Getting ready

I got the fantastic opportunity to move from a good position within the Danish part of Valtech to the UK part.  That is all going as it should, and I won't mention work again.

I moved to the UK in May 2010 after a two months of getting everything ready for the move - finding a house in Guildford as the first step. First - finding the location to live in. All that mattered was finding a spot where the kids could go to a good school. This, we were told, was not as easy as it should be. According to friends in the UK, most schools were crap, and finding a good one was indeed quite difficult. We used Up my street and looked at some 200 Ofsted reports before selecting Guildford as base - mainly because all schools in Guildford had good scores in the reports, and most other places had lots of schools with bad scores in the reports.

That done, we could focus on finding the right house in the right catchment area (a catchment area being where you have to live in order for your children to be able go to the school you want). A road movie in its own right, involving us racing between all the houses for rent in Guildford during one day in Foxton Dave's Mini with its skeleton paint job, selecting one house, regretting the choice, wriggling out of the offer, and signing the proper contract on day two.

You can probably imagine my head being the head of the skeleton - it actually looked natural to passers-by...

Next step was selling the Swedish house. That was an interesting experience I don't want to go through again. After numerous trips to the tip and lots of trips to the local Bauhaus to get the stuff needed to make the house look nice to the potential buyers, the circus began.

After the first viewing, the price skyrocketed and we didn't know what to think. Three or four days after the viewing, we were signing the contract with a much larger sum at the bottom line than we had dreamed about getting for the house.