Hi, welcome to the forum, you'll find loads of help on here. We were the same as you 12 months ago and I have been keeping a blog of our move, so you may want to have a little peep, it may give you some ideas, the link is in my signature below. (The other one is for my 2 cavalier spaniel pups with loads of cute photos)
Have a look at the articles, there are some really good ones. At first you don't know what questions to ask, so the articles are a good place to start, but then the search facility can bring all sorts of helpful threads.
We are due to move to Spain in 3 weeks time, and so excited, but like you are very disillusioned with the UK, and are fortunate to be able to do something about it.