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We knew that our whole plan with coming back to the USA was to do a renovation.  Part of the plan all along was to do as much as we could by ourselves, and as much as we could with recycled materials.   That doesn't mean that we're building a house out of old beer cans, but rather, we're buying all the old (but still good) stuff that people don't want and are selling on Craigslist.   If you're buying fridges and washers on craigslist, you need to be able to go get them yourself.   If you have to wait a couple days to borrow a truck, it could be sold to someone else, and if you have to pay to rent a truck, it's no longer a good deal.   So we decided to buy a truck, and ended up with a van.     We were looking at old Toyota trucks and found that even older ones were selling for $3000 if it had what we wanted.   But I wanted 4wd so we could work through the winter.  So I started looking at the Toyota Previa van.   They made them in 4wd from 1991-1996 and they can haul as much as a truck.   You can even fit a 4x8 sheet of wood in the back.   The bonus is that we can also use it for more practical stuff, like luggage, which you cant always do with a truck in bad weather.   We also plan to take a little trip up to Canada sometime in November, so we'll throw a bed in the back and if the weather is decent, make a little camping trip out of it. 

Right now, we've pulled out the seats and laid down some old carpeting so we can haul dirty stuff without messing up the interior of the van, which is actually very nice for a 20 year old car.   The other odd thing about this van is that the engine is located under the front seats.  If you're a car guy - that means is a 70* inline four.   If you're not a car guy, that means that you can fit a 16 foot roll of linoleum almost entirely inside the car, running it from the headlights, between the seats and all the way back.