Prepped

Above was the scene late this afternoon, after I had finished sanding down the van's cargo area in preparation for the next phase of my ongoing love affair with bed liner. I still have a bit of minor surface rust to treat, but once that's done, I'll cover the floor, walls, and ceiling with the stuff (bed liner, not surface rust). 

Then I'll put a layer of sound deadening material on top of that, followed by the very promising batch of Low-E insulation that arrived in yesterday's mail:

All that ought to keep me occupied for at least the next few days, as a brutal cold front (by LA standards) rolled in a couple of days ago and looks to be hanging around for four more. You see, the various substances I'm using that are known to the state of California to cause reproductive harm have finicky temperature requirements, and these daytime highs in the 50s mean I have a fairly limited window of sufficient warmth to work. No, I do not expect much sympathy from the snowbound readers out there.

With any luck, by the middle of next week or so, I should have the van's interior fully bed-lined and both sonically and thermally insulated – primed and ready to be turned into something that looks remotely like a living space. In the meantime, I'm beginning to plan out how the hell I'm going to do that. But hey, it was just a little over a week ago when I didn't have much idea of how to deal with rust, yet here I am now with rock-solid doorsteps and a bulletproof front floor (almost literally – this bed liner I'm using contains Kevlar).

One step at a time, have fun with the whole process, and take frequent breaks to either ponder my next move or just blow the horn for a while to clear my head. That's the strategy on this end, and while it may not lead me finish in record time, it does appear to be working.