Andy retired from his job in July 2020 as site manager and I.T. support technician at Tany's Dell School after 29 years and, as the house that we had lived in together since 1995 was tied to the job, we had to move out. This wasn't a problem as we had registered with Harlow housing in 2013 and we started bidding on one bedroom flats but as the summer passed into autumn and then winter it became obvious that we were not going to be offered a property as we were still on the lowest banding.
We also registered with Suffolk, Essex and east Herts to give us more options and looked at the private rentals in these areas. Eventually, on December 8th Harlow offered us a one bedroom flat in Shenfield but, the landlord would not allow us to bring our much loved 'Deefa dog' (Border terrier) who had been a member of our family for 11 years and we decided to decline their offer. The housing options and advice officer advised us that if we refuse to 're-home' our dog we would become technically 'street homeless' and Harlow housing dept. would remove us from the housing needs list. This is when we decided to 'take the bull by the horns' and move into the van full time. We rented a storage room at Safe store and moved some of our treasured possessions into it, the rest were either sold or given to family and friends to look after. We packed our bags with the main essentials for van life, handed the keys to the house over and set off in the van for our temporary site to wait for the Covid-19 restrictions to be lifted so that we could start our adventures and take up where we left off way back in early 2020.