the pups- a cozy little cave!

Last weekend I worked on a pull-out shelf/drawer for my fridge/freezer combo! The cool thing about the slides I used is that they lock when puhshed all the way in. That means things won't go flying when I'm driving- yay!

Yesterday I turned two doors into one door! Birdie originally had two doors that hinged on either side and closed to each other in the middle. I cut one side off its hinges and used thick aluminium and bolts to attach the loose door to the still-hinged door. I am SO pleased with how it turned out! Once the rain here stops I'll be able to spray paint all the hardware and use the grinder to take the ends of the bolts off for a more finished look.

Last Weekend: I fraamed out the walls of the dogs' cozy cave area

Getting Caught Up: The same weekend I also started framing out the closet and laid out the under-the-bed dog space!

Getting Caught Up: Then I built a base for my sink to sit on!

Getting Caught Up: Next I framed out the walls for my shower/bathroom area.

Getting Caught Up: With a little help getting started, I built frames for my couch bench things! They're so much bigger in real life than in my head and I'm so happy with them.

Getting Caught Up: Finally took care of the rest of this awkward entryway floor space!

4/29/25: Today (that's right, the Birdie Blog is officially caught up!) I cut some lumber to frame out more of my walls. I also broke up some of the leftover insulation to use inside my walls. The plan is to use sprayfoam around this, possibly with another layer of foam board in there too.

Yesterday I got the "leftover space" piece of subfloor rough (very rough) cut and put into place.

Then a couple days later I came back and got the rest of the insulation in, then the rest of the plywood. Other than a couple feet of space at the front, and the steps, I have a subfloor! WOO! This is huge progress for me!!

The next step was putting down insulation and plywood for my subfloor!!! This involved renting a pickup for an hour, as the materials needed were not going to fit in my suv- by a longshot. Shoutout to my truck rental guys at a certain home improvement store & to my guy D who guarded my 2 carts worth of stuff while I went and pulled the truck up, AND to the girl with her nails done who fearlessly helped me load plywood into the truck. Other than having to drive a Ford (fight me 😒), it was a successful day! I got half the foam insulation in and one piece of plywood, and called it a day.

Once the floor was primed, I only had one more thing to do to make the bus completely watertight: the skylights! I had decided I wanted to install bubble skylights where both emergency exit hatches were. This involved climbing up to the roof of the bus- a thusfar unexplored world! BOY was it dirty up there!

The whole inside of the bus was instantly transformed by the addition of the skylights. I'm so in love with them already! Huge shoutout to my partner for helping me figure out how to go about installing these badboys. We did the first one together and it was definitely trial by fire! The second one I was able to do on my own because we'd worked out all the kinks together. ☺️

Finishing up the floor priming was such a good feeling! The bus finally looked clean and neat- sooo satisfying.

Getting that first step for the floor finished also meant I had a chance to spray my layout down and really get a visual on where everything would be!

Friendly reminder to wear your PPE! Mask, check!

Gloves, not so much check... Five days later and the paint had mostly worn off 😅

The next big project was to use the angle grinder on the floors to get the worst of the rust off, then paint them with a rust-prohibiting primer for protection, then glue down pennies over all the holes in the floor ($1.20 in pennies), then run over everything with a second coat of primer.

BUT I knew I wanted to be able to hang a hammock even when the bus was all built out, so I did some rough estimating and figured out where she'd fit, and bought some heavy duty hardware to install permanent mounting points that I'd be able to access even once the ceiling was installed.

After drilling some pretty epic holes into the ribs, and using probably way too much locktite, hammock time was officially secured for all future times to come!

Hammocks though, right? I love me some hammock time...

...and Birdie's ceiling has plenty of sketchy tether points!

Ok so the ceiling. Woof. The ceiling was sheetmetal attached with rivets to the ribs (steel framework the roof also attaches to) of the bus. But not, like, a few rivets. Total in the bus (including walls) I estimated there were about 700 of those fuckers. For the walls I used an air hammer/chisel to disconect the heads and then bust them off. For the ceiling though the legerage wasn't right to use that tool, so I used an angle grinder with a variety of wheels on it. I felt like such a badass getting comfortable using such a potentially dangerous tool!

Next to go after the AC fans (which lived under the bus) were the AC units themselves (inside the bus). I was done removing the walls at this point and had started on the ceiling, but in order to get two of the panels down, the AC units had to come out. This was a bit of a bear of a project, but we got it done (ace bestie and I).

The "upsidedown" of the bus: underneath it! An intimidating but spacious place 🤓

As I ground bolts out of the floor, the AC fans underneath disconnected and eventually fell. I'll be putting in a minisplit for heat/AC so the existing units were not necessary.

And to go right along with that last PSA, here's another: don't let your cutting wheels get this bad. Throw that shit awayyyyy!

Ok time for a little Do As I Say Not As I Do PSA: if you wear the cheap gloves, the metal shards flying out of your angle grinder WILL melt holes in them. So, yeah. Invest in leather gloves. Noww you knooow! (Catch the Bill Nye reference millennials??)

Sometimes a girl's gotta take a break and enjoy the bright blue of the sky, ya know?

Along the same lines as the walls, these wiring casings and higher up brackets had to come down. Those things were a PAIN because the bolts were too deep in the wells to be able to get to, so they had to be cut off with the angle grinder. EESH. Peep my rockstar bestie helping me out tho?? 🥰

I punched the rivets off and then the use a crowbar to pry the wall panels off their base. "It was a pain" would be the understatement of the year, hah!

At vaguely the same time as all this, I rented a hammerdrill and went to town on the wall rivets. BTW, in total there were about 750 rivets on this dang bus (including those securing the ceiling, as well as the walls). Spoiler alert, they're all gone now- ya girl's a badass 😎

Another side project I was working on at the time was removing the back heater, which involved the scariest thing I'd done up to this point- cutting through and removing hoses that connected back into the radiator. I successfully shortened the circuit to exclude all the hose that had previously led back to the heater in question.

I also used the heat gun to remove the "SCHOOL BUS" lettering on the sides of the bus. It was tedius, but it did work!

It "worked a treat", as my brother would say! Here's the before and after.

While I was working on taking up the subfloor, I had a few other projects going as well. One was taking a heatgun and a putty knife to the glue that was on the steps after I got the rubber step liners up.

Finally I got one full sheet of the subfloor plywood up and that got me motivated. The stuff bolted through it had been seriously disheartening because I was still a newb at this point and wasn't sure how to go about tackling it! It's wild to think how much I've learned since then.

Once I got all the rubber flooring up, I set my eye to ripping up the plywood subfloor. Unfortunately for me there were some very stubborn L brackets bolted thru the plywood and the floor of the bus to the underside. The sawzall and I became besties! 🙃

First step was to rip up all the rubber flooring that was covering the plywood, which in turn was sitting on top of the sheetmetal that made up the floor of the bus.

My brother and his landlord generously agreed to let me house Birdie at his apartment, so after her oil change and a trip to Cummins, I got her settled into her new home.

Once we made it I took her to a local shop for an oil change and they lifted her up! I was able to walk around underneath and point at things and ask what they were- super cool.

The drive home was a little rough and ended up taking about 5 days, although one of those days was speant at various autoshops 🙃

Some pre-Birdie photos, and the two of us starting our trip home!

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All About The Bird