Home, Sweet Home

Yesterday marks exactly a month since we moved to our new place outside of the city! I don't like living out of boxes, so within a week we were completely unpacked and I have since been setting up the house to make it the most functional possible. I always love that feeling when setting up in a new house. It's a fresh start, and makes me feel like I'm on the show "The Home Edit." If you haven't seen it, it's so good! They organize a room or a whole house when a family needs help. I'm a sucker for organization!

I want to share with you a little about where we moved. For the last 8 months, we lived in the city of Bern. It was a very different life than I was used to, especially growing up in the country. That being said, I found the location really optimal: we were close to the tram line, only 5 minutes away from downtown by tram, and we had quite the choice of parks and cafés within a 5 minute walk from our apartment. What more than parks and coffee did we need, right??

In January, when we received the notice that we needed to move within the year, we started looking in the city of Bern and quickly noticed that the prices were very high. Because I love numbers, let me just give you an idea: currently, there is an apartment for rent with 3 bedrooms, close to where we used to live. It is listed for just over 2500 CHF per month (this includes most utilities). We had really lucked out with the apartment we found in Bern since we were paying only 1700 CHF per month. That's peanuts for an apartment! In downtown Ottawa at the moment, a 3 bedroom apartment would go for over 2500 CAD per month, not including utilities. That being said, we really didn't like the idea of using up so much income on rent, especially when our hope is to travel and see as much as we can while we are in Europe! That is when we started widening our search to outside of the city. We felt like life outside of the city might also be better for the kids - the hustle and bustle of the city can become overwhelming, especially to our little ones. To add another layer of complexity on top of this, we wanted to make sure that the commute would not be any longer for Justyn. He was already commuting 1 hour each way to work. If possible, we wanted to shorten his commute. Here is a map of the area of Bern:

After visiting a few apartments in different areas of town, we landed on one village that we felt best suited our needs: Jegenstorf. All of the other smaller hamlets and villages around seemed to either be too small, or not be positioned well to the train line we needed for commuting. We also didn't want to move too far away from the city, where we have made friendships and connections, and where we finally have a church family.

Jegenstorf is, in my opinion, a hidden gem in the Bern area. It is a charming small farming village, complete with its own castle, a beautiful park, and all of the basic amenities for a family. Most importantly, it is directly on the train line and gets to the Bern train station in only 13 minutes. Thankfully, Jegenstorf is also along the main train line that Justyn needs for work. It has cut down his commute by half! This has been a game changer for our family. We started looking within Jegenstorf for apartments at just the right time: a beautiful farmhouse popped up on the rental market. It had more space than we needed, was close to the train and the grocery store, and just charmed us right away. The house was built in 1790. We have wonderful landlords who live in the unit below us - they renovated the place so that it is modern, but still retains that traditional Swiss look with exposed wooden beams. The balcony has allowed me to grow some herbs and dip my toes into urban gardening (planting veggies and herbs in pots instead of gardens).

I won't share pictures of everything here, but here is a taste of what our space and surroundings look like:

I hope to share more in the weeks to come, as we explore more in Jegenstorf. I also need to make more of an effort to actually take pictures every day - I just realized while writing this post that I haven't taken many pictures of our new home. I hope this blog can keep me accountable so that I capture more pictures from this amazing moment of time in our lives!

Thank you for taking the time to read about our latest adventures!