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When I got the bus down in Virginia, it was filthy. I'm not sure that it had been cleaned in its twenty-year service life. There was garbage on the floors, the seats were torn up, and a thick layer of grime coated everything. Everything on the inside needed to go; seats, flooring, the original windows, even the interior sheetmetal was slated for the dumpster.
The primary tool in this task was my trusty angle grinder (at the time not so much trusty as brand new). The seats came out quickly; I ground down the bolts holding them in place, rocked them back and forth, and they popped right out. The rest took a while longer - the sheetmetal was attached by the manufacturer exceedingly well with large rivets spaced every couple inches. I had to grind off a couple thousand rivet heads and pound in the bodies before removing the sheetmetal piece-by-piece. You can imagine how fun the rivets on the ceiling were; mid-July with hot sparks raining down from above.
This left me with just the ribs and the outside layer of sheetmetal.
The bus needed a few structural improvements before I could really get going on making it liveable. The original roof was short enough that I could almost brush my head on the ceiling (and I'm not a tall guy); my taller friends couldn't stand up straight. It was pretty cramped. The solution was to raise the roof, or at least part of it.
My original plan had been to cut the forward roof free and raise it with jacks, support it with temporary scaffolds while I did the structural welding. When the time came, every jack around failed - every one either didn't fit, or was too short, or didn't have a way for me to secure it. I realized in the process that the roof was unexpectedly light. In the end I just climbed up on a step ladder and lifted the roof myself while my dad moved the scaffolding into place. We lifted the front of the roof first.
The result? From the rear wheels forward the bus stands 2' higher than it used to. I had enough room to build a loft extending over the cab and engine compartment and still mount my water and waste tanks in the heated interior.