We were lucky that our bus already had the seats ripped out by the previous owner.
If you’ve ever seen a bus demo on Youtube, you know that taking the seats out is a very monotonous and annoying process.
We only had the driver’s seat and the front two padded walls to take out but this gave us a taste of what taking out 22 seats would have felt like.
Each seat is bolted through the floor which makes this process a two-person job. One person is holding each seat bolt in place inside the bus while the other is under the bus loosening up each nut under the floor.
Once the seats were removed came the taxing job of removing the floor.
I’ve seen people ask on Skoolie Nation and FB groups if they could just keep the original bus floor, but to be blunt, the floors get extremely gross after years of use so they need to go!
The first thing we had to do was remove the metal runners holding the floors in place. This required unscrewing tons of more screws along these metal track. A lot of the screws ended up being stripped from years of kids walking on them. These screws required a lot of persuasion from a hammer and crowbar to be removed.
After pulling up all the metal tracks lining the walkway, sides of the bus, and wheel wells we only had the rubber flooring and plywood left to take off the floor.
There’s an easy way and a hard way to do this. If you care about recycling as we do, you need to peel the black rubber off the plywood. If you don’t… you could peel away just enough rubber to find where the plywood boards separate and go ahead with ripping up the plywood and rubber all together.
The rubber was glued to the plywood but due to age, most of it was easy to peel away with the help of sliding a crowbar underneath it to break up brittle glue. What made this harder was the old rubber crumbling while we peeled it up leaving us with a mess and black sticky hands.
After getting rid of the ribber, next, we needed to pull up the plywood. Since the plywood was nailed down, it required a lot of force to remove it. Mike used a long bar and a hammer to pry the boards up.
Here’s what we ended up finding under the rubber and plywood.
It looks worst than it was. The metal floor only had some mild surface rust, so this meant we were fortunate in not having to patch any holes!
On to the next task of taking down the ceiling!
