The day that Fern Evans had to hand back the keys of her Wrexham city centre bar and bistro she admits it felt like her heart was breaking. In 2014 the business, called Set The Bar, was the dominant feature of her life, with the doors opening just two weeks after her father passed away in October.
Determined to make the bar a success, Fern spent four years building up the business, including recognising a gap in the catering business in the city, with the vegan options offered on the menu becoming so popular that she phased meat out, and the business thrived.
But after working to excess to realise her dream of running her own premises, a dream held since she began working in hospitality at the age of 15, it came to an abrupt end. An unexpected and unaffordable substantial rise in the premise's rent meant that her business was no longer viable.
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But the experience was not the first or last time that trauma had suddenly ploughed uninvited into her life, experiences that have taught the 35-year-old a number of life lessons that she now values very deeply, especially as true devastation was on the horizon for Fern and her family.
Fern says: "Losing the bar was really sad, I put my heart and soul into it, it was my life, but in 2016 my brother Daron took his own life. It's not something you expect and I don't think anyone can imagine what they would do if that was to happen to them, it's not something you can fathom.
"My mum fell apart, as you would, and my brother Jamie - there was only a year between them and so they were extremely close - just fell to pieces. I think I was having to take care of them, I think I was more focused on how they were than my own grief, I just sort of had to get on with it and deal with it.
"I wasn't really thinking about my business, and it was hard to juggle it and to try and get mum out of bed. She was devastated, she didn't want to go anywhere, I'd take her to work with me just to have her there so she wasn't in the house on her own."
Fern had to keep the business in Wrexham going for financial reasons, with loans to pay back and bills to pay, and looking back she thinks that the daily distraction probably helped her through the early days of shock and pain.
Fern says: "There was stuff to do, I couldn't be sitting in the house all day because then I think it would have been a longer process. But it was a long time before anything at all started to feel normal again, because it was not just the event itself but the fact that his kids were left behind.
"Also it's the questions you ask yourself. What could I have done? What did we do wrong? It turns your world upside down, you just don't know what to do."
The Wrexham bar closing in 2018 was the next challenge for Fern to overcome. Whilst still working through her own grief and supporting mum Gaynor and her brother's children, Fern moved her focus to a premises in Llangollen in March 2019, but with a totally different outlook brought about by the tragic loss.
Fern says: "Llangollen is a good tourist town, good for a vegan business, but I made a vow at that point that I was not going to completely throw myself into the business, because look what I'd done for four years and it got me nowhere."
But then the Covid-19 pandemic struck in March 2020 and it was another moment of a change in direction forced upon Fern and her new business.
She says: "It was so up and down with the restrictions and the lockdown that it was impossible by the beginning of 2021 to keep going with the increasing family commitments of supporting my brother's children in conjunction with mum.
"I'd been through so much with the previous business, I'd lost it all and then I'd built it all up again in Llangollen, but with everything else going on I just thought, 'I haven't got the energy to do it right now'."
The pandemic and the family commitments merged into a situation where Fern decided to shift her outlook for the future, and it was not going to be based around a business at a fixed premises again.
Gaynor suggested in early 2021 that Fern should consider going mobile with her vegan food, breaking the cycle of being committed to one physical place, not having to pay regular rent, and giving her more freedom to work around the growing family commitments.
Fern says: "During all this time I'd done the odd market and food festivals with tables and gas hobs and such, and always enjoyed it and done really well at them, so mum said why don't we do something mobile. A friend took over the tenancy of the Llangollen premises, the landlord was fantastic, and he's turned it into a lovely little bistro.
"Daron's suicide pushed me to keep trying things and to keep going but at the same time it gave me the mentality of never do anything that's going to take me away from the people that I love and the people I want to spend time with, I was trying to find a work life balance.
"Talking about Daron's suicide, if it can help people, I am fine to do it. Knowing the depth of how my mum was affected, knowing who she's been all my life, a very strong independent woman, to see her basically lose all of that and become a different person from it, it does do that to you.
"The important thing that anyone in that situation needs to take from it is that it doesn't get better, it doesn't go away, it doesn't hurt any less but eventually you do sort of start to get bits of yourself back, you're not gone forever. You just need to try and adapt to it and try to live with it and sometimes there will be days when it will be awful.
