Our Home-base in Holland!

We had a pretty intense holiday exploring markets in Belgium, Holland, and Germany for three weeks and then immediately moved into our new house in Holland, outside Amsterdam! Atlas started a homeschool group, and we found a skateboard class for him to be part of each week. I guess you can say we are temporarily rooted for a bit. When we left the states nearly eight months ago, the plan was Portugal through and through. When the process proved itself disorganized and gave us low confidence, we declared UK our home! But life had different plans for us, as always. While in Kent, which we loved, I was reminded of a process to move to Holland which appeared to have less resistance than most other European countries. We had spent some time in South Holland and immediately felt happy there, so looking into this process wasn’t going in completely blind, though honestly, we never talked about Holland as a home-base until then.

Instagram and Facebook is proof we aren’t the only one’s looking to take a break or full on departure from the States right now. Almost everyday I get 1-5 messages asking “how”, “how much”, “please help”. We decided to work on an up-to-date massive post to answer all those questions, once we have proven successful. I would hate to give you information in detail that ultimately failed us, so hang tight, we are on the last step. For every 50 things we try, 40-45 fail, it certainly makes life interesting.

So, home! We decided to move forward with the process, which has one big fat wild card in it. Home. In order to work for yourself and move to Holland, before you can really do anything (open a bank account, claim home school status, register your business, get a parking pass, get a museum pass, a Dutch phone, etc…) you need an address. We considered this high risk because what if we went through the process and got denied and then we were stuck with a whole house we couldn’t use.

So I dedicated an entire 10 hour day to searching through over 2,000 homes for rent in the entirety of Netherlands with no criteria in mind other than it being furnished. Three furnished homes were acceptable. One was rented the day I inquired. Two were down the street from each other in an area we were not familiar with, but was close to a lot of stuff we wanted to explore. Major cities, museums, and the only organized homeschool group we could find in Netherlands. We grabbed it as quick as we could. It’s super close to the beach, bike paths, and a tiny town steps from our front door with all the necessities. Also, dunes! It’s calm. It’s just what we need as a base to come in and out of.

We moved in, in January and got to styling and setting up rooms. We only have our office left to design, it’s totally empty and we need to organize how we are going to work in there.

So here it is, our “home for now”. Where we work on the blog, turn our dining room table into homeschool lessons, and experiment with cooking local produce. It’s been pretty chilly out, so we have enjoyed spending time inside, catching up on movies and snuggling, doing laundry reliably and planning all our travel destinations from here. I love the idea we don’t need to bring all our possessions with us everywhere we go and if a place doesn’t feel good, we have our bed to come back to.

I know a lot of you who plan on traveling full time may be thinking about cost. This very safe, very clean, very English-speaking town by the beach we found to be much more reasonable than renting in South Florida. For a two bedroom apartment in Boca Raton, we were paying $2,200. We didn’t have a place to work, so Joey used the dining room to set up his studio. This four bedroom detached house with small yard is 1,700 EU which has plenty of room and privacy seems like a steal. To have a guaranteed base is super valuable to use, especially with a washer and dryer (which can be rare when traveling to some parts of Europe) and a place for Atlas to set up his LEGO collection.

If you remember from Instagram, we tried to buy a house in South Holland before we rented, but they wouldn’t let us! Remember that tricky thing I mentioned in the beginning of this post….. you need an address before you can open a bank account. You need a bank account if you plan to buy a house! I am happy with how things worked out though!