THIRTY

YeLLow to White

If you're going to use a school bus for anything other than transporting kids to school you have to, by law, paint it. We were finally blessed with a couple days of nice enough weather to paint ours and went hard to get it done in one day.

Despite warnings it may look like a prison bus we chose to paint it white. Truthfully it was cheaper to buy white metal paint in large quantities then to try to get anything mixed.

Be prepared the process of painting a whole bus in one day is quite extensive. The taping alone took hours with three of us doing it. We decided to leave the black accents (lines across the side, hood, etc) so as to add a little bit of character after Phil completely vetoed any ideas for colourful designs I had in mind. Come on, who doesn't want to live in a flower-covered house?

Before painting we spent a few separate occasions with a sander, roughing up the yellow paint. We were careful not to create scratches that would show through the white paint but rather remove the smooth shine of the paint. We went through a lot of sandpaper and some areas we had to do by hand; the front of the bus has a lot of small nooks and crannies.

The decals came off easily with a paint scraper, but the yellow paint dust on our clothes seemed to linger.

With our first warm day we washed the bus really well to get off all the yellow dust from the sanding.

Phil and My mom did the taping, I was lucky enough to be teaching a yoga class.
​They've let me know there are way more areas to tape off than you'd expect.

We were racing against time to get the outside of the bus finished so mom pitched in to help. We used regular rollers and brushes, and though some areas needed a little fixing up to get rid of brush strokes, in the end the paint job looked pretty professional. Typing this months later I can share that we've had probably half a dozen people ask if we painted it ourselves and were surprised to hear that we did based on how well it looks. 

If I could give any advice to someone looking to paint a bus it would be this, don't rush it, pick a season that isn't in the winter! Other than that, the whole thing was pretty straight forward.

A comic celebration to end the day and the post :)

Luckily we got the bus painted when we did, this was the next day