HIllbilly Vampire Bus

I didn't grow up watching Thomas the Train, but I definitely see a face in my bus, and when we but these log braces in the front it began to look like a cheerful vampire face, or maybe a gap toothed hillbilly!  

In addition to replacing the door, we tried our best to make the bus sit level.  Fortunately, the bus rests in a relatively level spot on our very non-level land.  Using some strategically placed logs, we braced the bus from underneath in enough locations to get the floor on the inside leveled, and then used blocks and stones to make pillars under the bus to brace it in place.  Over time the logs rotted, but the pillars we made give the bus a firm foundation and keep it from feeling like a carnival house when you walk around in it. 

The bus didn't have passenger seats when we got it, but it did have a drivers seat and a console with a bunch of buttons for the heater.  In the picture above, Brandon has, with great effort, removed the drivers seat and is working on removing metal strips on the floor that delineated the aisle.  We tried to get all pieces of the floor that stuck up removed so our wood floor would be as flat as possible.  

Once we got the part of the heater that was inside the bus removed, which included some tubes with green antifreeze fluid in them that ran along one wall of the bus, near the floor, I did a thorough cleaning of everything on the inside.  I'll never know how long the bus hauled children, but since the bus was made in 1964, there could have been forty year old boogers in there, so I felt much better once everything had a good scrubbing!