Spain - Only A Pipe Dream?! Part 4 of Our Story
Friday, May 20, 2011 @ 3:03 PM
They say that everything happens for a reason. Even if at the time you have no clue what that reason might be! Only later, when reflecting on where we are now – beautiful sunny Spain - do we realise that if there hadn’t been a recession, if our business hadn’t closed, if we hadn’t tried every other option in the UK, we wouldn’t be here now. But I am jumping the gun a little bit. I wanted to explain our story and how we came to be out here.
When we finally closed the gates on the garden centre we actually felt a great sense of relief! After all, nobody could accuse us of not trying. We had worked seven days a week, giving up on precious family time and any hope of a social life. We had ploughed every penny we had into the venture, along with loans from the banks – Big Mistake!!! It was a very strange feeling, going from working flat out, to sitting and watching Jeremy Kyle in the mornings. We tried to carry on with the landscaping side of the business, our mainstay before opening the garden centre, but nobody was prepared to spend out on improving their homes and the undercutting by other businesses made it impossible. We sold our beautiful motorbike just to make enough to pay the rent and eat. We got up at stupid o’clock on Saturdays and Sundays to sell bits and pieces at the local boot fairs. We were surviving. Just! It seemed that life in the UK was going nowhere. For us anyway. We started checking out the Internet for cheaper rental property. What a joke! If we wanted a shoebox for a little less than we were currently paying, then brilliant. The rental market was taking off as more and more people were turned down for mortgages and landlords had carte blanche on prices. And despite England supposedly being the home of dog lovers – no one would entertain renting a property to anyone with a dog. Our dog is a part of our family and there was no way we would consider selling him. Then one evening, for a laugh, we thought we’d check out the international section of a certain property site. What an eye opener! For the same price as a UK “shoebox”, we could get a two or three bedroom apartment in Spain AND they didn’t seem to object to animals. But surely that was only a pipe dream?!
