About Me

I grew up in New Zealand. My trade was floor laying, old school sprung wooden floors, ballroom floors, basketball courts.

That is precision timber work. A sprung floor can’t be ‘mostly good’, you notice the moment you walk across it and putting it right means taking the whole thing back up. So you do it once and you do it properly.

I come from a family of fixers, builders, engineers, racers, and dreamers. Messing around with tools in workshops is what we know.

I lived van life

I moved to the UK in 2018. I met Becky, my wife, in New Zealand, and she had to come back. I came with her.

We did not want a normal life, so we bought a van and did it up and lived in it. We are keen snowboarders so did a couple of seasons out in the French winter, then travelled around in the summer, what a life!

I know what works and what doesn’t and I know what full time van life is like.

Our very first van was a big Renault Master that we built, rain or shine, on the driveway. It took ages, we made plenty of mistakes, redid the layout a million times, but we got there in the end! Everyone’s first van can be a bit of a nightmare, ours was the same! It is on my work page, if you want to look: the Renault Master.

The workshop

The Smithy is the old blacksmith’s building in Llanfairfechan. It was derelict when I took it on.

The workshop mid-restoration: bare stone walls, a new blue roof going on, a ladder against the gable and a van parked outside.

Partway through. The roof went on, then the next day a storm ripped it off and chucked it in the river! We fished it out and it went back on.

It was a crazy project, a bit bigger than a campervan! The building has so much history and character we just couldn’t see it fall by the wayside and get knocked down and turned into a block of flats. New walls, new roof, new driveway. Plenty of work and plenty of stress, but it got finished and BB Vans was born at the end of 2024.

The finished workshop from outside: stone walls under a new grey roof, the original Smithy sign above the door, and timber stacked in the open bay.

The same building now.

It is just me

Becky is studying to become a massage therapist, so the business is me on my own. One van at a time, and every part of it is my work, the electrics, the gas, the windows, the heating, the cabinetry.

I am a registered Autoterm installer and a Webasto technician, a registered Fogstar installer, and I hold the STGW 100 gas qualification, issued by LPG Training, who are contracted by the NCC.

Outside the workshop

The outdoors, snowboarding, jiu jitsu and tech.

The ski seasons are why I knew what was being asked for when somebody wanted a van built round a pair of skis.

And the tech is why I care as much as I do about electrical systems. A system that is efficient and does exactly what it should is the part of a build I would happily spend the longest on.