We started talking about Cornwall in October 1999 after we'd been down on holiday (again!). The timing was critical as James was in his last year at Primary school and would be moving up to Secondary school in September 2000. Kyle and Bec still had some Primary school years to go so it was a "is it now or in another 5 years?" kind of discussion. By now we'd bought the council house on Woodstock Road so we decided to see if we could sell it - we both thought that if the house didn't sell then it just wasn't meant to be. Well the first person to view the house actually bought it - so fate did indeed play a part in making us take the plunge and move - and it was indeed meant to be. The speed of this sale obviously caught us by surprise and we needed to find a house in Cornwall pretty quick!! Carol put her trust in me to do this and I spent a couple of weekends in Cornwall looking at properties. The one we really wanted was already under offer so we put a bid in on another. While this was being sorted the sale of our first choice house fell through so we quickly withdrew our first bid and went after that. Again - fate played it's part in getting us where we really wanted to be. Unbelievably the timescale from putting our own house on the market to finding our Cornish home and moving in was just 3 months - you see some things are just meant to happen! We moved in at the end of May 2000 to begin our new life far away from everything we knew and our family and friends. It was quite scary but it was what we wanted to do - we believed in the decision we'd made and wanted to make it work for all of us - especially the kids. The next thing to do was for me to find a job!!