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

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. 

The call with the offer on our flat came as we arrived at the van viewing, and there’s a large possibility that the endorphins of selling the flat so quickly, which got the ball rolling, steered us towards putting that deposit down on Boris. We wanted it to be the right van so that’s what we convinced ourselves. 

In hindsight, we should’ve held off and slept on the decision. But there you go, you live and you learn. In all fairness we did the same thing when we bought our flat, we got the gut feeling and made an offer the same day. Luckily it all worked out with the flat. Yes, it needed some work doing, and yes it was an absolute bloody nightmare, but we still sold up just 2 years later for a profit. 

We only discovered how much of a nightmare the van was going to be when we took it into the garage for a pre-MOT check. There were still 5 months on the MOT, but we thought if we had an MOT-like check and major problems were found, we could still try to sell it on with an MOT rather than as a fail. The mechanic said he could see that there was some welding to be done in places other than the bracket that I had spied when we went to view the van. Ok, these things crop up, maybe it would be £500 of welding rather than £300. But there was more. They listed some issues that may need seeing to in order to pass an MOT and be safe to drive. We asked them for an estimate, and they placed it at about £1,300. Now that’s a big jump from £300. The estimate was on the basis that all the things they’d seen would require disassembly and purchasing of entirely new parts. It’s also important to remember that this was based on a cursory look at the van off the ramp.

So, we ummed and ahhhed about it, and did our best to shave items off the estimate that we might be able to fix ourselves with a little Google knowledge. We managed to get the estimate down to about £800 by doing a lot of bits ourselves and looking for second hand LDV parts online. Anything less than £1,000, we were happy with. 

We were ready to book it in for the repairs but the garage recommended getting the MOT done first by another garage (as they don’t MOT class 7 vehicles) and they may pick up things they missed or may not see other issues as a concern. Fair enough - it’s sensible to get a second opinion!

So we took it to another garage for an MOT and unsurprisingly it failed, but with issues we weren’t expecting. 

As well as the corrosion the first garage had found, there was major corrosion under the front drivers wheel arch and it had a fuel leak. They quoted around £550 to fix just the MOT fails and didn’t want to take on any of the other welding. We thought it would be better to get everything done at once by the same garage, so we took it back to the first garage, informed them of the extra issues and expected it to cost around £1000 to have the MOT fails fixed and all the welding done, accepting that we would have to leave some of the issues that were classed as advisories.

It was all downhill from there.

The garage told us that the flooring that was down in the van would need to be taken out, so that they could safely weld the chassis and not send the whole van up in flames. 

Matt gutted the van of it’s interior while I was at work one day. The first thing he found was that the bedding and mattress had gone mouldy. This wasn’t from a leak or condensation, the mould wasn’t ferocious enough for that. We came to the conclusion that a previous owner hadn’t thought through the fact that you sweat while you sleep, and that mattresses have slatted bases nowadays for a reason. They had just used a sheet of ply under the mattress as the base, so it couldn’t breathe at all. So now the welding was costing more than we expected, and we had to buy a new mattress and bed base. Ok, grand scheme of things, look on the bright side of life and all that, we said “Well, these things happen, we’ll just have to change that plan slightly”. 

Mouldy Mattress

So we moved on to taking out the floor. Again, in the interests of saving money, we thought we would take it out cleanly so we could to re-use and recycle the wood from the floor, the insulation, the wooden battens, and be able to pop the majority of these bits back in where they were when we got the van back from the garage. That plan went to pot the second we realised that almost all of the screws holding the ply-wood down had rusted and the heads were shredding. So now we had to break parts of the ply to get it out. Then it was wet and rotten in places and wouldn’t come out at all. Then we went to peel the insulation out, and that’s where everything fell apart. Quite literally. As I was rolling up the loft insulation that had been put in, chunks of the van chassis were coming with it. And we really do mean chunks! You could see straight through the van floor and count the pebbles on the tarmac. 

By the end of the day, once the battens had also been pried off of the floor, there were only 2 places you could stand safely inside the van, and the entire of the middle of the van was not one of those parts. We arrived at the garage 2 hours late, and very sheepish, as we knew that what we were about to leave the mechanics with what was virtually an entire re-build of the van floor. We came away, heads hung low, knowing that our scrimping and saving had been for nothing. There was no way we could fix this ourselves, or bring the price down. 

It was too late to turn back. We would lose money from insurance cancellation fees and if we tried to sell the van on in the state it was now in, we would be lucky to get 20% of what we paid for it.

This is when we fell out of love with the van for a while. A long while.

Jenna x

Next Post: 5. No House + No Van