We had found an apartment that we really liked in La Alcazaba, and we knew it would not be available for long.  Ideal, as it was close to my parents, but before we could proceed, we had to have sold Hamilton avenue. 

What made the move even more complicated, was that we also planned to buy Trudy’s parent’s home in Switzerland from Josephine (Trudy's mother) where Trudy had grown up.  This was to help her, as she was finding the house and garden too much for her to cope with and she wanted to buy a flat, additionally Trudy really wanted to have it.

The price we were getting was sufficient to buy both properties and finally we had a completion date by 1st December 2002.  By then unfortunately, the flat we wanted had been sold within 2 days of our seeing it.  Needless to say, we were terribly upset! 

Strangely, we learnt that the buyer's main interest had been to buy apartments at La Alcazaba, with the sole intention of improving them before selling them on, he had already done this several times.  Luckily for us, he found another larger apartment that needed a lot more doing to it, and he preferred to buy that one, so we were able to negotiate the purchase again. 


Emigrated to Spain & Switzerland

Because we eventually emigrated to live in Switzerland and Spain, we gradually found ourselves a new circle of friends.  Some came about from attending Spanish language schools, where we had so many laughs because of what are called 'false friends', these come about because so many Spanish words are very similar to the English ones and most have the same meaning, but there are some that do not mean anything like the same and can be embarrassing (for example embarazada does not mean what one would think, it means pregnant!). 


Buying Our Spanish home

The Agent contacted us (knowing we really wanted it) to tell us we could have it, for the price we had agreed, and that we could take over from the buyer's solicitor as most of the legal work was completed and this would mean we could have possession far quicker. 

We agreed immediately, but our concern then was the question of the timing of the completion of our own sale. 

Everything looked good, but we received a call on the day of completion, to say our completion would have to be delayed a further 4 days, as there was a chain involved and the first-time buyer had simply given his solicitor a cheque instead of a banker's draft. 

So, the delay was to allow time for that cheque to be cleared.  But we had committed ourselves to pay the next day for our own purchase and could not proceed without having the funds.  At that time no sale could be considered certain until after the completion, and our buyers had worried us earlier about the completion date. 

I was so annoyed, I took a chance and told our solicitor to inform our buyer, that if they failed to complete on that day, I would withdraw our house and put it on the market the following Spring.  Our solicitor said he thought we would lose the sale, as he believed it was no longer possible to be done on that day. 

Trudy and I spent the rest of that morning walking around Puerto Banus feeling rather on edge.  By about 2:00pm we decided to have something to eat, Trudy suggested I should check my mobile phone as we had not heard it ring.