We got a lot done this week

It's been a couple days since I've written, so there is a lot to catch up on. First, Dave and Gary took off the back bumper and welded on a new extended bumper which will hold the generator:

We finished painting the walls and the floor with the insulating paint:


We got the wood and insulation to line the floor and ceiling:


We got the whole floor installed:

It's hard to see in the picture, but i painted a smily face on Dave's back. Now he has a tan line from it. :)

Oh, and we couldn't have made it through the day with out a couple injuries:

Friends of the Crusher

Hey, we've set up a myspace so everyone add us :)

http://www.myspace.com/geekcrusher

Paint

We've spent the last 2 days painting the interior walls. It's sort of a grayish/whitish/yellowish color. It looks like a space ship. OK, not really, but we did mixed in this fancy insulating powder that NASA developed. We still have a coat or two to go on the walls and we're going to paint the floor as well. Since it's for insulating purposes, rather than aesthetic, the color doesn't matter at this point and most of this won't be showing anyway. After we are done painting we'll be covering the walls with plywood and thin insulation then covering the whole thing with sheet metal to give it a high-tech feel.

Week 3

Dave's been getting a lot of the technical aspects figured out for the truck/mobile office. I'll have to have him explain those in a little better detail since most of it is still a little over my head. We've got most everything we need as far as power is concerned: 7000 watt generator, batteries, inverter, etc, etc. Over the past few days Dave got the rest of the framing and the floor out of the truck and we started painting the walls with the insulating paint. To provide further insulation, as well as sound protection, we've also got plywood and some thin insulation. We will only lose about an inch on either side with this method, as opposed to the original framing and insulation which took almost a full 4 inches off either side.

Countdown to success

According to the fortune cookie I got with my dinner last night, success is only a month away.

Happy Friday

It is Friday, isn't it? I don't really keep track of the days anymore. We work everyday, so there isn't really much need to keep track.

Dave's made some progress tearing out the walls. We dropped the truck off to have it serviced so we haven't been able to get much done the last couple of days. We're also waiting for the insulating paint to come. It's supposed to be here today. Once we get the whole thing painted then we can really start to get the whole thing put back together again.

Making progress

Dave's been making a lot of progress getting everything taken out of the (still nameless) truck. Now that most everything is out we have a lot more space to work with. We're in the process of rounding up supplies and trying to figure out the most efficient way to set everything up. We found this insulating paint we are going to use to save space rather than using regular insulation.

I guess I'll just keep this short and just post the pictures.

Naming the beast

It needs a name. It's way too cool to just refer to it as "the truck" or the "mobile office."

Nothing brilliant has come to mind yet.

A few suggestions that have been motioned so far:

Mo: Sort of an acronym for 'mobile office'. I'm usually anti-acronym, but since it is pronounced "Moe" rather than spelled out M-O, I think I could handle it.

Geek Crusher: Dave's brother suggested this one. I liked it enough to use it as the blog title. Maybe we could just call it "The Crusher" for short or something.

Archie: Short for our original business name,
Archetype Development - we are merging with another company and creating a new company with a new name, so it would sort of be a reminder of where we started.

Nothing is really sticking yet. We are looking for suggestions. What have you got, huh? Name the beast.

Demolition part one

I'll let the pictures tell most of the story on this one, but basically Dave is tearing apart the beast. We (when i say "we" I really mean "Dave") are pretty much gutting it (which is sad, because it was pretty damn cool to begin with, just not exactly fitting to our needs) so we can completely remodel it. Here is how day 1 of the demolition has been going:

A little background

So who are we anyway?

I'm Andrea Thornton (age 25), and Dave Wall (age 22) is my business partner. We currently live in Salt Lake City, Utah. We are both young, adventurous and spontaneous. We knew early on the office life wasn't for us. We're both crazy enough to decide to create a mobile office that will allow us to travel the country on a perma-road trip. Our friends think we are weird. My roommate even refers to it as the "giant ice cream truck." So maybe we are a little weird. At least we aren't boring. And at least we aren't wasting away the best years of our lives in a cubicle answering to a boss.

So what do we do?

It was a family vacation in Belize that first made me realize that the internet was the way to go. We were on a tour bus driving through a little village. Amongst the tin shacks and run down houses was an internet cafe. It was that moment that I realized I didn't need to sit in a stuffy cubicle to be productive. I could be at an internet cafe in a tropical village. I could be on the beach. I could be anywhere.

I started out in web design and then learned the in's and out's of e-commerce and internet marketing. Now we build internet companies ranging in everything from women's golf equipment to collectible cookie jars. And the best part is: We are portable. And the truck is just the beginning. Why stop there? How about a house boat office? Or a flying office?

How'd we come up with this crazy idea anyway?

Back in the very Early days of Archetype Development we came across a 1976 Bluebird school bus for sale on Craigslist.org for $500. We really had no practically use for this 90 passenger monstrosity, but really, who could pass up something like this? We got to work cleaning it out and prepping it for conversion into to ultimate snowboarding roadtrip mobile party bus. The problem was, it was too big to park anywhere even remotely near us so working on it became sort of a back-burner project and most of our free-time was dedicated to building up Archetype Development.

It was Dave who came up with the idea to turn it into a mobile office. It would take a lot of work and money, so we decided maybe it would be better to start on a smaller, more usable vehicle. Something newer than '76 seemed like a smart idea too. The bus sat for a year while we figured out what to do with it. It was just too big to ever be practical so we ended up selling it and put the money towards finding something better.

First things first

I'm not much for writing. I never know quite how to start. I'd start at the beginning, but that was almost a year ago and I tend to get myself too concerned with the tiny details, so if I just started at the beginning this would go on way too long. I guess I'll just sum up the basic concept of who we are and what we are doing.

First of all, my name is Andrea. Dave is my business partner. We shared one common dream: freedom. Our goal was to create a situation where we could be free from the confines of a regular 9-5 office job. We wanted to be able to enjoy our young years traveling the country, snowboarding, sightseeing and adventuring without having to pinch pennies, save up vacation time, catch up on missed work or wait until retirement to enjoy our freedom. Our solution? Take work with us on our journey. We started our own company a little over a year ago - I'll get into the details of that later. Being young and unfunded (I'm 25 and Dave is 22) we didn't have a lot of money to work with. We put everything we had into building up the company and finally as of last week we had gathered enough money to make the first purchase that would make this dream of freedom a reality: an old Praxair truck.
Now this may not look like much to be excited about to you, but for us, this was the ticket to freedom. It had already been converted into a motorhome. It had shelving, a sink, fridge, etc. We scored the thing for $3095. Our ultimate plans for it involve super space-optimized work stations, bathroom, and sleeping areas, so we have a lot of work to do.

This blog is a place for us to document our progress and our adventures.





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