Since January 2020, my wife and I have been living together in Öje, a village with 180 inhabitants. We had been going to Sweden on holiday for years and at some point we decided to take action and move there. That was in 2017/2018. We encountered many obstacles and wondered whether moving to Sweden was a good idea… It is, of course, a big step. We started early with an evening course in Swedish, visited a fair, and read a lot. We continued to hop around Sweden, looking for a place that suited us.
And that’s how we ended up with Eddy. He jumped right in. The contact was very pleasant, and he immediately let us know that he would guide us through the entire process. At that point, we didn’t go through with our plans, but when we got back in touch later, Eddy was still there for us. We decided to look for a home in the province of Dalarna, where there are two hospitals where Helma could work. We drew a circle around the hospital to figure out what would be a reasonable commute. We would look for a suitable home within that circle. Eddy was very important to us in finding a house and handling all the real estate agent matters that came with it.
We viewed seven properties and the one we now live in was the first one. It wasn’t exactly what we were looking for; we wanted an older, red, wooden house… This one was grey, built in 1980, but it does have a comfort that you don’t find in older houses. Eddy thought we should at least take a look, and when we stood in front of it, we thought, “Well, it’s not bad, we’ll keep it in mind”. But when we left Sweden, we still felt that we hadn’t found what we were looking for. And yet… we ended up coming back to this house. We signed the purchase contract in January 2019 and have been living here happily since the end of 2019/beginning of 2020. Corona has made it more difficult to socialise. Swedes are more reserved than Dutch people anyway. We notice that it’s just “okay” that we’re here, but no one asks us why we took this step, for example.
What we found remarkable was that the estate agent hardly spoke any English or German, which we had expected after all our travels in Sweden and certainly given the large number of Dutch and German people who have bought houses in Sweden. We were of course already working on the language ourselves, but we could really use Eddy’s help. He translated entire sections for us. Every email we sent was answered (quickly!), and it contained all the information we needed to move forward and get clarity.
A clear difference with the Netherlands is that Swedes are much calmer. You hear “Det kommer” a lot here, which means “it will be fine”. So if you want to live here, you have to think a little differently. It will be fine. The best thing about Sweden, in our opinion, is the vastness. The enormous forests, nature… the peace and quiet. But also the climate. Contrary to what many people think, you can have beautiful summers in Sweden, like last year. The climate is more pleasant than in the Netherlands. Autumn and winter do arrive earlier, but they are beautiful with autumn colours and snow. So the idea that it rains a lot here is definitely not true!