{"id":3145,"date":"2024-05-21T22:13:06","date_gmt":"2024-05-22T02:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abroadreachtravel.com\/?p=3145"},"modified":"2024-05-24T21:24:52","modified_gmt":"2024-05-25T01:24:52","slug":"we-bought-a-broken-van-the-van-life-diaries-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abroadreachtravel.com\/we-bought-a-broken-van-the-van-life-diaries-2\/","title":{"rendered":"We Bought a Broken Van: The Van Life Diaries 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Updated on May 24th, 2024<\/p>\n

We bought a van with a broken transmission. Not just shifting a little funky broken, but truly will not go into any<\/em> gear broken. Was this a good idea? Probably not. Andy and I have done a lot of crazy things over the years and this doesn’t even register in the top 5. The only crazy part of this idea was that we were about to own three cars and only one working transmission. Yup, you read that right. Andy was halfway through rebuilding the transmission in our 1973 Jeep CJ5. We decided that buying a van that needed to be towed to the house was a brilliant idea. *Insert eye roll here*<\/p>\n\n\n

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Why We Bought a Broken Van<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When we sat down to talk about what our next campervan was going to look like, the very first thing both of us said was, “it has to be a high top”. Lavendar, our last van, was a Chevy Express low top. While she did the job, there is no way we could have lived in her full time. Even before my cancer diagnosis<\/a>, we knew that we would be spending anywhere from 4-12 months at a time in the van, so we wanted it to be a lot more comfortable this time around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We also knew that we were going to be on a relatively tight budget for a full-time build. We decided that we could afford to set a budget of $30,000. This meant that we needed to get a van for less than $20,000 if we were going to have enough left to do a decent interior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the US, there are three major options for high-top vans: Mercedes Sprinters, Ford Transits, and Ram Promasters. After watching Facebook marketplace for a few weeks, we knew that the Mercedes and Ford would be out of our budget. That’s ok though. Both are notoriously hard to work on yourself if anything goes wrong. Andy doing all of our maintenance and repairs is one reason we are able to make all out adventures happen. That meant we were looking for a Promaster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We had three requirements:<\/p>\n\n\n\n