I get a LOT of questions about
living in Pikey Park. In the style of fellow tiny house dwellers,
Click Clack Gorilla and
Tammy Strobel, I thought I’d compile some answers to the frequently asked questions I receive. Think of it as a little interview with myself :)
What is Pikey Park, where is it and how come it exists?
Pikey Park is the unofficial name we fondly give to the place that we call home sweet home. It’s on one side of a big car park in the ski resort of Meribel that has been officially allocated to van dwellers. It’s supported and provided by the police municipal. It’s an intentional community of people who choose to live in vans, who are fairly self-sufficient and who choose to live an alternative lifestyle, far from the madding crowds of Meribel as a ski resort. There are spaces for 17 live-in vehicles and there are about 30 people and 12 dogs living here. Eight people are from the UK and the rest are French. The municipal finally conceded that there would always be people coming to Meribel and living in vans, so they provided us with the current Pikey Park with full amenities to tidy up the van dwellers. Meribel is a really affluent ski resort and one of the most expensive places to live in France; and I guess to protect people from their own fears and judgements about people who live in vans, the police finally gave us a little space of our own to hide us away from them. And in turn, give us a little sanctuary to live peacefully far from the observations of everyone else. Plenty of people (who didn’t know that I lived in the park) have assured me what a good idea it was to tidy up the van dwellers, “because quite frankly, there were some real gypsies there”. If they’d been bothered to meet those people before judging, they’d have found out that some of the most successful, pro-active, creative and interesting people live in those vans. We are not gypsies in the derogatory sense of the word. In the positive sense, I suppose we are – people who live in homes on wheels. But that wasn’t what they meant - they weren’t congratulating us.
Can anyone come and live there?
Yes and no. There are 17 spaces, and priority is given to those who already live there. The people who live in the Park are a community of friends who have built their own homes; are willing to share and support each other with absolutely everything; who promise never to behave like dickheads to one another; and who are above all trustworthy and FUN and chilled to be around. A couple of guys from town came poking their noses round the other day (none of us know them – would you go poking your nose around someone’s house that you didn’t know?) and announced that they were going to get two spaces – one to live in, and one to rent out a van for the season to make profit. I can tell you know, they would be chased out with pitchforks and torn to pieces within minutes. Pikey Park is like one big house and each van is a bedroom. This is where we live, it’s not a fairground. It is certainly not a place for people to use as a letting agency; and certainly not a place to have a constant rotation of strangers coming in. Pikey Park is not (just) a money saving scheme: it is a way of life! The few guests and honorary pikeys that have moved into the park have been approved by everyone, and it’s a sort of unspoken rule that you have to know someone or be invited to come in. As
Click Clack Gorilla says about her Wagonplatz community; “The fact that wagenplatz dwellings tend to be wheeled leave many English-speakers tempted to translate the term as “trailer park,” though the term rings false in my ears as the trailer parks I have known were not neighborhoods based on common left-leaning political ideas, consensus, mutual aid, and autonomy, but accidental communities brought together by space and not necessarily similarities, much like the traditional off-wheels neighborhood.” Pikey Park is the same sort of idea.
The most frequently asked question that we receive: Isn’t it cold?
No! Is your house cold?! When we built the van, Pikey Park didn’t exist, and we never knew that it would, so we designed it to be fully self-sufficient in winter, so it already has a kick-ass Trumatic gas heater. Each van in Pikey Park has an electric hook-up, so we run two small oil-filled radiators from that, and we also have a halogen heater as a backup for when it’s minus 30 outside. We never use the gas heater and very rarely use the halogen heater. In fact, we are beginning to turn off the radiators too, as it is cooking in our vans – even though it’s still in the depths of winter! One of the oil filled radiators goes under our bed to keep us warm, and doubles up as a drying cupboard: we hang wet towels from the bed slats to dry! We also have a duck down filled duvet and a quilt that I made myself whilst we built the van. The walls, floors and ceilings are triple insulated and finished with ply wood panelling. We have a thermal windscreen wrap to stop heat escaping through the cab. Each of the three windows in the living space has a thermal blackout blind.
