Getting around in a converted courier truck that’s also your house is all well and good, until it comes to the crunch. By ‘the crunch’, I refer to that moment when it becomes clear that you cannot pull up in the same car park every night of the week – at least, not indefinitely. It might work with a small, nondescript sedan, but not with a huge truck like mine.
If you park it in the same place every night, people quickly cotton on to the fact that you have no fixed address. That, it would seem, is an intolerable civic offense, and there’s no point sticking around waiting to be hassled by disgruntled homeowners. Point is, I’m now faced with the problem of finding a new spot to pull this thing up in every day. It’s not as simple as you might think, especially in Moorabbin, of all places.
It all started when I ran into an old high school buddy, who just happens to be a renegade truck mechanic specialising in converting old fleet vehicles into living spaces on wheels. Once the idea was in my head, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and when the lease ended on my apartment I knew it was time to get to it. Little did I know what was in store.
Maintaining a truck is no walk in the park, it turns out – you can’t just rock up to any old car service centre. Near Moorabbin, fortunately, there are a couple of workshops that can handle large trucks, although I’ve noticed a certain exasperation in the eyes of the mechanics when I bring mine in. As it happens, old mate who set the thing up for me took some dodgy shortcuts in the construction process, with the result being that it barely scrapes in as roadworthy.
Why can’t the aforementioned mate service it for me? Well, when he was done with my build, he promptly took off to the NT in his own truck house. The ability to disappear at a moment’s notice, ultimately, is the one clear benefit of this whole malarkey.
