Of course these savings are only worth it if you have the time to spend on finding, cleaning and fixing these windows. These windows will need a thorough cleaning and some touch ups to some of the frames but overall we are very pleased with what we found and only ended up spending $33 per window. We were lucky to find matching windows, only one odd one that is close enough to the design of the others to work. Many windows were broken or had smoke damage from fires, however Don was determined and we spent 5 hours in their junk yard searching through 100’s of windows and found almost all the windows we desired. We headed out to Johnson’s Surplus Store where they have salvaged windows ranging from $25-50. Elkhart is known as the RV Capital of the World, so it made sense that this would be where we would find the best deals. Our friends, Ivan and Sylvie, recommended we head up to the Elkhart area along the border of Indiana and Michigan where there are many RV Surplus stores. This was our ideal plan, now we just had to find affordable windows. On the drivers side, we planned to remove all the windows, reskin with sheet metal and install RV windows in the front with slides and screens (to help with airflow), with only a small window in the kitchen area and the bedroom area. We looked up standard RV window sizes and came up with a new design to remove 4 windows on the passenger side, reskin those areas with sheet metal and install double pane RV windows with slides and screens still allowing this entire side of the bus to have great views. While going back and redoing projects can be frustrating and waste money, in the long run we feel these choices are necessary to make ourselves a comfortable home. Unfortunately this did mean that many of the walls we already cut out and painted would need to be replaced to fit around whatever new windows we find. ![]() We were also realizing that it would be much wiser to replace more of the buses single pane windows and better insulate our walls. For only 3 double pane windows it was going to cost $4000. ![]() We were planning on ordering custom made windows from Motion Windows by Peninsula Glass Company, however when it came down to ordering we realized once we added the cost of shipping (doubling the price) this was taking us out of budget. Our original plan for our conversion was to only replace 3 of the bus windows with RV windows, allowing us to open these windows for airflow, and take out a couple more windows and fill the wall in with sheet metal.
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