Invisible in Plain Sight.

January has finally let up again.  This past week has been almost all below zero.     Now after a day of snowfall we are in the low twenties.   As good as we can hope for, not yet a month into winter.  I suppose we got maybe two fresh inches on the ground with a slippery base coat under it.   I had a couple of job interviews in Arkansas last fall.   Ever since then on those really cold days I check the temperature in Hot Springs.   I suppose if I actually lived down there I might not ride on a fifty degree day, but up here in the land of ice I can sure imagine going down the road with the wind in my face.

To round out my living plan….  We covered what was not going to work.   Campers, too expensive.  School bus, too immovable.  Conversion vans, *too creepy*!   We covered what I want.   I want to be able to live inside a metro area for essentially free.  There was an answer out there and I actually stumbled into it more or less by accident.

Part of my life involves computer security.   In that business, we sort of joke about “Security through Obscurity”.   Something that hides in plain site.  We teach our users to call that “No security at all”, and yet all of us in the business know that is sometimes all you need.   At a certain point something is so common it becomes invisible.

It was an accidental extension of the conversion van searching that led me onto it.   A option called Stealth Camping.  It’s amazing, but there is a nomadic subculture of this country and it takes something like the internet to bring it together.  There are two branches of Stealth Camping.   There are the true campers.  Out in the woods, tenting it and living a Walden-least-travelled life.   But there are also the urban campers.   These were the people I was interested in.   And once I heard about it, then it made perfect sense.   They are doing camping in the most ubiquitous vehicle a city has.  The plain white cargo van.

I found that people are taking generic work vans and turning them into stealth campers.   Mostly these are people who work a job where they travel from city to city.   But, each city they are landing at, they tend to spend a few months there.  They live in them seven days a week.   I would really be more like four.   Hmmmm interesting.

Initially I started looking at the cheapest point.   Cable companies, phone companies, energy companies all buy and routinely lifecycle cargo vans.   They buy them new, run them up to a certain milage point.  Then they sell them off.   Carpenters, plumbers and electricians buy them up and use them for work vans.  They run them until they are ready to sell them.   Either they have the money to buy a newer one, or the wheels are about to fall off.  That’s where I started looking.

Cargo vans are available starting at about $2000.   For that price you will get a little bit of visible surface rust on the body.   It won’t be as bad as a comparably aged/miled automobile.   I attribute that the fairly rigorous wash schedule of many professional vehicles.   The driver of a cable van for instance would be on the clock for wash time.   Heck, I would even wash my own car if I was getting paid for it.   In this range you are looking at vans that have 230,000+ miles.

All used vans will have some holes cut into the floor.  Specialized equipment gets mounted and requires varying degrees of holes.  Before sale, usually that equipment gets pulled out so it can be moved on to their new van.   Or, if you are buying from a dealer, they will pull anything like that out and try to sell it separately for good money.  Seeing a two to three inch hole cut into the floor is very common.   The real key here is what happened after the hole was drilled.  —If it was rust treated and painted.   Even better, maybe some underbody sealant sprayed onto it.   If that is the case, you just have a hole to be patched or designed around.   But if those key things didn’t get done, rust will have begun occurring immediately.   Water can pool in spots like this.  By the time you are buying it you want to check very closely any spots like this.   It can lead to an overall weak area in the floor.  Common in this $2000-$3000 price range.

When I first started looking at vans it was with the thought I would actually be primarily stationary.   I was planning on keeping within a mile radius.  Renting a parking space at work and just moving the van only enough to keep it from looking like an abandon vehicle.   So a van with some mechanical issues didn’t really bother me.    But after looking at a couple I decided against this cheap of a van.   It could technically work as a crash pad, but not worth the money to make the inside plush.   …and baby, I’m looking for plush.

The next big price point is $6000-8000.   This seemed to be where the majority of vans lie.   Here you are buying something about 200,000 miles.  These are the vans where any holes got good rust treatment.   Lots of them in this range only had holes for attaching shelving.  It pays to still look it over pretty close though.   For this money the bodies are usually quite clean.   Most decent sized cities will have a dealer who specifically only sells cargo vans.  The one I went to had maybe a hundred vans on the lot.  Almost all of them were priced under $10,000.

As a side note, I don’t know if all cargo van dealers are this way but this place is the only dealer in town and they don’t haggle.   When I walked in the door the woman gave me a price sheet and told me to go take a look.   They were all open.  She told me to stop back if I found something.  There was one cable company van that looked maybe a little better than the rest for $6700.  When I went back in I asked her if they would be willing to consider something closer to six.  She just looked at me a weird way and said “No”.   Then left me to retract myself out of the awkward silence that followed.

All of the vans I looked at are the standard length vans.  One hundred and three inches from the bulkhead divider to the back door.  Seventy two inches wide.   That is fifty one and a half square feet of living space.  People are doing it.  Like the tiny house movement, a maximum amount of thought goes into design for compact living.  Every inch is thought out and utilized.  Most people build in a small galley kitchen with a cooktop on one side and sink on the other.  Bed in the back.   But I confess, it is a small space.  With the counters on both sides it only has a twenty four inch wide hallway down the middle.   It feels beyond cozy moving into more what I describe as closed in.

But here’s where something unexpected happened.  Talking about this whole idea with The Wife, she was intrigued.  It could be something to do with her being one of the cheapest individuals I have ever met in my life.   She dies for a good bargain.  So when I brought this up to her she was interested and not simply out of the politeness given a spouse and his latest wild scheme.  She was genuinely enthusiastic about being onboard.   She looked at it with the thought of the ability to slide ourselves into the center of a big city like Chicago on a Thursday evening.  To disappear into the background with free lodging for two nights.  Then splurge on a hotel for the final night.  To her, that’s a trip at 66% off!   It never occurred to me that she would think of it that way.   Twenty plus years and I still get a surprise from time to time.

Previously I had been looking at this with a best case scenario of… “maybe I sell this as a romantic mid-week get-away, and talk her into joining me twice a year for an overnight” to now she needs to be factored in as a design consideration.

Interesting.

Oh, and by the way, the five pictures that are in this article I took when I walked downtown for lunch today.   They were taken hardly moving my feet.   All five were within site of one another.   Were any of them living space?  I doubt it, but who knows?  I bet no matter what sized town you live in you drove by several of these vans today.  Did you see them?  Or are they just part of the background camouflage that makes up urban living?