Diary: 3. Finding The Right Van

Buy, buy, buy, sell, sell, sell! 

There were just two things on our minds this month. Buying the van, and selling the flat. If we weren’t cleaning the flat and doing glasswork on the skirting boards, we were trawling the internet for suitable vans. We still hadn’t decided on whether to buy a fully kitted out van and just change layout or decorations to suit us, or whether or not to buy a completely empty, un-ply-lined tin can, and start entirely from scratch. The hope being that we could purchase a better base vehicle, and scrimp and scrounge to find building materials for the interior. 

We used Gumtree, E-bay, Pre-Loved and AutoTrader (which I found by chance has it’s own dedicated camper van tab in the top left! Extremely helpful, even if just to nose about a few!). Twice a day, nearly every day, I would set the filters to ‘Most Recent First’, type in ‘Van’ and scroll through. The first few days were tough, and the vans all became a bit of a blur, as there were weeks worth of posts to get through. Once that was done though, I would know I only needed to go back a maximum of 12 hours since posting to know it was a van that we hadn’t seen yet. 

After laboriously searching through listings (sometime cheekily at work), we thought we were in luck. There was a Renault Transporter on Gumtree, clearly from the 90’s, but full of character. It was smaller than what we had in mind but it was fully converted, had loads of extras and was a very good price. We contacted the sellers, who were in for a quick sale as they had already bought their plane tickets home to New Zealand. 

We exchanged messages back and forth, and found out they would be back in Essex on Thursday. The only issue was, we were both working Thursday. There was potential to haul ass down to Essex on Friday night, but that was the best we could do. We arranged this with the sellers, but before we set off on the 100 mile drive, Matt gave them a quick call to give them an ETA. It was a blow to hear that they had accepted a deposit from someone who had managed to see the van that morning. Damn! We asked to be kept in the loop, as if it fell through, we would still be able to go and have a look at the van on Saturday morning. 

It didn't fall through, so back on the hunt we went, and it wasn’t long before we found ‘Boris’.

He was on Gumtree, a massive extra tall LDV with a long wheel base and bags of character. I got that gut feeling when you fall in love and will stick by your feelings through thick and thin. The van was about 70 miles away in Chelmsford, so we organised to drive down and see it the next day. The interior wasn’t the kind of layout we were after, but it had been fully insulated and ply-lined, and we knew that we could likely recycle anything that we dismantle. It had a bed with bedding and a foam mattress, plus solar panel and leisure batteries, so we reckoned it was a good bet.

As we arrived at the viewing of our potential new European home, Matt got a call from an estate agent. The agent we were selling the flat with never seemed to call through on the same number, so we thought it would just be a marketing call from another agent who had seen we were selling.

That phone call turned out to be an offer on our flat! We had only conducted 3 viewings, 2 of which were to the same woman. This offer could potentially mean that our flat had gone on the market and sold in the same week. 

After exchanging some niceties and having a general look around, I got a rug and a torch, and spent 20 minutes underneath the van looking for any mischief. Apart from a little surface rust and a bracket that needed to be welded back on, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong that wouldn’t be expected of a 17 year old van with 122,000 miles on the clock.

Once we had been for a test drive, we asked our questions, had some lovely cups of tea and decided to put a cash deposit down. We negotiated £300 off the asking price to pay for the bracket to be welded, satisfied that we had snatched a pretty good deal.

The owners had called it Boris but it struck us as more of a Keith, so we decided to name it Keith Borison.

We left full of excitement, searching our calendars for a day we could come down and drive it home. It felt like fate. We had managed to sell our home and buy a new one within the same hour.

And that’s where the good news about the van ended….

Jenna x

Next Post: 4. Our New Van - Had We Made A Mistake?