Ambulance – Insulation Removal

Hello! Welcome to another blog post! This one is going to be all about the trials and tribulations involved in removing the pre existing insulation in the ambulance. I have also posted a YouTube video that shows all of the things that I am going to be talking about in this blog post, if you would like to check that out!

I really thought that this would only take one or two days at the most, but it ended up being 3+ days, and I’m not sure how much longer it will take past that. The insulation has actually been really easy to remove, it has mostly been the ceiling that has made everything go a lot slower than expected. 

Since most of the insulation inside the ambulance is fiberglass insulation, like the kind used in houses, we all had to suit up so our skin and lungs and eyes didn’t get super irritated. My parents and my fiancé, Alex, were helping me with this part and I am really thankful for that. 

We took some funny pictures before we started since we all had the same uniform on, and it was pretty comical. Here is one of those: 

We did end up getting a tiny bit of fiberglass on our skin, but a very small amount. I am very glad that we all had the suits on because it would have been so much worse if we did not. It was also really warm in the suits, which was okay at this point since it was really cold outside while we were working on it. 

During this first day, we ended up getting a ton of the insulation off of the walls since it was really easy to remove. This has been my favorite part of the demo so far, just because it was all so satisfying and I really felt capable of taking the insulation off haha. 

We also tried to scrape as much insulation off the walls as possible so we wouldn’t have to deal with it later, and so we’d have clean surfaces to work with, which was also pretty satisfying. I tried to do as many sections as I could before we had to go inside. 

We also unfortunately found out that a ton of wiring runs through the ceiling and that it was a lot more secured to the top of the ambulance than we had originally anticipated. This is the thing that made this process take more than one day. 

It was starting to get dark out though, so we couldn’t work very much more on it that day. We did have about 10 huge garbage bags filled with insulation that we had to get rid of, so we decided to do that right after as well so we didn’t have to mess with the fiberglass without the suits on. 

It was just Alex and I working on the ambulance the next day. The goal for this day was to cut most of the ceiling down and take the insulation out from behind it. We really only ended up cutting the ceiling down and that was it. 

Alex did that part, and it was a pretty tiring job. We didn’t really have a good place to put it after that, so we just left the pieces standing up in the ambulance. I also finished scraping all of the sections that I didn’t finish previously, so that part of the job was done. 

We did end up deciding that we shouldn’t take the rest of the ceiling insulation down this day since we were going to take it to a metal shop the following day to get the removal of the exterior cabinets appraised. We did not want to start this big job just the two of us and then not be able to finish it by the time we had to take it in. 

It was also close to sunset for this day, so we packed our stuff up, cleaned up a bit, and then retired for the day. Even though we didn’t get everything done that I wanted to, we still got a ton done and I was really happy with how much we were progressing. 

The last day we worked on the insulation was mostly just a cleaning day. I wanted to take all of the extra stuff out of the ambulance, such as stuff that we took off but are still keeping, and also clean up as much as possible before the quote time. 

Since the ceiling was off, a bunch of the cords were hanging down, so Alex taped those up to the ceiling to make it a lot nicer to walk around and work in. This is super temporary, but it made it look a lot neater than before. 

I vacuumed and swept and took everything out of the ambulance, and then it was time to take the ambulance to the metal shop! I didn’t expect them to want to take the ambulance that day, but they did so we ended up leaving it there. My next post will be all about the removal of the exterior cabinets! 

That is all I have to talk about today, thank you so much for reading my blog post! If you would like to check out the YouTube video that goes along with this post, I would greatly appreciate that! I’ll see you in the next one!