Vivvy the Van - Part 1. How I Decided on Which Van and How I Financed It.

Those of you who follow me on Instagram know I’ve been embroiled in a van conversion. I’m loving the process but also the moments of frustration are fierce! So why now? Well it’s been on my vision board for years and if 2020 taught is anything we don’t know what’s round the corner.

I’m going to be blogging the conversion and my trips in it and this first post is going to start on the decision on the base van and financing it.

So first off it’s important to say this wasn't an overnight decision - this has always been my dream. When I started doing wedding photography 10 years ago I did it for the travel factor and the idea was to have a VW to match my twee branding and chug around the UK shooting folks getting hitched. When I realised wedding photography wasn’t for me the idea of a camper van went on the back burner for a bit and I invested in a tent and a load of kit to go with it.

For four years now I’ve had an itching to work more on the road and have slowly been tweaking the architecture of my photography business for it. But with crippling debt and never getting a handle on my finances it just didn’t seem like a sensible thing to do. Somehow I managed to but my money elsewhere - I guess in hindsight it was feeling of not deserving it. It kinda scratched away at me - a number of notable bereavements and my own accident taught me over the years that our time on this earth is brief.

Anyhoo - here we are at the end of 2020 and my car was up for the balloon payment or the refinance. I realised the time had come - having had financial coaching with my pal Stacey my debts were all in order and well on their way to being cleared and really the question was ‘why not?’. The financial implication of a year of reduced work had to be considered but sobriety extended a large award here.

So in this series of posts I plan to detail my whole van buying and conversion process - when I shared that I had bought a van on the ‘gram I had so many messages from people saying they wanted a piece of #vanlife but didn’t know where to start - so it can inspire you to take the leap too if it’s what your heart desires!

Just a note - my Mac keeps swapping conversion to conversation 😃

The Van Choice

Ok, so. When the seed of thought came into my mind that now might be the time I literally had no idea where to start. I knew nothing about vans, or vehicles at all. For reasons I’ll divulge another time, from a very young age I associated motoring as a negative thing. A vehicle for me is an enabler but I’m happy to leave the specialist stuff about the inner workings to someone else.

I hit the internet starting with Pinterest and checked out some van conversions. And I had grand ideas of a whole shebang in a Sprinter and got pinning/swooning at beautifully designed conversions with showers and different living areas. And then I started to get real and remembered that this vehicle is going to be my every day vehicle too - I’m in Brighton so can access most parts of the city by foot or bike and the train station is super close but I had to be realistic that I do drive out of town to walk most days. Also, this coincided with me taking a trip to Dartmoor - I purposely went on a two week trip to sound out how I wanted my travel life to look and camping in a tent in late autumn isn’t a huge amount of fun after about a week. Add to that driving around those Dartmoor roads I realised I was going to need something pretty compact if I was truly going to enjoy the freedom of #vanlife.

So I started making a list of what my needs were and the factors to consider:

• Where will I drive it?

• Will it be my everyday vehicle?

• Where will I park it while travelling?

• How often will I use it at home?

• What are the essentials for the live in space?

• How much will I have to spend on it each year?

I started by looking at Bongos but I knew what my max budget was and the vans I was seeing within this prince range just didn’t feel right - I’m not interested in learning mechanics and felt weird about buying a van with high mileage/years on earth. I also started coming across the term ‘stealth camping’ which was super attractive to me.. A stealth camper van means that you can park your van on the road and it isn’t clear that it’s a camper - this has considerations on when you’re not using a camp site. I have friends all over the UK and I want to start seeing them more so wanted something that I wouldn’t have to find a campsite for every night.

Then I joined a Facebook group that was aimed for women with camper vans for sale and I just spent a good few months looking at what was available and weighing up the options. One morning in the group I spotted a Vivaro for sale and there was something about it that spoke to me - I nearly bought it but for various reasons it didn’t work out but having researched I was set on this model. An hour after I’d said a final no to this by I found another with a dealer in Essex and it was Vivvy! She was over my budget but the mileage was good and she was part converted into a day camper which was a big draw for me.

So why a Vivaro? Well first of all I liked the shape of them and the general consensus are they are decent vans. And I knew I wanted a short wheel based (SWB) because living in Brighton means parking is a huge consideration. Long wheel based (LWB) vans are slightly longer and I wasn’t sure what I gained in interior space made up for ease in parking/getting on ferries etc.

Then these vans were much more in my price range. It just so happened that Vivvy had some cupboards and side windows - when I weighed up the time and money this would save me it was a bit of deal clincher.

So, why unconverted over converted?

So, having read numerous posts on forums and Facebook groups and various blogs I started to learn about a conversion and started to wonder if it was something I could give a go. Plus converted vans are at a premium at the moment as lots of people are in the market having come out the other end of 2020. Add to that the conversions I was seeing just were not me at all - sure, the grey carpet and trims look neat but it felt cold to me and just not inline with my personality at all. Considering I’m going to be spending some serious time in the van I was a personalised space.

How much to set aside for the conversion?

You will need to take this into account in your budget - don’t fool yourself on conversion costs. At first I thought - how expensive can a bit of insulation and some timber be? But things add up, trust me! Especially when you start adding electrics.

I’m going to do a more detailed post about this figure later but my conversion clocked in just over £1500. That includes solar panels, a split charge relay system, a leisure battery, the sliding bed, all furnishings from mattress through to decor (artificial plants & bedding etc). But to be clear here I did forage materials locally so all the wood from the bed came from some builders doing a loft conversion round the corner and the paint I used was paint I already had. Again, I’ll delve into this in another post.

To calculate what you’re going to need on your conversion make a list of what you’ll need. I know when you start thinking abut conversions this can seem daunting. Here’s some considerations:

• will you want off grid (power without a hookup in a campsite) electrics? If so you’ll probably need a couple of solar panels and a split charge system

• what will you use for cooking? Will you install a gas hob? I saved on this by using a camping stove but I might upgrade later down the line

• do you want a powered fridge? Again, I saved by opting for a 12v cool box but will reassess getting a fridge once I’ve done a few trips

• how will you ventilate your vehicle? For me, the side windows were in so I just costed up a fan

My conversion list was:

Financing the van and conversion

My car finance was up and my plan was to sell the car to settle the balloon payment and use the remaining to fund the conversion and then I would refinance the van. But when I looked into a few options it turned out a low interest loan was my best choice - I looked at the APR on finance and I would have ended up paying more out on finance. An option was also to part exchange but I would have got a lot less for the car the way. I used Money Supermarket to check what was available to me.

So welcome to my life, Vivivanne, I’m so pleased you're here and let’s get this show on the road!

More posts very soon!