Recycling the Vintage Magazine Racks

We hope to be hitting the road in the Robbiebago motorhome for our first trial run within weeks. It has been a long hard struggle with many suppliers and trades people not meeting their own time frames but we will get there eventually.

Meanwhile, Rob & I can still find things to do. One of my projects was to take the old vintage magazine racks that were on the backs of the chairs of the bus and recover them.

I have done 8 of them so far. I recovered the top part with various coordinating upholstery fabrics that fit within my colour scheme of green and burgundy. (Rob would be horrified if I went with pink!)

I played around with dyeing the netting but decided to leave them the original burgundy colour but I had to recover the faded velvet top.

The original magazine racks with the cup holders above.

These will be scattered throughout the motorhome. Here is one of them up in the motorhome under the dash near the front door.

I love to recycle things when I can. Everyone needs a stylish magazine rack, am I right?  I still have maybe a dozen left over. I am wondering if I can use them somewhere else. Maybe I will list them for sale on Ebay when we come back from our trip if I haven't thought of anything else.

So what do you think of my 'new' retro magazine racks now?

Under the dashboard

When we redesigned the dashboard, it gave us the opportunity to create custom storage areas under the dashboard, in and around various things.

Some of the stuff we'd rarely need to get to such as the electrics for the headlights. However we still need to be able to access it occasionally. So we had to consider designs that enable us to remove a wall or create some other sort access or door to still get at these areas if and when needed sometime in the future.

We have installed open shelving that slopes back and down gently and the big round 'disk' is an access hole which we are considering inserting a radio or such sometime in the future. Already we have installed a reversing camera/GPS  on the top of the clutch cover.

Front area includes some shelving that slopes down and back gently!

I just love storage and cubby holes - the more the better in my opinion. Some we don't know what we will do with it until we actually get the motorhome on the road but I am sure I will find a use for each and every spot Rob can  create for me.

If you look at the extreme left on the top photo you can see what appears to be a flat area or maybe you thought it was a step. but actually it is a lid for the box housing the 3,000 watt inverter. We did take up a narrow part of the wide steps for this. There is a opening at the front for air circulation. The lid will allow Rob to access the inverter if it needs tweaking or whatever.

The inverter being placed before being encased!

I have also jazzed up some of the vintage magazine racks and have yet to decide if we can fit one of these here too! Maybe under the grab handle.  The others I will be scattering them around the motorhome.

Redesigning the Dashboard

The original dashboard was quite ugly. There were equipment that we didn't want to keep and as it was you could see the mess of wires etc. We wanted to utilize every scrap of space possible and that included making the most of the area around the dashboard and the front area as well as make it look much nicer than it was.

The dash board as it was when we bought the bus

Rob decided that we would redesign the front area with plywood and cover it with vinyl for looks. We kept the angular lines for practicality. He measured and cut the plywood, taking into account the air vents and the accessibility to the clutch fluid so we can top it up as needed. You can see the circle cut in the top of the plywood in the photo above. We used a 6 inch cover plate - generally used for sewer pipes.

Fitting the plywood top.

We painted the plywood, only because it took a while finding a supplier for the vinyl also gave me an idea of what the contrast would look like before going to the effort of the vinyl covering.

The painted dashboard with the clutch fluid access hole

The air vents on top were taken out, repaired and  spray painted black.
Eventually we found a supplier for the vinyl. We ordered a dark hunter green and it duly arrived. 
We glued dense foam (from Clarks Rubber) to the plywood and then glued and stapled the vinyl to the foam after cutting holes for the air vents and clutch cover.

 

The new looking air vents were screwed back in place on top.
We have added the screen for the reversing camera to the clutch cover. We also added a grab handle for getting in and out especially as we can't stop the clock we have to admit we are getting older. (But shush... don't tell anyone I admitted that!)

So all  up we have a great looking dashboard... next blog post is about the area under dashboard!