Buying or even renting a new van will make household punters and even small businesses think you have too much financial success and think about price haggling and heel dragging (like a dog going to the vet dragging its behind) and will also make you a shiny looking target for thieving types....oh look a nice new van I bet it has nice new kit inside......smash....grab...
I had a friend who kept his stuff in a nice shiny van and he got broken into and cleaned out....he taped a binbag over the window and said he would go to autoglass on friday (payday) , this was on wednesday night.......on thursday night somebody came along and torched his van right right outside his window at the B&B digs...the alarm didn't even go off, first he knew was the lady manager knocking his door.
If I was using a van for everyday use I would get something in quite good condition (but cheap and quite old)and either clear out my tools every night in storage boxes, or keep it in a Garage/big shed... for going out to do maintenance on Banks, Big supermarket/shop customers/ offices at companies etc then a good thing to do is go to enterprise rent-a-car or somewhere similar and rent a clean new minivan like a white Astra van or a Toyota or something (you can get them without the big green enterprise logo) and use that....this means that you can have something that is really clean and shiny (which they will think better of) and it will be small and maneuverable enough to get into all kinds of carparks and side lanes that a big van like a Ford transit or a Mercedes would be a bit too big for...you can also get magnetic temporary easy peel signs that you can put on with a Logo etc, but you don't need those unless you really want as all big/corporate companies care about is that they look shiny....you don't have to worry very much about damage or scrapes as long as you are not on the corporate customers fancy office/shop site on bin day....bin lorry drivers will just clatter the van, and bin men will just drag a wheelie bin right against it, you won't get anywhere complaining either as its council and they can get away with anything...
I have been on corporate office sites in the city centre where they have told people (via a warning from the Agency office)to bring a shiny new van or preferably a nice car or forget about parking on site, as they were worried that an old van anywhere within visual range would make them look bad, its a corporate thing where everything has to look "perfect" for vain passers by who may well be customers or even rivals....
when we arrived onsite at 6Am on the first day, the security guy gave us a pincode for the gate to use the onsite multi storey carpark, some people came 2 and 3 to a car and a few brought their own vans etc.....at about 8:30 Am a security desk woman appeared and said "who has such n such a van?" and told the man that the front desk security manager wanted to see him.....he went down and they told him to get his van out of the indoor carpark as it "looked bad" and they didn't want it sitting there rusting away next to mercs and BMW'S....he took it out and drove it down the road but refused to "get it away" and parked it about 150 yards down the road on a pay n display road where we could see it from the floor we were working on (7th floor) he was getting paranoid about it sitting there (so would I) as it had a lot of tools inside and was going up to the window every 5 minutes and looking at it, as well as running off on tea breaks to drive it around the block and back again and pay another £4 odd each time for a fresh voucher (2 hour limit) well he was looking between breaks (about an hour after buying a 2 hour ticket) and saw it going onto the back of a lorry, so he ran out and the "parking attendant" complete with a shoulder cam and a big man attitude told him that it was getting towed because "a CCTV operator seen what you did, you drove it around the block and took it back again and you are not allowed to do that"...... so I think for those kinds of vain customers who don't want an old van seen outside for image reasons,it is better to rent a clean new van for a day or two, they pay quite well but if you look scruffy you are out the door, these guys even had a dress code for
workwear....
renting a van for this also means that you can take just the one toolbox or whatever you need for that day and take it inside the customer site with you, leaving the hire van empty...
