Organising the move back.

The main issue when organising the move back was to find someone to bring all our furniture and possessions back. The internet was a necessity for doing this as it saved us a fortune in phone calls.

We decided we wanted a UK company to move us back and needed someone with the facility to store our furniture if there was any delay in getting the keys to whichever house we were moving in to.

After a lot of searching and enquiries we chose our company to move us. We were aware that we would be a part load on a large van but doing it this way kept costs down. This however, means it's less easy to get firm dates. All they would tell us was that the van would be with us sometime during the week commencing - and until the week before they could not give us a definite day. This made it increasingly difficult to plan our trip home. After all if we didn't know whether the van would be here Monday or Friday, how could we book our tickets for the Channel Tunnel.

We did, however, manage to work with this, and trying our best to keep the stress levels under control, we packed everything we could and waited for the confirmed day. On the Monday of the week before we would be moving back, we finally we're told our shipment would be collected on the Friday of the following week. The van would spend the week dropping off part loads as it moved through the UK, France and southwards to us in the south of Spain and would arrive at us as an empty van.

Having collected our stuff it would then spend several days reversing the journey and finally estimated arriving with our stuff a week later.

This meant I could now plan the drive home, book the hotels for the overnight stops on the way home and book the Chunnel tickets.

If cost is not too big a consideration I would certainly book a dedicated company that only move your stuff on the van, but by using a shared van we halved our transport costs which, for us, was definitely worth doing.

We moved within 4 weeks of deciding to return to the UK so it was a fairly hectic and stressful time, however, it was definitely helpful that we'd already done the move out to Spain ourselves as we knew exactly what we needed to do and could just get on with it.

Such things as needing cardboard boxes. Our time in Spain had taught us that whatever you can buy off the internet in the UK, Spain has the same types of supplies. By finding out the spanish for cardboard box and googling it, I found a number of sites which would supply moving packs, cancellation of services is the same as in the UK and we even arranged the re-direction of our post. Jobs that 3 years earlier would have seemed so difficult to organise in a foreign country now all fell in to place without any bother.

I began to realise just how much we had learned during our time in Spain.