"Sometimes the pain will come out of nowhere and it will hit you for six. There were days when mum didn't think she'd ever laugh again when it happened, she thought 'how could you ever possibly be happy again after that's happened'. But it's the human condition isn't it, after a while you just do, you have to get on with it or not, that's what you have to do, especially for the kids."
To move forward Fern began the hunt for a mobile catering vehicle, with creative ideas and financial support from Gaynor. Fern had one stipulation for her new project; very little or no renovation work required so she could get the business up and running immediately.
Horses boxes were quickly out of the running as Fern wanted more space inside her new vegan unit but a mobile coffee café vehicle for sale on an online auction site caught her eye. But on the drive to go and see the vehicle, it was suddenly sold.
Fern returned home and was not pleased, but this is when a series of events began that she describes as serendipity. She says: "I just happened to be scrolling through Facebook that night and saw a caravan for sale and when I messaged the owner he lived just down the road, I couldn't believe it.
"I kept saying, 'I don't want something that I've got to convert, I just want something that's ready. I don't want the hassle of working on it'. But as soon as I saw the caravan, that was it, it just changed my mind.
"I loved the uniqueness of it, the quirkiness of it, I've always liked things that are a bit different. Just seeing the caravan, there was just something about it, it's on the cusp between retro and vintage, it will be vintage in a few years.
"I went to see it, I fell in love with it. It cost just £400 so I was probably stupid, I didn't think about it as much as I should have, but the trouble with me is that once my mind is set on something there's not really much that's going to change it. I thought, 'that's it then, it'll be fine'."
But it wasn't. The caravan itself, which had only had one previous owner, was in a good condition but what lay beneath proved to be the cause of Fern's new business almost crumbling before it had even begun.
Fern says: "The body and the inside were in a good state, obviously dated and in need of a lick of paint, but in pretty good condition. The bed is still in it now and the cabinets are all perfect. Even the shell of it, considering it's aluminium, was good - there was only one hole above the door.
"But all of the underneath including the A-frame was bad, the tow hitch was completely rusted, and the chassis had rotted itself to the base of the caravan."
The underside of the caravan was suffering from so much rust that it was not able to be towed, and so stepped in the first helping hand - a friend with a low-loading truck.
The well-known saying goes that it takes a village to raise a child and in Fern's case it took a village of supportive family, friends and local north Wales businesses to bring Buttercup back from the brink of a future as scrapyard fodder.
The caravan was transported home but then came the challenge of finding a skilled company who were willing to take on the problems presented by the chassis. Fern says: "It took me a long time to find someone who would work on it and fix it, and at one point we thought we weren't going to be able to use her.
"I had different quotes from people and it was around £4,500 and I thought, 'if it's going to cost that much I might as well buy something else'. And some people couldn't even see how to save her, no-one seemed to have an answer."
Through Gaynor's work colleagues in the engineering department of the local university Fern found her caravan savours, Range Fabrications. This local, family run company was very enthusiastic about saving the vehicle and had a creative idea to solve the problem; a transplant.
Fern explains: "They didn't want to cut the whole frame off because they thought the bottom of the caravan would fall off, so they told me to go and find a chassis from a caravan that was about to be scrapped to do a transplant, not an easy ask."
Serendipity came calling again as Fern started hunting for an old caravan in the area that could be a donor.
She says: "I called National Caravan Salvage in Colwyn Bay and they said they had just had a caravan in on that day. They measured it and the width of the chassis was exactly the same as mine, but from a 1990s van, I couldn't believe it because to find the same width measurement is incredible.
"It was an absolute fluke that I happened to phone on that day and at that time, before they had broken the 1990s van down and taken it away for scrap."
Once the company had broken the caravan down to a shell, they offered it to Fern for free, happy that she could reuse it to save her vehicle.
Fern says: "My friend from KP Recovery came to get it with me and then we spent two weeks separating the caravan from the chassis using an angle grinder and it was very hard, my brother and boyfriend were amazing even though they almost got crushed by it when I was driving the chassis off.
"The fabricators then left the bars on and welded on the other caravan's chassis and only charged me £2,000 and these two companies saved my van."
From this point the birth of Buttercup, The Vintage Street Food Caravan began to visually begin with a renovation of the interiors.
