Getting ready to rent our house
In addition to getting all of our paperwork together and submitted for translation so it would all be ready when we arrived in Spain to submit we had to get our lives ready. We were mid landscaping project, needed to get a shed to store our stuff, clean out a storage shed in another city, pack, do a few repairs on our house, etc. It was total chaos.
I started by listing some big items on Marketplace that I knew we wouldn’t need or use like our kayaks, some furniture, sporting goods, kitchen items. Then I will pack one space at a time. When we move I usually go through the kitchen first and pack all the things I only use occasionally like table decorations, specialty cooking appliances like fondu pots, waffle irons, cupcake sheets, rolling pins and anything I don’t use much. After that I start by cleaning out my closet and packing anything that is off season. We were moving in the summer and we were moving to a hot part of Spain so I purged a lot of torn and worn clothes as well as things I just don’t wear. Then I edited down winter clothes to a few nice sweaters and a few ski items that I would use but I got rid of most everything else. I then packed all of my cold weather clothes I was going to take in a bag we planned to ship. We bought used suitcases at the second hand store. Most of them we bought for between $15 and $25 dollars. I did buy one new carry on roller bag because I wanted something to use on our trips inside Europe.
Every day I would pack a closet or a room. Our house in Denver is small and we had just moved from Trinidad back to Denver in May of 2024 so I had already purged a lot of things. By going room by room it made the big packing easy. We knew our apartment in Spain was furnished and small so we packed a lot of boxes to ship eventually, if and when we buy a house and we want to bring over a container of stuff. We also boxed up stuff to keep at the house if either of our kids or if we ever move back. We bought a shed to be able to store things like tools, sporting goods, kitchen items, and furniture. Initially I wanted to rent our house furnished but we didn’t find any tenants interested in a furnished house. I sold a lot of furniture but we kept a few pieces that we like or that we would want if we ever move back.
The storage unit in Trinidad was a big task. We had a lot of restaurant equipment in there from our business that we closed in 2022. I went on the various town Facebook groups and advertised a garage sale. I also called all of the local restaurants and told them what equipment and stuff I had so they knew we were coming and what we had so they could be ready for when we came to town. We rented a truck and drove down then set up a garage sale for two days. During the garage sale I would post more stuff on market place and I kept posting on the community pages with photos of the things we had available. In the end we sold all of the equipment but one piece. We sold most of our stuff including an expensive large custom made bar height table. I was happy to sell it because it was a special piece but because of its size it needed a specific buyer.
When we got to Denver I sold the last piece of restaurant equipment to a restaurant reseller and we sold a little more of the stuff in a garage sale that we had at our house the following weekend. I looked into and estate company but they wanted $3000 off the top then split the proceeds of what was left. I didn’t have a lot of stuff so I decided to do it myself. If I had a big house with a lot of stuff I probably would have hired an estate company. I hosted one garage sale and posted it on all the local yard sale Facebook pages as well as on Next door. I also posted individual items on marketplace to drive more traffic. This worked great. At the end of day two I put away anything that still had value then I posted that everything left was free and a bunch of people came and took nearly everything I had left. I ended up with one small carload of stuff to donate at the end. I would highly recommend posting on the buy nothing pages for anything you can’t sell that you don’t want to keep.
The final days before we left I packed up the last of the stuff we were using and we finished packing the bags we planned to ship. The last of our furniture we put in the shed and the garage and left. It was two months and one day from when we got back from our summer trip to Spain and Italy and we got back on a plane to return to Spain. We completed all of our visa paperwork, packed up a house, cleaned out a storage unit, got a shed built and finished a big landscaping project. It was a huge undertaking but I think having to do it in such a short amount of time was kind of good because we couldn’t procrastinate. I had daily tasks and just power through.
We shipped ourselves about six bags, now that we are in Spain I think we shipped some of the wrong stuff. I shipped some clothes, but I wish we would have shipped some good flat sheets and towels. You can buy bedding here but sizes and quality of bedding is a little complicated so I think a few flat sheets of my favorite sheets would have been nice. We shipped some hand tools but the hardware store is pretty cheap so I am not sure it was worth shipping those, we ended up having to buy a hammer and a couple of screw drivers anyway because our bags got delayed. My husband shipped a bunch of bags, I have no idea why. I wish we would have shipped some family photos or a few pieces of our art to make the house feel a little more homey. I shipped some spices and my only regret is that I didn’t ship a little more. I have found spices but not some that I often use, especially for Indian and South Asian food. I wish I would have packed a few more shirts for myself. I hate to shop and I am a little intimidated to try and find my size here. I know I will be able to find stuff because there are a lot of northern Europeans here, but it is still intimidating and I would like to put it off a lot longer.
