The first photo we have of it is dated 31 October 2023. An empty Luton box, ribbed aluminium walls, a plywood floor with somebody else's decade of work ground into it, and two concrete blocks sitting roughly where the counters would eventually go. It did not look like much.
Underneath it was a 2016 Renault Master, bought secondhand with the last owner's signwriting still across the front of the luton. It's a low-loader body, which matters more than it sounds. The floor sits lower than a standard box van, so you can stand up and work properly inside one without the whole thing turning into a top-heavy nuisance on a Valleys lane.
We built it because we couldn't afford to buy one ready made. That's the whole reason. Each month whatever profit there was went back into the van, a bit at a time. The ten months wasn't a plan. It was the budget.
It went on in evenings and weekends and whatever else there was. David's staff came up from the office to help, which is how we found out that programmers are not naturally gifted with power tools. Coders by day, pizza slingers by night. The parts that genuinely mattered we handed to specialists who knew what they were doing.
Then you have to decide where to cut the hole.
That was December. You get one attempt at it. Too far forward and you're serving across the wheel arch; too far back and your queue is standing in the road. The hatch went into the nearside, framed in aluminium, hinged at the top so it lifts up and gives people something to stand under when it rains. Which, in Rhondda Cynon Taf, it will.
January was the part nobody puts on Instagram. Ply lining on every surface, a strip light and downlights into the ceiling, the extraction canopy hung, and the electrics run back to a consumer unit and a 3000W inverter. There's a photo from around then of the inside full of flat-pack, boxes of fittings and a set of plans taped to the bare ply. That is what most of a van build actually looks like. Cold, and slower than you think.
By the end of April it had stopped looking like a shed. White walls, grey safety vinyl running up the sides so it can be hosed rather than wiped, stainless counters, and white metro tiles across the back wall where the ovens were going to sit. Still a building site, with a step ladder in the middle of the floor and an angle grinder on the deck, but you could finally see it.
The ovens went in in July. Two Gozneys, side by side, flues taken straight up through the roof. That is the moment it stopped being a project and became a kitchen. Everything before it, every sheet of ply and every metre of cable, was really just preparation for holding those two in the right place at the right height.
On 23 July we parked it outside the unit with the hatch up and took a photo of it, plain white, hillside behind it. No signwriting, no branding, nothing. It looked better than a plain white van has any right to look.
The wrap went on at the start of September. Charcoal, with chillies and tomatoes across the panels and our roundel on the bonnet. The photo is dated 4 September 2024, which makes it ten months and four days from that first picture of an empty box.
The first time we opened that hatch properly was a scary afternoon on the little industrial estate in Tonypandy where the whole thing had been built, slinging pizzas for our friends and for the neighbours in the units around us. If you're going to get it wrong in front of anyone, get it wrong in front of them.
That was the build. What nobody tells you is that it doesn't stop there.
A year later the Gozneys came out to make way for two bigger ones. The boiler was recalled, so that has been replaced too. David has blown the fuses at more than one event, which he is never going to be allowed to forget. And the water pumps, I have genuinely lost count.
My family will tell you the van is my second home, and they're not really joking. Between them and our friends, we've spent more time in it these last few years than we have at home.
There are trucks and trailers and the gazebo setups now as well, and it's still flat out. Before long the van is getting a brother and a sister. David just needs to learn to drive a bigger one first.
It's been a mad few years. We love it.
You'll find that van out on the road as pizzavan.wales, our street food side, at pitches and festivals where people want to walk up rather than sit down.
Rebecca x