For the past 10 months, my girlfriend and I have been living in a converted minibus instead of a house.
When we met, I was just starting to think about it, and she was on board straight away. She’s quite environmentally conscious, so the idea probably appealed to her for that reason. The truth is, we've never been happier.
We call our minibus 'Chugg'. It's 20 years old and we converted it ourselves, stripping out everything to create what is basically a flat on wheels. We’ve insulated it, put in a bed, a kitchen, an oven, a fridge, a shower, a toilet, a hob and solar panels on the roof for electricity and hot water. Basically, it has most things a small flat would have, but we don’t have to pay any rent.
Nick Hayward
The van pre-makeover
For water, we often have to be creative though – using public toilets etc. And we wash our clothes in a bucket.
All in all, the conversion cost me about £4,000, including the bus itself, and it took me about a month of time off work to complete. I don’t reckon that’s too bad in comparison to the price of renting or buying a house.
It’s a point of principle for me that no one should have to pay extortionate rent. Before I got the bus, I was paying £350 a month for a room in Northampton. Where I am in Devon now, you can get a top floor flat for about £500-£600 a month. I just think that’s disproportionate to what you’re getting.
Electricity and water are expensive too - especially as I believe that we as a country could produce enough electricity for much less. We’re an island after all – we’ve got wind and wave power everywhere.
I don’t really understand why people would accept a life of working just to pay the bills. Surely there’s more to life then spending all of your money on a house or possessions and working so much of the time to be able to do that?
Nick Hayward
I absolutely hate technology, so we don’t use much of it. I only have a phone because I need it for work. At the moment, I’m doing a job cleaning ovens – I need to be contactable. My girlfriend has a laptop so if it is raining in the evening we might put a DVD on. Apart from that, we find our own entertainment: playing cards, going for walks, just enjoying nature.
A big appeal of the bus for me is the idea of being able to live in a different place every week. But one problem is finding places to park up.
On a trip to Cornwall, we discovered that most car parks had overnight stay restrictions, but we soon discovered that people absolutely loved Chugg and we were flooded with offers from strangers to park in random places.
Parking attendants sometimes turn a blind eye too, if you're lucky. A lovely lady once let us park on her restaurant forecourt in Crackington Haven, and we got directed to a farm by two locals in port Issac where the owners let us park up for the night and have showers. It was so refreshing to see such kindness in strangers.
Those showers didn’t go too well, actually. What we didn't realise was that the shower was on a timer and we only had one pound. It ran out halfway through, when we were covered in soap. We spent the next 10 minutes absolutely freezing trying to get changed in a cold outside shower block before trudging back to the bus in the rain. Having no running water can be difficult at times.
At the moment we are just parked up on a farm Monday to Friday and we pay them £20 a week to stay there. They have a well we can get water from. On the weekends, we travel and park up as far away from people and roads as we can.
Nick Hayward
We're both on a saving mission at the moment. We’re trying to get enough money to get away from England and go touring around Europe doing volunteering work in exchange for somewhere to stay and some food.
When I tell people about how I live, the most common response is, “You can’t live in a van,” to which I just answer, “Well, yes you can - you can live anywhere.”
I think people are just so caught up in this consumer world where you have to have so many rooms, a washing machine and a bathroom. For a lot of people, if you haven’t got those things, they can’t understand how you cope. I think it’s about attitude. It’s about assessing what you actually need in life, against what you might want.
I think younger people today, especially, find it hard to differentiate between what they need and what they want. They have it drilled into them that they have to have all this stuff and they need to buy a house, get married and have kids, which is completely wrong.
Of course, it won't be for everyone. There have been difficult times. Trying to sleep in something that rocks like a boat in the wind isn’t great. Katy has mentioned that having two square metres to get changed in isn’t ideal and nor is having to keep your clothes in a box under the bed. I personally don’t enjoy having to empty the toilet – that makes me gag every time.
On the whole though, we just love the freedom. We’ve never been happier.