What do you do for water and washing?
We built our van with a 300 litre fresh water tank and a fully functioning toilet/ shower room, but we took out the tank to save space and use the wash room as extra storage for hanging coats and snowboarding clothes and boots. There is a shower block porta-cabin which has a tank of hot water that’s bigger than me; four shower cubicles and two sinks. It’s a bit like camping, except it’s like a sauna when you step out from the shower, due to another kick-ass radiator in the cabin. Luscious! Everybody is expected to tidy up after themselves – squeegee the floor and take out their rubbish – it’s always in pretty good condition. We use a 10 litre tank to transport water for drinking, cooking, washing up, teeth brushing etc. Ten litres usually lasts us a good few days!
And what about toilets?
There is a toilet block with two ladies’ toilets and two monsieurs’ toilets next to the shower block. It’s about a 50 metre walk from our van, which even in the snow is really not so much of a big deal. If we’re lucky there is toilet paper provided by the municipal, but otherwise we bring our own. There is running water in the toilets and the sinks. Someone from the municipal comes to hose them down and disinfect them every few days, and they are generally always in good condition too. After all, no one wants to literally shit on their own doorstep.
Internet?
Meribel-Mottaret is covered by a wifi signal (that isn’t the best, and isn’t the worst!). There are several options for buying internet time. I buy 50 hours for 50 euros pay-as-you-go internet time. So far, my first 50 hours have lasted me two months. It’s really handy for doing all the things I use the internet for: blogging, reading and keeping in touch; but because the internet is not unlimited, it also keeps me from spending too much time online, and instead I go out snowboarding or hang out with my friends. Or both, at the same time :)
How much does it cost?
We pay the municipal police 750 euros per van for the season. This includes the parking space, electricity, water. To do our laundry, I save up enough to make it worth going in the huge machine, which is 13 euros a pop but super quick and I can get pretty much everything I own in there! Drying all that costs about another 6 euros, so you don’t get much change from 20 euros to do the laundry, but considering how little we pay on rent, it’s all a-ok. Sometimes our kind friends do our washing in their machines at home, but it’s best not to put pressure on them as they’re busy, and we are not total skanks! Before we had electricity, we ran our gas heater from a gas bottle which lasted about a week when we had it on all the time. Now we only use electric heaters, our gas bottle has lasted about two months! This includes making endless cups of tea, cooking, and heating water for washing up. One 13kg propane bottle costs 25 euros.
How big is your van and what’s inside it?
Not including the cab, the living area is 2 metres high, 2 metres wide and 4 metres long. We have a kitchen with a sink and two gas hobs and lots of storage. There’s a ‘bathroom’ that has shower and toilet facilities, that we don’t use in the winter (but instead use it as a storage room) as there are facilities provided on the park and we don’t want the pipes and tanks to freeze (plus it’s a pain in the arse to get water in and out of the van on a big scale when it’s parked up for 6 months). We have a living area with two bench seats, that you can seat four people comfortably, and 6 people at a squeeze. We have a fridge that we use but don’t really need to turn on to keep cold (as we are living on the top of a mountain in the French Alps during winter time!); worktops and loads of cubby holes, drawers and extra storage under the bench seats. We have a permanent king-size bed above the cab, which is the biggest and comfiest bed I have ever slept in! The bed is a £300 frame and mattress combo that we bought for £30 on ebay, practically brand new.
Who built your van? How much did it cost?
