My ceiling install went well, or so I thought.

I used thin tongue and groove knotty pine for the ceiling because anything thicker would force me to duck whenever I stood in my bus…I already instinctively catch myself ducking anyway.

ANYWAY, the thin knotty pine looked lovely when it was installed, BUT I installed it when the weather was in the 80s and 90s. In that heat, the metal of the bus was hot and expanded. When the temperature dropped in the winter, the metal frame and body of the bus contracted. The thin panels of pine are not structural, just decorative, so the entire ceiling started buckling. It wasn’t a good look, and I thought I had ruined my ceiling.

However, as soon as spring hit, the ceiling ironed itself out. So, this is apparently just something I am going to have to deal with as the seasons change.

If I could do it all over again, instead of drilling the boards directly to the metal ribs of the bus, I would have attached wood pieces to the sides of the ribs, then screwed into those. I saw all of the posts about avoiding creating a thermal bridge by drilling directly into metal, thus creating a conducting path of metal from the exterior of your bus to the head of your screw, but I figured the heat transference would be negligible. From what I can tell, it is. But, having the boards directly attached to the ribs means they are totally at the mercy of how the ribs expand and contract. Putting a wood piece to the side of the ribs might help only because my theory is that the wood may flex a bit more with the weather. But really, the only way to truly avoid this situation is to use thicker boards that wouldn’t bend so easily, then leaving ample room for expansion and contraction.

Then again, as I state in the video, maybe this is one project that you should skip my advice on…