savannals

In a major development in the get-things-out-of-our-house-and-into-the-van front, we put the solar panels on the roof this weekend!

I am very glad that's done and I really, truly hope we don't have to mess with the solar panels for a long time. Getting those up there was not easy.

Because there are a lot of bolts in a lot of holes, we started out by fastening everything together on the ground. We already had aluminum channel that we had previously drilled, so we just needed to put that all together, right? Almost right.

Even though I carefully measured everything and really could've sworn that the holes were in the right place, they weren't. So we had to elongate some of them to get everything to go together. You can see an elongated hole above.

So, we did that. And then we were able to bolt everything together:

I don't have pictures of the process of getting that absolute unit up on top of the van, because it was hard. The whole thing was decently carry-able by two people but getting it up quite a distance above our heads was a somewhat frustrating endeavor. In the end, maybe a couple hours and a trip to Ace Hardware for replacement bolts (someone went into hulk mode and sheared one of them off with her brute strength) later, we did it and I'm happy with the result!

I'm a bit infatuated with this pair of photos, taken about 10 minutes apart. This wrap is gorgeous and I love it so much.

I also spent some time cleaning out the inside of the van to get it ready for interior work. I parked it on our sloped driveway and ran a hose into the driver's side door. Letting a hose run into your vehicle is a weird feeling if you're a person who has mostly just had normal cars in the past, lemme tell you.

We've had some mud recently and there was a fair bit of dirt already on the van floor when we bought it. I didn't need to get it spotlessly clean, but I wanted to start out with a decently clean slate before adding stuff to the inside.

I think it went pretty well! Lots of dirt came out of the corners, for sure.

I let it dry out for a bit and then added the floor mat that I bought to serve as a bit of insulation and also to fill in the ridges on the floor; the underside is sculpted to fit into the floor's channels.

I also cleaned up the wheel well covers that came with the van and re-installed those as well. Just cause they look nice.

She's lookin' good and I'm very excited to start building out the interior.