Who am I?

My name is Debbie, I am wife to Barry & mother to one dog called Beaux.  Barry & I moved to Spain in 2003 after spending many amazing holidays here & fell in love with the culture, people & lifestyle.  We had a long term dream to move to Spain 'one day'.  In fact, that 'one day' was originally planned much further forward than the reality of actually doing it.

My father passed away when I was just 24 leaving my mum & nan.  Sadly nan died too just a few short years later, leaving just mum.  Not many more years later, my mum was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and survived for just 18 months.

The day after mum passed away Barry and I had moved into a new house which we had planned to extend & renovate and turn into a dream home.   We plodded on with life as you do, but my enthusiasm was a little lost.  At the age of 30 something I felt like an orphan.

We employed an architect & gained planning permission for exactly the work we wanted to carry out.  This is when reality set in.  Yes, we could afford to do the work, but we questioned would this really be our dream home?  Probably not, you see we get bored with houses & like to move around a lot, which means we were unlikely to reap back the financial rewards of this property unless we stayed for 5 years or more.  Additionally, once the works were complete we'd have no savings left.

We sat in our local pub in the village we lived and discussed again our intentions to move to Spain.  Barry suggested we could go sooner than planned if we sold the house with the planning permission, but did none of the work.  Another topic of discussion was the fact that 'life is too short'.  A very valid point, bearing in mind the death of my parents at their young ages.

OK, that's it then, we'll sell the house with planning permission, sell our business too & move to Spain.  At this point we had already purchased a small holiday home the year before, so we even had a property to move into, perfect.  Oh, but what about a living?

We did our sums & worked out with the money we had put away, plus the sale of our house & the business we could have a good life. Plus, to top up our income we'd do in Spain what we'd always done in UK.  Buy a property, renovate, sell it & make a profit. Some would call us 'property developers'.  The only difference, each time we buy such property, we live it in whilst renovating, then as soon as it's picture perfect we sell it & move onto the next one!

So here we are.  We are now currently selling our third property in Spain, but the recent recession has bought a delayed sale & greatly reduced asking price to what we had hoped.  That's life.

But, we'll plod on.

However, despite being happy and doing what we said about moving to Spain earlier than planned because 'life's too short', that has nearly proved true too.

In January of this year (2010) I was diagnosed with colon cancer.  I had  become extremely ill and was rushed into hospital for emergency surgery to remove a 15cm tumour.  We now realise the tumour had actually been growing for quite a few years and I've been getting on with life without realising I had cancer at all.  I've spend all of this year so far having chemo & radiotherapy, scans etc, etc.  The prognosis is now good and I'm looking forward to getting back into normal life.

Of course, some of my views have changed and this is one of the reasons for starting this blog.  Please join me in my future trials & tribulations of life in Spain.  I'd like to get to know you all more too and share our experiences together.

Debs.

PS.  Please introduce yourself and leave comments too.