As I started working on the ceiling, I reached a point where I would either have to put the ceiling in first, then add some walls over it, or do the walls first. I was not interested in lowering my head clearance any more than necessary, so I opted to do the framing that I had been putting off.

This included figuring out how I was going to put a door on my bathroom. I had grappled with this idea for several months and went back and forth about how I was going to do it. I saw another youtube skoolie guy create a pocket door that rolled on the ground, on roller blade wheels. I thought the idea of a pocket door was nice, but I didn’t want to do wheels. I wanted my door to be firmly attached to the frame of the bus and sturdy enough to give a proper sense of privacy. A skating door wouldn’t cut it.

The second lightning bolt of inspiration came when I attended the 2017 Seattle RV Show. Some RVs had these god awful doors that slid on heavy duty drawer slides and didn’t really close right. Most were just mounted to the interior wall adjacent to the bathroom, and when closed, would expose the drawer slides on the inside of the door and on the wall. Some of the “nicer” models had the pocket door in the wall, but again, it was just one panel that would expose the drawer slides to whoever was inside the bathroom. It took some mental gymnastics, but I eventually figured out how I was going to do it better. The Secret Compartment mechanism idea was my jumping off point.

Basically, my design is two of the fancy panels attached together so they would slide as one. The order of operations for the build would take some planning, but the end result was well worth it.