Hi and welcome! I’m Jan and this is my first blog - a little daunting but here we go…
I thought I’d start at the beginning (always a very good place to start) and share the journey of how we started Posh Cornish Cottages.
Chris and I met one fateful day when we both worked for Woolworths… yes really! We have been married without any real dramas for over 30 years and we have produced and reared between us (at no small cost) three amazing and beautiful daughters.
We have spent our entire relationship moving around various counties of the UK, working at full time jobs and doing up houses in our free time to make some extra money. We found ourselves eventually living on the edge of the Pennines in West Yorkshire, happy and always busy, but not really content.
One day we had a lightbulb moment. We decided to stop complaining about our dull jobs, the unreasonable bosses, our sometimes monotonous work-life routine and the bad Pennine weather, and we took a giant step to do something about it. After 15 years in Yorkshire, we uprooted ourselves, our three kids, our two dogs and our twelve pigs, and we shipped them all down to the South West (where we had never even been for a holiday – nutty, I know)!
Friends and family were dumbstruck and thought we had truly lost the plot (maybe we had?). It was a huge wrench for all of us leaving our Northern friends, but, as we soon found, true friendships survive worse things - and everyone loves a friend with a house in in the South West!
Our kids were so supportive of us and each other which this made us an even tighter family unit. The initial move into Devon however wasn’t right for us as a family and a bad location choice for young girls (plus they’d argue we moved them into a haunted house, but I’m not so sure). However, someone was watching over us and purely by chance we found our forever home in Bude (which, if you know me, was quite an accomplishment: I’m a Romany at heart!). The only catch? It was an abandoned smallholding that had no running water, no electricity or even a habitable building…
Since 2010 we have felt like the luckiest people living where we do. Despite buying a derelict farm, we’ve happily spent the last 10 years developing it, establishing our home and our four beautiful, quirky and unique holiday homes. Now, we’re able to focus all our energy on something that we’re totally passionate about. We’re able to be creative, manage our own time and we get to meet so many lovely, interesting
people.
There have been challenges and I’m sure there will be more, we’ve made some great decisions and some (really) bad ones, some successes and some failures. But, we know that despite all of that, uprooting our entire life and starting this exciting Cornish adventure is the best decision we ever made.
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