Fern says: "It's a 1978 caravan and I wanted to keep the 70s theme to it, I wanted it to still look like it was in 1978 but a bit cleaner and tidier looking. Mum and I used a lot of 70s fabric and mismatched print and stuck with a palette of yellow, brown, and orange, classic 70s, and some green. It's very 70s throughout, quite bright, I like that it's a mix of patterns.
"I kept the two bench seats which turn into a bed, because Buttercup is nice for going away in, as well for work or holiday.
"Unfortunately I had to get rid of the hob as it wasn't gas safe but the sink is still in it. I stripped one end out and put in the work surfaces and the fridge and put a new hob in."
Buttercup was complete and Fern is very aware of how much of a team effort her van's revival was, saying: "So many people have helped and have just been amazing, and I couldn't have done it without them, especially my brother Jamie and, of course, my mum.
"Once Buttercup was finished I did a towing course so I could take her out on the roads. I wanted to take a proper course and not just go out on the roads not knowing what I was doing."
Just by chance as Fern was starting her caravan renovation journey, Plum Pictures, the production company who create Channel 4's George Clarke's Amazing Spaces, were looking for inspirational small space renovation stories to include in the next series of this popular property programme.
Fern says: "My boyfriend is a massive fan of the programme, so he suggested applying for a laugh. We went on the website and it turned out that was the time they were casting for the new series, again it seems to have fallen into the right time."
The production company felt the story of how Buttercup came into existence from the family's tragic experience and the need to build a business around a family in need, was a story that would inspire viewers.
Fern says: "We tried to fit the renovation work around the timeline of their filming schedule and kept them updated on our list of activities and when we were hoping to do them. They filmed almost everything, all the aspects of the work, including creating Buttercup's bright exterior."
As Buttercup's newly spray painted two-tone bright yellow exterior was drying, done by brother Jamie, Gaynor and Fern started worrying about appearing on the show. Even though the production team had all been very friendly and supportive, Buttercup was only a £400 caravan.
Fern says: "We were nervous on the day of the reveal and meeting George Clarke, you always wonder what people are going to be like when they're on the telly, and me and my mum were like, 'oh he's seen some amazing things on this programme that people spend thousands on, and what's he going to think about a little old £400 caravan?'.
"But George was impressed with it, and I was surprised, I thought he'd think it wasn't so good! We said that to him, 'we thought you'd think it was rubbish', and he thought we were mad. He loved that we'd kept as much of the original features as possible and also the retro shape of it.
"He was really normal and down-to-earth, he was chatty and had time for everyone, made everyone feel comfortable, it was a really nice day and he was lovely about the caravan."
The filming on the reveal day included family, friends and some of the people who worked on saving Buttercup enjoying Fern's vegan food, served from the caravan and enjoyed in the sunshine.
The budget to convert the caravan was initially £2,000 but ended up at £5,500. But what Fern has ended up with is a business that can fit around her family commitments.
She says: "Buttercup is the perfect way of doing everything, she's the perfect solution. I now visit local markets and summer festivals that suit the type of food I serve and now I've started to put on my own events, such as the pop-up plant based market showcasing local stall holders in Wrexham city centre on February the fourth. In the busier months I hope to work three weekends and then spend the fourth one with the kids."
And one thing Fern has noticed since taking Buttercup on the road is the reaction she gets from people who see her bright yellow van.
She says: "At first people thought I was mad painting the caravan yellow, some tried to talk me out of it, but I think now that everybody's seen it, it makes sense, and a lot of people are impressed with it, with how bright it is.
"It makes people smile, it's something unique and different so it will attract more attention, whether people want to eat the vegan food that I'm serving on the day or not, it's still noticeable. On my website Buttercup Vintage Caravan and across my social media accounts, the yellow visually stands out so well, it’s a good way of marketing the business, getting people’s attention."
In the past Fern says she didn't have a holiday for years, rarely had any time off and was always at work, but experience has given her a different perspective and a determination to change the course of her life.
Fern says: "After my brother passed, his children came to live with my mum and me and they are the main reason for doing this business.
“That's what's important about Buttercup, it's that flexibility to be able to book things in and plan things around the business but still have the time to spend with family because you don't get this time back.
"Daron's death has changed my outlook. There's no use having regrets, enjoy your life while you've got it, and you have to try and move forwards, and Buttercup has definitely helped me with that."
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