Just because our Routemaster mobile bus bar is all painted and polished on the outside don’t mean it’s ready to go. Also, I at this stage I was suffering with all the annoying jobs that get left till the end. The easy fun stuff gets done straightaway and really quickly. You ultimately get left with all the tricky bits, the bits you don’t quite know how to sort….GRRRRR

One of these very jobs was to paint the stairwell. the reason why it was such a total mission to do it because I did it at the end. When I build the second bus, I’ll do it first. To avoid over spray (or general dirt caused by prepping and painting) you mask off areas. Problem is, the stairwell accesses all areas. It took nearly 3 days to mask up. Once I’d finished I couldn’t get in anywhere. to then paint it was just as much of a pain because it’s such a tight space. By the end of it I was multicoloured and had a very sore arm and finger from waving that heavy paint gun around in very tight spaces without touching any of the walls.

Yes, yes! I know it should be red but the red grills get dirty and look rubbish in my opinion and so I’m painting mine black. Just a quick aerosol jobby but the prep seemed to take forever. The grill should also have a silver trim around the grill. Undecided whether I’ll add it. Watch this really geeky space….. ;)

The next few days I spent detailing and painting small sections of the bus. The wheels went black too (sorry purists). The wooden”life saver bars” at the bottom of each side got stained and I had to paint a stripe around it. Don’t kill me here people but I went for white. The stripe itself id called the relief band and they did various colours over the years. Gold, grey, cream, yellow etc etc.. I went for the obvious, white. It’s probably incorrect but guess what, dont care! ;)

I did toy with spraying the stripe on but I would’ve had to do so much masking up seeing that it’s right in the middle of the bis I decided to carefully brush it by hand.