Brenda and Brian Smith swapped the grey skies of Manchester for the golf courses of the sunny Algarve, as Brenda tells Richard Webber
“Brian and I have always enjoyed travelling, and made a decision that on reaching 50 we’d pack in our jobs and look for a new life overseas. We achieved our goal, just a little earlier than planned.
Brian was fed up working weekends running a catering business, we were tired of the increasing traffic everywhere and began to dislike how Britain was changing.
Then, Brian was offered a job in the Spanish town of Ayamonte, just across the border from Monte Francisco, where we live in Portugal. Although he soon realised the job wasn’t for him, he knew the landscapes and way of life were.
I carried on working in Manchester, visiting at weekends, before joining him ten months later in 2004 after selling our four-bedroom house in Manchester and two properties we’d rented out.
By this time we’d established that we wanted to live in the Portuguese village of Monte Francisco, on the eastern side of the Algarve.
We bought a plot of land and built our own home, which we designed ourselves, on the outskirts of the village where goats and donkeys roam the streets. It’s a beautiful traditional Portuguese village, populated by older people; many of the young families have moved to Lisbon to be near work.
The project, which Brian managed, took about two years from starting the planning process to finishing the house, and we moved in during October 2006. The overall cost was around £250,000-£300,000.
You hear horror stories on TV about people who build their own home in a foreign land, but our build went fairly smoothly. Brian, however, was still learning the language at the time, which caused a few challenges, such as resorting to drawing pictures on the ground to show the builders what we wanted.
Our home is a four-bedroom, four-bathroom villa with pool and gardens. We’re surrounded by hills and the view is stunning. We spend many evenings outside, enjoying a meal or simply relaxing.
People say that once you’ve built a house you should move on and build another, but we’re not interested in doing that, we want to enjoy what we’ve got.
For anyone wanting to build their own home, I’d advise them to do plenty of research on the area they intend living in to make sure it’s right and has all the amenities you want.
Finding the right person to carry out work on the property is essential, too. It’s surprising the number of people who jump in without even getting quotes! But anyone can undertake a project like ours, as long as they’re positive and have the finances – you need a cash back-up.
Read more in the March issue of Living Abroad magazine
