This morning I woke up at 5:30am and decided I was up for the day. Short night because I didn’t get bedded down until well after one last night. But, as it turned out it was prophetic. I was sitting in my messy cubical an hour later and reading the first headlines about the weather coming in. It was just like hitting a switch. Seconds later snow started to fall, and fall in earnest. By eight, when the majority start to arrive around me, I was hearing tales of long commutes. People talking about leaving home early to beat the rush and being caught in the middle of it. Two hour commutes from the suburbs. I had to think to myself, one of these days, when I hear about bad weather, I can plan for it. Commute time? Three minutes. The time it takes to walk from the nondescript white van in the back row of the parking lot.
In hindsight I supposed I shouldn’t have been so surprised by The Wife’s interest in dipping her toe into living this way. For the past year she and Number one son have been talking about the tiny house movement. Her Pinterest is filled with well designed and engineered houses roughly the size of our existing house dining room. The examples of innovation people are able to pack into these small spaces are sheer genius and make such small places livable. They are an inspiration to van dwelling.
Number one daughter, whom I have declared to be my social media advisor turned me on to Pinterest. If there was any doubt in my mind of the popularity of doing something like this it ended as I started to look under the category of Van Dwelling. Did you know that Pinterest has a limit on how many people you can follow in a 24 hour period? It is three hundred. I hit it barely putting a dent in the van dwellers.
So my search for standard length cargo vans was putting me in the $6500 range. I had hoped to be closer to five thousand but what I had to give up in van condition dropped off quite a bit in that fifteen hundred dollars. The scope of the project really changed though by my wife’s addition. I am a great planner. Plans require drawings, measurements and layouts. I started putting together some floor plans and she was interested. But my head works fine in 3D space. Years of building and construction from a lifetime of houses make it so I have no problem visualizing how something will look and how I can fit into it. She needed something a little more concrete.
This is a good thing to do if you are contemplating a similar project. Even if you consider yourself a builder, because I confess, I learned things too. We laid it out on our bedroom floor. We had some boxes to simulate cabinets, we put some markers down on the floor to simulate the walls. The standard length van isn’t much space and that became clear to me. What became clear to her was being so closed in was going to trigger her claustrophobia. But for this project and yours too, it is great to build out a plan so you can imagine yourself in this space. If you have young kids it is a great time to play blanket forts with them. :-) Make your fort 103”x72” and think about how you could live in that space.
Here’s what I think. If you are one person, camping primarily alone (unless fortuitous), you can get by on a standard van. But if you are one person who might add a second person for a couple, maybe three weeks or more out of a year, you really can’t. That’s saying a lot because the two of us are about the closest married people I have ever met. A standard cargo van is fifty one and a half square feet. Think about that for a minute. Even by tiny house standards this is a very small living space. It looks even more disparate if you look at the cubic feet. At least in a tiny house you have eight foot ceilings.
With the addition of Herself to the project I had to look for a bigger van. More money yet. Extended cargo vans are tougher to find. At the cargo van dealer with over a hundred white boxes on their lot, they only had three extended vans.
All three of them came from the fleet of medical gas (nitrous oxide, oxygen, nitrogen, helium, etc) suppliers. They were three-quarter ton, 2009 Chevy extended cargo vans. Bodies on both vehicles were in very good shape. They both had six round vents cut into the cargo area. I guess it wouldn’t do if there was a nitrous leak and the gas couldn’t leak out. Your driver could get pretty loopy. Hence plenty of venting. The trouble was two of them were priced just under ten thousand dollars, the other just over. Almost twice my desired budget.
I was kind of caught here. I wanted to keep the total cost for the entire project between ten and twelve thousand. I couldn’t do that if I was buying a ten thousand dollar van. Still though, I felt like somehow I was going to have to figure out a way to do it. I took all the plans I put together for a standard length van and started blowing them up to extended van length.
And that’s where the project sat for about a month. I thought it was a good idea and could offer a solution to my dilemma. I didn’t have the money for the longer van anyway. I continued to read and research. At the same time though I had something else going on. I interviewed and got offered a job as director of IT at a University research lab. I wanted that job so bad. It would have been amazing. It was a cancer research lab. I would have been building a system to take electron microscope data (20 terabytes a day) and build out a storage system where they could lay their hands on three years worth of data. Still doing something important if not environmental. But, alas it was not to be and in the end I had to turn it down.
I mourned.
But then an interesting thing happened. The Wife sent me a text of a Craigslist ad from our local area. 2008 Express 2500 Extended Van $6100 . Huh, the game was back on…
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