Vehicle Choice

How did we end up with a massive yellow Hovis lorry?

It’s not exactly stealthy, way too big to get into most campsites, you can’t just park it up anywhere, you need at least a category C on your driving license (which isn’t cheap), and its yellow. Really yellow.

I’d spent the last 3 winter seasons living in the Alps in a 9m long American RV. I’d been toying with the idea of gutting it and rebuilding it from the ground up, but after meeting my girlfriend, (we both lived in it last season) we decided that it was a much better idea to buy a lorry and convert that instead. So, we went to Australia for the summer, staying in a tiny camper van called ABE whilst we came up with a plan.

Our brief was pretty simple. We are very lucky to have somewhere to keep the lorry all year round, so we weren’t looking in anyway to make something small & stealthy. It will become our home, and as we’re not planning on moving it about a lot, we wanted to build something fairly large that would be a functional & comfortable place to live. The one absolute essential was that it must feature a bed that would stay in place permanently. We didn’t want to have to fold it away, or raise & lower it everyday, and it would be nice to separate it from the living area / kitchen. Having the bed above the cab like a horse box or racetruck was also a no no. Those things are great for weekends away, but not in our opinion great for full time living.

Iona came up with the design, then after some careful guesstimation we knew we were looking for a 26ft box. These seemed to be a bit of nightmare as we were looking at 7.5 tonners. Argos had just dumped a load of 24ft box trucks on the market and they were cheap! Around £4/5k but there was no way we could fit what we wanted to do into a 24ft box. Also, a 7.5 tonne wagon with such a big box wouldn’t have much payload left to play around with, and as I already had my C+E, or class 1 in old money,  we started to look at 18 tonners. I really wanted a Scania P series, but they were way out of our price range. Volvo didn’t really make anything that small so really there was only one option, the DAF LF 55.

Weirdly they were cheaper. I guess theres less people who can drive them, and less people wanting to repurpose them as motorhomes or horse boxes. Both Hovis & Warburtons had also just renewed their fleets, so there was plenty of bright yellow & bright orange lorries on eBay. However, they had 28ft or 29ft boxes on them. How hard could cutting the back off a lorry be?

The warburtons trucks all had a door cut into the side of them at the rear.

This would have caused us problems with our design, as we’d have ended up having to cut right through the centre of the door, leaving a weird hole at the back of our truck. They also seemed to be higher millage than the Hovis trucks, and the Hovis wagons had a really neat wind deflector and side cheeks that nicely hid the gap between the cab and the box.

We managed to find a seller with 3 Hovis trucks not far from us, and after picking one with a tuck under tail lift, the lowest millage and best tyres, after a test drive we parted with £3600 plus VAT and headed back home to think about what we’d just done…

We didn’t yet know that we were going to be in for one of the hottest summers on record, but we did know the lorry would be spending its winters being very cold in the Alps. We were going to need to insulate it properly.