I mentioned back in April that the interior of the bus had been painted with latex paint and it was already peeling. It took several weeks of work to get rid of the paint, and even then we needed to make a special effort for some of the deeper nooks and crannies. Since we were replacing all the window seals, we also removed the windows for our VW bus painting project.It is incredible how much time, effort and tape it takes to mask off a project like this!

We painted it white, thinking that would be nice and neutral (plus not too much of the paint will be visible when we’re finished with the camper build).

Well, I hated it. It was so bland, so boring. And too white. We had already unmasked everything, so we had a serious chat about whether we disliked it enough to go through all the work of masking and painting again.

Even worse, when we pulled all the masking off, we found that we hadn’t covered nearly enough of the bus – the entire roof was filled with overspray.

Luckily, the internet is an excellent resource for ideas of how to get spraypaint off of cars. We first tried the gentlest solution – waxing the vehicle – but it wasn’t strong enough. Our final solution ended up being acetone. We were concerned about taking off the clear coat, but we didn’t see any damage to the existing paint when using acetone. Then we waxed it all after, just for extra protection.

After we fixed that mishap, we re-masked the whole thing (better this time!) and started giving the interior some color. We found a teal spraypaint that was almost identical to the exterior, and I just love it. I want this to be a space I’m excited to spend time in, and the teal paint is definitely a step towards that.

It feels fantastic to have this job done. For so long, we’ve been tearing things down and pulling stuff out of the bus, this is the first time we’ve put something new in. It’s the first step to building a camper we love!