Hello lovely people!
Since my last blog post, Gareth and I have been busy little bees, gutting out the truck and giving everything a good clean! (Man was it DIRTY!!)
So stage one was ripping out the shelves and racks from the box body. That was a mission in itself! Big thanks to my mum for coming and helping out and lending us her drill (and later her steam mop). While me and mum began gutting the body, Gareth started work on gutting the cab. Obviously whoever owned the truck previously had been a smoker, there were cigarette butts stashed away, broken glass on the floor, EVERYTHING you touched was greasy and gross and don't even get me started on the seats... you'll see the state of those for yourselves shortly!
It took a solid weekend and a few after work late nights but we managed to get everything ripped out and cleaned all the bits pulled out of the cab. The dust on everything in the body was unbelievable! And ripping the fan and grate out from the back was just disgusting... the dust was an inch thick... so many dust bunnies! Also, funnily enough, the two hardest parts of the job were pulling out the two mirrors. The first one was easier and we managed to save it... the second one wasn't so lucky so I guess I'll be making a cool mirror mosaic at some point with the broken bits!
Then came the fun job of drilling out all the rivets and ripping out the walls and ceiling... which was fun because there was a bundle of wires which we assumed were all disconnected from anything so Gareth just cut through them all... apparently one of them was connected to the rear stop lights! OOPS!
Once the walls were off we had to pull out all the polystyrene insulation. IT had actually melted in some places... so I don't think we'll be reusing that! Sounds a bit toxic to me!
Apparently there was an ants nest in one corner and there were flies living inside the polystyrene... how were they even alive!? So random and kind of gross. Nice.
Not as gross however, as the state of the seats... BLEURGH! I don't know how they got so dirty considering the truck just went door to door selling clothes... but they were black and greasy and smelt soooo bad. However, by the time I was done cleaning them, they look and smell a million times better!
As you can see above, (before pics on the left, after pics on the right) the seats now look almost new! I really should have taken a photo of the state of the towels after doing each seat... it was black.
Anyway, as the truck sits currently, the cab is almost put back together. Only the drivers seat needs to be put back inside, and the box has been completely gutted. The main thing we're looking for at this point is water damage and any areas where water can get in, also need to establish whether the box frame will be able to be extended over the luton. We want to raise the roof on the front of the truck so that we can have our bed up there, so we'll have to get a quote from someone to see how much that will cost and start doing some more saving!
There's water getting in around the base of the box floor, so looks like we're going to have to re-panel the outside of the box and make sure it's 100% watertight, and will also need to get some new marine ply to redo the flooring. We're better off spending the money and doing it now than 3 years down the line when we need to rip all our furniture out to fix and leaks or broken floor!!
So the next few stages are going to be potentially pretty big jobs, and we're going to have to wait for a while for funds to refill (massive shout out to Gareth's mum for lending us the money to buy the truck while our savings were still holed up in a term deposit!!). I'll keep you guys posted as things get done or any big updates that crop up. It's going to be a mission, but I'm still so excited! <3
So here's how the truck is now looking atm, and until next time, peace out folks!
