We held onto the Astra Estate when I bought a new car last year. The thinking was that we would use the Astra while we were doing the house renovation and then sell it when we had finished. However, the Astra has turned out to be less useful than we thought.
While it has a lot of space inside, it can’t really handle the weight. I picked up a dozen bags of sand last week and that was really about all that you could put in it. It also isn’t that good with large bulky items (e.g. big bags of old loft insulation, old sheets of corrugated steel), so we have decided to sell it and replace it with a pickup truck. Again, we will only keep it for the duration of the renovation, but hopefully it will be a little more practical for our purposes.
It is a ten-year old Mitsbushi L2oo pickup – 130,000 miles, 4×4, single cab, 1 tonne load.
If you want to take a pickup truck (which is classified as a light commercial vehicle) to the dump, you need to get a special permit from the council. Many councils do not allow commercial vehicles into their refuse collection centres. So if you own one of these vehicles for personal use, you need to apply for a special permit. You can find the Kirkless application form here. It costs nothing to apply for.
Now the only problem I have is that the snow is preventing me from collecting it from the dealer. Ho hum.