Deposit down. Anticipation rising. Time ticking. Bringing our van home took a bit more coordination than we anticipated.
After the ups and downs of actually securing the van we were ready to bring her (him?) … home.
Our search for an automatic panel van taught us a few of things:
- Choices are limited
- There are hardly any small vans available below £15k (summer 2023)
- Pretty much all Norfolk vans are manual
Weeks of looking yielded very few possibilities. We spent a lot of time viewing manual vans just to help us narrow down our search. Even though we couldn’t test drive them, we could imagine what a conversion would be like in the space available and if you’re in a similar situation, I’d highly recommend it.
In the end, we found our van in Doncaster, about 200 miles away from Norwich.
Sorting out the details
Since we’re using the van for day-to-day commuting and as a campervan, we were hoping for a clean swap before the car’s MOT ran out. With it being an old car, there was some concern that it would fail the MOT and we’d waste money fixing it just before selling it.
Unfortunately, our search for the perfect van took us beyond the MOT deadline for our much-loved, squeeky, ol’ Ford Focus. Thankfully, and surprisingly, she passed! No added expense – phew!
The next deadline was the road tax… and no one wants to pay unnecessary tax. As an American, UK road tax is a mystery to me, so I left this one to David.
All I can tell you is it’s tax that is paid each year by vehicle owners and it’s calculated based on the type, age, efficiency, and value of your vehicle. As satisfying as it would be to say that it goes directly toward the upkeep of roads, it’s not that linear.
But I digress, we thought we had it all planned. The tax for our car ran out on the last day of the month, and we’d swap it with the van on the first day of the month.
As we got to thinking, we started worrying that we would be slammed with a fine since we would still own and drive the car on the first day after our tax payment deadline. A technicality which might have cost us a pretty penny. At the time we thought our only options were to pay 6 months of road tax (about £200), risk a fine (bearing in mind we would be driving and there are cameras), or pick up the van a day earlier.
To avoid these hefty fines, we settled on picking up the van a day earlier. Unfortunately, our insurance company wouldn’t adjust our policy(!) which meant we had to pay for 1 day of standalone van insurance through someone else.
What a headache!
(We now know you can pay the tax monthly so that would have been an option comparable to the cost of the added insurance.)
Bringing the van home
We coordinated the pickup around David’s pre-planned journey to the midlands for a conference. That bit, at least, went off without a hitch and I got to welcome the van home later in the week.
After months of consideration, debate, and planning… We have a van!!!!!
Next phase: the van build!
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