Removing Bus Seats & Tackling the Floor

After getting Moseby home, I started to take the seats out right away. Fortunately, I did not have the problems I had seen other bus conversions have with seat removal. Nonetheless, the process still isn’t painless, and it takes two people. One person has to be underneath the bus holding the wrench on the nut to prevent it from moving. The second person is inside the bus, with another wrench, unscrewing the bolts. You can also unscrew the bolts from the bottom of the bus, but in certain places this can be difficult as the wrench will not have as much room to move as it will from inside. This is the first step of converting your school bus, and can honestly be the most tedious.

Pro Tip: Do not lay directly underneath the bolt that you are unscrewing when under the bus. From experience, the dirt and grime do not taste good. :)

It’s been over a year since we took the seats out of the bus, and I am still scarred by how much of a chore it was. After working on the seats for about three days, you wouldn’t believe how much space there is once it’s empty. Far from what I remember when riding a bus as a child. Here’s my astonishing before and after:

After taking out the seats, there were a few next steps. This was the first time I experienced having to do some serious prep work before being able to do what I initially considered to be the next step. Ideally, the next step was pulling up the floor. In reality the next step was to unhook the heater, and unscrew EVERYTHING.

Now the heater was a little bit tricky for a few different reasons. Breaking it could release dangerous gas, and or antifreeze would spill everywhere. Neither one of these are ideal scenarios, so to avoid this it’s important to take your time, and look for all the possible connections between the heater and the bus. Whatever you do, don’t just unscrew it from the floor and then try t

o yank it off the wall, it won’t work. Another tip for unhooking the heater is to get some clamps, put one on each hose, as close as you can to the heater, without it being in the way, and tighten them

as much as possible. This can prevent getting too much antifreeze from spilling, but cleanup is unavoidable. It’s almost impossible to do this without creating some kind of mess, so keep a bucket (or two) nearby.

After taking out the heater, it’s important to unscrew everything from the floor. Typically there’s some thin metal down the middle of the floor to outline the walkway, and kickboards at the front and back of the bus. Pulling up the floor is some serious manual labor. If you have a circular saw, this is where it can come in handy. I would start at the back of the bus, where you can see the thickness of the floor the best. Adjust the length of your circular saw to the depth of the floor in order to “score” the plywood. When you adjust your saw, have the saw blade about a ¼ of an inch less than the actual thickness of the plywood, or else you’ll risk cutting the metal bottom. Cut the plywood into smaller sections in order to make it easier to pull up. Then try not to throw your back out, and pull up the floor. I’ve seen other people pull up the rubber floor and then the plywood separately, but we did it all at once. We used crowbars and hammers, by lining up the crowbar at the bottom of the plywood, and then hammering the other end to push the crowbar further underneath the plywood. The first section is by far the hardest part. After the first piece of plywood is up, the rest will be slightly easier.

This is what a section of my floor looked like after pulling up the plywood. As you can see there is some surface rust, but compared to some other builds, I was in pretty good shape. I didn’t have to repair any sections of the floor, as I had no holes, or significant weak spots. This wasn’t exactly luck though. When buying a bus you want to check for rust before you buy it. Here are some easy places to spot rust: Around the doors, in the wheel well, and around the stairs/front of the bus. You can also look for leaks around the windows and ceiling, which you can assume will cause rust. In a bus that’s been sitting for a while, it might be dusty, and if it hasn’t rained recently nothing in the bus will be wet. If the bus has been sitting, and there are spots that are NOT dusty, then it’s probably leaked at some point, and the water has washed the dust away. As far as the rust goes, it’s important to take the time to look at the bus before you buy it. Don’t be afraid to crawl underneath, look for weak spots or holes, and check the areas mentioned above as well as others for rust. Something else you can note is where you buy the bus from. More than likely you will find more rust in buses from places with harsher winters or more rain, ie. northern states. The climate is wetter for longer, and so it’s bound to have more opportunities for rust. If you choose to buy your bus from an online auction this is something to look out for. My grandma has always said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” so spend quality time before buying a bus so that when you pull up the floor, and begin your build you won’t run into as many problems.

Overall, ripping out the seats, and pulling up the floor can be a very rewarding experience after buying the bus. It’s the first time you will see significant progress in your build, and your bus will never look the same after that moment. With the floor gone, so many possibilities began to open up once I had a true look at the space. It felt like I had already put so much work into the bus, yet there’s so much more to come.

Thanks for reading, and welcome to the Sweet Life!

-Hannah