You no doubt noticed the frequency and perhaps even the increased urgency around our house lately when it comes to getting rid of things. What you may not know is that we have now been living in Germany for almost 10 years. Yep, as of July 28th, 2012, Stefan will have been here 10 years — and my anniversary is just a week later because I actually had to stick around in Miami to finish up the rest of my exams at the University of Miami. It’s kinda funny to think that we expected to be here only 2 years, perhaps up to 3. And now it’s been wildly longer than that. Maybe we’re just not too good at counting or estimating — good thing we studied finance in school. 😉

The truth of the matter is, we just started to settle in here. And yes, there have always been times when we wanted to go back (usually when it gets cold here). Yet Germany has been home for a while now, despite the fact that I don’t think we will ever fully fit in with Germans. And I’m totally ok with that. 😉

Although we thought there might be a significant move in our future sometime soon, the one we are about to make is not exactly what we were thinking. But we are totally looking forward to it.

Where are we going, you ask?

One of Berlin’s most well known landmarks, the Brandenburger Tor

Yes, it’s BERLIN!!

How our lives will change

Things are definitely going to be different in our world. We’re going to be heading from small town life in the ‘burbs and moving right into the middle of city to an apartment. We’ll no longer have the farm, our cars or half of our belongings (God willing) and it feels incredible to know that we’ll be so streamlined and free from these burdens.

For us, this is an opportunity to refocus on our family, our personal lives, our health and our overall well-being. We know that the quality of life in Berlin is going to be much better, simply starting with the fact that there is more going on, my husband will be working less hours, we’ll have less on our to do lists (when it comes to home maintenance & repairs) and we’ll be doing the things we love to do like cooking, living naturally with a sustainable mindset, seeking out new local places to support and sharing it all with you!

Plus we’re going to start working out DAILY (which will be so much easier with a few extra hours to spend together every day) and probably make a few diet changes which focus on more locally grown, organic choices (and maybe even some drastic cleanses or test diets we’ve heard about lately). We want to finally start taking better care of ourselves NOW, before it gets too late and too difficult to make changes.

What’s going to happen to NOH?

I am still going to be here, going strong and writing at No Ordinary Homestead. In fact, I have plans to make it bigger and better than ever — and will actually have a bit more time to focus on it (or at least less guilt about not weeding the garden or painting a door or something else house-related) as well as be able to add some really cool new stuff.

There’s probably going to be a bit more about our expat lives as well as life in Berlin while we’re out and about. I hope to get to know some of the people behind the small businesses that are thriving in Berlin, from clothing to food to whatever, and be able to not only show them support but learn from them as well.

I am going to be focusing a lot more effort on helping other work at home moms to achieve their dreams and goals (whether that’s through blogging, starting a home-based business or continuing what they are running already). It IS what I’ve been doing for the last 6 years full time — and we’ve been running our own businesses on the side since 2000. So I know I have a lot of information to lend to others.

The features of NOH that you love are not going to change. My weekly Friday Garden Life linky will continue as well. We don’t know yet if we’ll have any sort of container garden space or not, but I will definitely still be scoping out other people’s gardens, talking about all sorts of garden goodness and so on. Ayla will still get her spotlights as well — and probably have even more to say and show since she’ll be a big dog in the city, something she’s always seemed to love on our trips to Italy!

And now that we’ve started living with the William Morris mantra of having nothing in our home that is not beautiful, or that is not useful; I think that our decluttering will continue even after our major purging session has been achieved. It’s something that just changes your whole perspective about trappings — and with far less space to fill up with “stuff”, we will hopefully manage to really only keep the things that matter most to us.

So what do you think? Have you ever been to Berlin? What do you want to see in upcoming posts on NOH?