Cramping In Style

We Did It!

After scrolling through several hundred yards of Facebook marketplace and Craigslist ads, we finally bought a van! Its just the first step in what’s sure to be a monumental undertaking, but now that we made our initial move, it feels a lot more real.

Converting a van was our big goal for this year; it will be our first major joint purchase (two names on the title, oh boy…) and the first big project we tackle together. And neither of us really know what we’re doing, so we’re sure to learn a lot.

We set out on Saturday morning for somewhere called Hugo, Minnesota, about thirty minutes northeast of the twin cities, to meet Joe, the guy who’s dad had just sold his electrician business and was in the process of liquidating his assets (read “selling his old vans to adventurous millennials). This would be the third van we’d scoped out. The first, which Taylor looked at with her dad, turned out to be a minivan; all the information on the listing was incorrect, so a big waste of time. It was too small and in too poor condition. The next one, while it was indeed a cargo van, was a bit too old. A 1994 ford E150 with 140,000 miles, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t THE ONE. So we took a couple of days off and set our sights on this one. It was blue.

Taylor coordinated everything for this one, so when we rolled up to the trailer/office parked in the snow, she asked all the questions and I wandered through the van poking and prodding. There was a lot of rust. And a really bald tire, but it drove well and had 120,000 miles on it; pretty low, considering these bad boys are supposed to last well beyond 300,000 miles if you take care of them. It was a 2002 Chevy Express (I had to ditch my loyalty to Ford, built over a couple of years ripping around in a ’94 Explorer that regularly ran bone dry after burning off all the oil and whose accelerator had a bad habit of detaching from the floor), and it was pretty much perfect. We took it for a test drive on the freeway, then dropped it off and went for coffee (almost leaving Taylor’s license with ol’ Joe in the process).

Taylor’s move, and a good one at that, was to take a look at the van, then step away, go sit down somewhere, and try to talk it out logically. Sitting in a Dunn Brother’s coffee shop a mile up the road, it was hard to be rational; we were both buzzing. We listed the pros and cons, decided to make an offer, and gave Joe a call. Before we’d taken off, he’d said that the lowest his dad would go would be $2,900, so we offered $2,700 and, after a quick chat with pops, Joe called us back to tell us it was ours if we wanted it! At least that’s what Taylor tells me. She stepped outside to make the call, so she might have threatened his life to get us a good deal. I’ll never know.

So now we had a van! A quick trip to the nearest Wells Fargo (6.3 miles away in White Bear) and we were headed back to Joe’s office/trailer with $2,700 in cash to trade for an old electrician’s van. We got the title, handed them a sealed envelope of cash (which they didn’t even count, bless ’em) and headed home with the van. Taylor got the first long haul driving it, and she made it home alright, so I guess it was a good call!

‘It’ Is a Bit Rusty

Day one of being van owners was a long one! After we got home with the van, we took advantage of the gorgeous weather (a balmy mid-forties) to take the dogs to the park so they could burn off some steam. Like us, they’ve been cooped up inside, hiding from the Minnesota winter. But as soon as we got back, we got to work!

We pulled the van around behind the apartment building and got down to business. Looking over the van in Hugo, we’d found a couple issues, mostly cosmetic, but we were pretty confident in the mechanical reliability of the van. There was a torn seat, some busted door handles, a door latch that required a very deft touch to activate, and rusty rocker panels all around, which is apparently par for the course up here in the Great White North. On top of that, there was a set of work shelves and a divider in the back of the van, taking up a ton of space. We had our work cut out.

After a couple of hours, we’d made a little bit of progress, but far less than we’d anticipated; we couldn’t remove the biggest set of shelves because the bolts were (surprise) rusted beyond anything my trusty Stanley ratchet set could handle. So at the end of day one, we’d already hit our first obstacle.

The shelving (and our lack of tools) had us at a standstill, so I removed everything else in the van that I could and took a peak under the rubber floor mat. It turns out that a metal floor will turn into a big pile of rust if its covered with a rubber mat that seals in all the moisture, then gets driven around in the snow for all of its life. Peeling that mat up about halfway, I got an idea of what we’re working with. We’re in for a workin’.

• 

•