Toby and I converted the entire thing ourselves about five years ago. It was definitely the most difficult and most rewarding thing I have ever accomplished. I still can’t believe we built our own house and survive very comfortably out here against the elements through the winter in the French Alps. It’s hard to say exactly how much it cost, but here’s a rough breakdown: £900 for the empty van itself. Then we realised the crook who’d sold it to us had neglected to mention the dead engine, so we had the entire thing replaced. Thanks to Toby’s Papa being an absolute angel, we managed to get a new engine for about £800 (instead of about £2000). It took the garage 7 weeks to do it (we weren’t paying much so they weren’t prioritizing us) which meant we missed the winter season we were aiming to head out for. Now that we weren’t rushing to get out to the snow, we decided that we’d make the living space good enough to last 10 years like the new engine would. So we set to work! We bought a caravan for parts and scrapped the rest (which paid us more than the caravan cost!) and then had an interesting journey of buying and selling caravan parts on ebay and at car boot sales, until we could afford and source exactly what we wanted and needed. A lot of the wood that we used came from skip digging and being resourceful. A lot of it was free, recycled or upcycled. In total I’d guess around £5000 and 18 months of our lives. I dread to think how many £££ were spent on screws, and how many kilos of them are inside the van!
Are you all a load of benefits-scrounging, tax dodging crusties?
Not at all – quite the opposite. One of the conditions for having a place in the Park was to have proof of employment. By making the choice to change our lifestyle and live in a community of tiny homes on wheels, we have practically eliminated the eternal problem of rent, which in turn relieves us from the rat-race of having to work just to pay to live. Owning our own self-built homes and living in this way allows us to focus our time on doing meaningful work that we enjoy. As a result, we all actually work really hard, but doing dream jobs. Amongst the UK community living here, we have 3 musicians (check out a couple of them
here and
here), one VJ, one artist and two teachers (one of them being me!). Oh, and we’re all really nice people to boot :) We all have the amazing opportunity to work for ourselves and choose our own hours. In terms of traditional success i.e. earning money; and in success that we are interested in, i.e levels of happiness; we are very successful in both ways. I think even our parents get it now, and are proud of us :)
How do you cope living in such a small space when you have so much stuff?!
Toby and I are natural hoarders and see beauty in beautiful objects. However, we did manage to do an impressive amount of downsizing before moving into the van this winter, and actually found it much easier when we knew the size of the space, and the time-scale looming upon us. We knew that it would be a nightmare to keep all our stuff that we didn’t use in the van, and the inevitable clutter and stress that it would cause, so we just got rid of all our crap. We kept a couple of boxes of stuff that we love but wouldn’t use in the winter at a friends’ place, although I’m sure I’ll find it fairly easy to part with it when I next un-box it. Toby and I have a lot of hobbies:
music;
craft;
reading;
writing;
snowboarding etc; which in turn brings a fair amount of stuff with it. We also have to have certain equipment for our jobs. We took our the seats from our cab and use it to store snowboards and things. Having no seats in the cab also serves as an anti-theft device (although I think that the wall of ice in front of the van, and the fact it’s an off-putting right hand steering wheel van may also help to keep it put!). We built the van with an ingenious amount of storage inside, and no space has gone to waste. Everything has it’s own home, and we spend a little bit of time everyday tidying up and putting things away. It doesn’t take long, because we don’t have much space, therefore we don’t have much stuff to put away! We also opt for multi-functional kitchen gadgets, such as nesting bowls and cup stackers. We each have a
kindle, so our entire library can be minimised into a device the size of one little paperback.
Do you ever get any time to yourself?
Yes. I go snowboarding pretty much everyday and leave Toby to sleep or to potter around the van. Then I go to teach in the afternoons and he goes to work at night (he is a DJ and musician and part of the brilliant
Bubble and Crisp crew), which is when I get time to myself to write and read and knit and do the things I want to do. We all often hang out at each others’ vans, so there’s usually somewhere else to go if someone needs their own space – it feels a bit like university halls – lots of time hanging out together, but always a place of your own to retreat to when you need some quiet time. Sometimes Toby and I even get to hang out together in the van – we cook dinner and watch a film or some episodes or chat, or go and hang out with the other Pikeys. We do truly live in paradise!
Do you have any more questions about Pikey Park? From the obvious to the bizarre, I’d love to hear them – please leave your questions in the comments box below and I will write another post to answer extra questions very berry soon! For now, sending you lots of love from Pikey Park! XXX