We haven’t been here long enough for me to know what I am going to miss. I think with time I will learn to adapt to the different products in the stores and figure it out. When we eventually buy a house I will hopefully have a better idea of what I want to ship over.
Visa and More
When we decided to move to Spain in April, it started the clock ticking because we knew we needed to start getting ready for a move in September. We also had a pre-planned trip in June to Spain and Italy. We contacted a couple of immigration attorneys and decided to go with a group Move To Spain that specialize in Digital Nomad Visas. The other immigration attorney we spoke to didn’t even know what a Digital Nomad Visa was and she thought we were talking about a Highly Skilled Visa.
Because of past experiences living abroad and with our distillery Sol and I are both pretty good at navigating bureaucracy. I did a lot of reading on Reddit, Facebook, Immigration Websites and on YouTube channels. Before we decided to pull the trigger I had good information about what visa we qualified for and what was the best course of action for our situation.
I knew that we needed specific paperwork that was time sensitive and would take some time to get. Most documents can’t be more than six months old at the time of application. We ordered a notarized copy of Sol’s diploma because he was the primary on our Digital Nomad Visa and we got our FBI finger prints taken and submitted for Apostilles before we left. Those documents took the longest to get so we needed to order them early. I had also ordered a certified copy of my birth certificate for my British Citizenship application and that took a while to get from out of State. I didn’t end up needing it for our DNV application though. Most of your documents need apostilles for Spain, which are verifications from the secretary of state that the documents are authentic. Some documents need notaries and Apostilles and the FBI check gets an Apostille from the US State Department. We were fortunate that most of our life has taken place in Colorado so other than the FBI Check we were able to get marriage certificates, letters from employers, our kids birth certificates, etc and I walked everything into the Secretary of State’s office for the Apostilles. There are services that will do this for you and if we had moved a lot or needed documents from multiple states, I might have hired one.
Even doing it myself was pretty expensive. Most certified copies of documents cost between $15 and $35 per document. I ordered two copies of some things in case I needed extras when I got to Spain. The Apostilles cost $5 for regular orders and $15 for rush orders per document in Colorado.. I also ended up going to one county to get our marriage certificate and a name change document, another for a certificate that my daughter had never been married, vital records for birth certificates. Documents are held in different areas depending on what you are looking for, so it all took quite a bit of leg work. I got laid off of work in March so being unemployed gave me the time during working hours to get everything.
We went to Spain to “practice living there and to figure out where we would live and where Aftan would go to school. Once we arrived in Spain we visited schools, looked at apartments and opened a bank account. Sol also worked part of the time we were there so he could see how his day would look with the new time zone. We rented an condo with a kitchen so we shopped and cooked and spent our days doing normal things. I think this gives you an idea of what life is like rather than staying ina hotel and just doing touristy things. It probably would have been better to have spent more time, but we did what we were able to do. The trip helped us solidify our plans about where we were going to live once we moved. We also visited another region just to make sure we were making the right decision. We had spent some time in the Marbella area before and my family had lived here so we were pretty sure this was where we would move. We have also traveled in a few other parts of Spain which helped in our decision.
Had we been more prepared it would have been better to have applied for our visa when we were on our trip but we weren’t ready. It was a little scary packing up our lives and our animals and moving without knowing for sure that our Visa would be approved.
When we returned to the US we frantically started compiling the rest of the documents we needed for our Digital Nomad Application. In addition to getting the documents they also needed to be translated. The Move to Spain group has translators because they have to be licensed translators so I couldn’t just have my brother do it for us. They also had templates for the letters we needed about employment and the work we were doing. We just followed their directions and sent emails with questions. Sol and I are both pretty good with forms and check lists, but I still wouldn’t want to do it without the help of someone in Spain who does this all the time. Some people do it themselves but it was too risky to possibly mess stuff up after you move your family across the globe. Some people also hire attorneys who don’t know a lot about the Digital Nomad Visas and have some problems.
We arrived in Spain on September 4rh and had originally wanted to turn our visa application in on the 5th but we were issued a NIE number when we got our certificate of entrance stamped but the number wasn’t authenticated. This caused some confusion and we had to go to the National Police to figure out what to do. They told us to apply for our visa and that the number that we were given couldn’t be changed but also wasn’t authorized it was more of a place holder. It was very confusing. We submitted our Visa on the 9th of September and we got notice of our approval on September 30th. Our NIA numbers were the numbers issued at the National Police when we arrived so thankfully that didn’t cause any problems. We already registered at city hall that we are residents and we need to register our business as self employed so we can then get our residency cards.
People complain about the bureaucracy in Spain but I had to jump through similar hoops at home to get a correction for my Son’s social security card and to get all the notaries, certified copies and apostilles for the documents we needed here. It is easier at home because I speak the language but there are still often multiple offices you need to go to, not everything is digitized, they may need additional documentation.
Sun Family in Spain 