Completion Day

Good things come to those that wait... 8 months to be precise. In those 8 months we experienced the joy of being given the initial thumbs up for our dream from the bank, the heart break of our first property falling through; renewed excitement at finding our second; a cardiac arrest near miss when the call from the bank to say the mortgage offer had been issued was initially misheard as "there is an issue with your mortgage", the frustration of land boundary negotiations until finally....Friday March 11th..Completion Day.

We set off from Hertfordshire in convoy - Dave wielding a hired van packed with basic necessities and me following in convoy with the dogs in the 4x4. At our first coffee stop we agreed that when Dave received confirmation of completion from our solicitor he would flash his hazard lights. 25 minutes later Dave pulled into the inside lane of the M4 and his hazards came on - I duly yelled and cried and sang (all at once, much to the consternation of the dogs)!

2 hours later we made a second stop where Dave sheepishly admitted that he'd completely forgotten about 'the code' and was simply saying thank you to the lorry driver for letting him in. The solicitor was duly chased and we were advised that the keys would be released in the next 30 minutes. Dave was reminded of 'the code' and we set off again... 30 minutes turned into an hour, followed by another a hour until we stopped again with just 5 miles to go. What the heck would we do if we hadn't completed?

Email was checked again....

And breathe - Completion confirmed and we drove the final 5 miles with lighter hearts and slightly less knotted stomachs. There was one final test of our strained nerves as we found that the previous owners, who were supposed to be handing the keys over to us were nowhere to be seen. A panic phone call was made to the Estate Agents and the nice lady said she was about to go home but would meet Dave at the local petrol station to hand over the keys... that's how they roll in Pembrokeshire it seems.

The van was duly unloaded, bed built and dogs/humans fed with time to witness the sun setting over our land:

And so it begins...