Yes, you read that title correctly. The fridge is 30 inches wide and the doorway is significantly more narrow(I didn’t measure). The only alternative was to completely remove on of the side windows and hoist it up and into the bus from there, which worked out perfectly because we were removing the windows to be painted anyway. For those of you who saw pictures of the windows before, they were an odd light bluish color and didn’t match with the gray of the rest of the bus; the reason for this being that they were custom jobs taken out of another coach and installed into ours.
Not wanting to leave them that wretched color, we found a shop to paint them. First however, they had to come out of the bus. The first step was getting up to the windows, for this we thanked God for The Flash(our red, Ford Expedition).
These pictures are slightly out-of-order, but we drove The Flash underneath the window and two of us climbed on top of the van. The way it had to work was that we would raise the window off the sill and place on foot there and the other on the roof of The Flash. We would then lift the window out of the channel and hand it down to the third man on the ground who would hold it until one of the guys on top could slide down and help him maneuver the window into the back of the van.
You can hardly see that funky blueish color, but this is one of the old windows. It almost looks greenish/grey. Well, that one went into the back of the van and then we pulled around to the other side to repeat the process for the matching window.
Here’s what the bus looks like from the outside, looking through an empty window frame right now. It’s sitting in a farm workshop near Dunn, NC where a family has offered to not only allow us to park and work on our bus, but also stay in their home for several days. God is amazing!
Well, the windows went out and came back a nice ebony black color.Which looked a little like this next picture.
We pulled those out of the back, remounted The Flash, and put them in place. Now the bus looks more normal in the front. However, before we put the windows back in, we needed to get the new fridge into the bus. This was about 10 times a tricky and difficult as the windows were. The easy way to do it would’ve been with a forklift, however, we didn’t have one handy and so we did it by hand. You’ll never fully appreciate your refrigerator until you’ve lifted it, by hand up through a bus window.
So, this was the basic objective: lift the fridge vertically up onto the stepladder, get a guy inside and feed it up onto the window sill horizontally, then slowly pull it into the bus and then set it upright. It sounded easy enough, but those things are a lot heavier than they look. It took a lot of effort and strain, but eventually we had success.
Yeah, the bus is a mess right now, but the fridge looks great! Oh, and if you were wondering, it’s not going to stay there. We have a much more convenient place for it, I’m just excited we got it in. The fridge was by no means the most difficult thing we’ve done on this project so far, and it is far from over. But, little by little it’s all coming together.
So, there you have it. If you’ve ever wondered how to get a fridge through a bus window, you just need three guys, a stepladder, and a little faith that it can be done. I think I’m going to call this fridge “Mountains”, that way I can say that I had faith and moved mountains.
As always, thanks for reading, and keep up with me on Twitter and Facebook for more info and pictures as the building of the bus progresses.
–the anonymous novelist
the anonymous novelist 