19/01/22 – Settling down
Coming back to the house we had previously rented and back in the area we loved felt like coming home.
We had until the end of July (the house was rented to someone else in August) to house hunt and find our new home.
We also had to finish sorting the car out and making sure it ended up on Spanish plates, as with now having residencia, you only have 30 days after getting that to start the process of matriculating your car. We had already started the process, but we weren’t 100% confident that we wouldn’t get into trouble still driving around on UK plates.
I was doing a little bit of work for some family members, just a few admin tasks. Nothing much but we had a little income coming in, and we also set ourselves a daily budget as we had money set aside for living on, but it wasn’t much.
We found out pretty quickly that we were RUBBISH at sticking to a budget, I think we went over most of the time!! But we tried not to stress about it too much, we had enough to get by for now.
Jon did a few odd jobs for some of the other people up on the mountain, mainly gardening work such as weeding and strimming. Again, not a great income but we were both contributing however we could to the household income.
We were spending a lot of time house hunting – at first it was so much fun.
But, after viewing about 45 different houses, it became a chore. We had the dogs with us, it was hot, and some of the properties we viewed were basically derelict! “Oh it’s OK” say’s the estate agent, “just needs a little work”. This was a house with a huge crack down the side which you could see the outside through!
We had a chance meeting with some neighbours, who asked us if we were house hunting (was it that obvious!!).
They knew someone who had mentioned they might want to sell their holiday home, it was only around the corner and he would check whether the owner might want to sell and could we go round and see the property.
We had also found another house in Arenas which we really liked. It was a little above our budget but the owner had agreed a little discount.
The owner of the house near us had said he would consider selling, so our neighbour, who had the key to that house, took us round to have a look.
I LOVED it! Considering it was a holiday home and not used much, it was very clean and tidy and not mouldy or falling apart, which is quite unusual! Campo homes here need to be lived in, if they are left unattended for too long, so many problems occur. The main issue was that it was fairly visible from everywhere, we wanted to be a little more privately tucked away, but this house really wasn’t!
So now we had 2 houses we liked, and we needed to have a long discussion about which one we preferred.
The one in Arenas was bigger, I think the land was about the same, but it was more expensive. We decided to go for this one, but it wasn’t meant to be and we walked away after going to visit the house again and the owner had given the local farmer permission to build a road through the land that came with the house! We were not happy with that, and when we walked away we both felt calm and not really even upset, so it was definitely the correct decision.
So now it came down to the house near us, the owner was coming out in April to collect a few things, and had agreed on a price for us to purchase the house.
To cut a long story short (haha after making it long), we purchased this house at the end of July in 2019 and have lived here since, doing little bits to it here and there to make it our own, and when our budget allows for it.
We are mostly happy here, the neighbours are nice, but next door’s dogs do bark, a lot!! It’s the same everywhere here in the campo, you sort of get used to it but it can be annoying at times.
Ok I’m off and will be working on the next instalment soon!
