Welcome

Hello all you beautiful souls and welcome! My name is Emily and I’ve created this blog to share my love of life, design and travel. I’m here to share my experience and offer support as we venture through this journey called life. For my first post I thought I would bring you up to speed on how I got to where I am currently.

2020, the year of implosion. I was newly separated, sold a home, moved to a different state and started a new job (yeah, no biggie). The culmination of the past 10 years had been some of the hardest of my life, but brought amazing lessons, and yet, I hadn’t gone through the worst of it.

I was in the midst of a complete home remodel of what I thought would be my forever home, realizing I needed to take stock of what I wanted to accomplish with the rest of my life. Now, I didn’t put a bunch of pressure on myself, just simply asked the question, “what do you want?” and put pen to paper with whatever came up.

Live abroad for a year

Learn a new language

Travel

Take adventures with my pups

And so on…

If you take anything from this post, DREAM BIG, my friends. The universe has so much more in store for you than you could ever imagine. Little did I know that this small action step would start the manifestation of a life I absolutely LOVE.

About a year after creating this list, I went online to my employers website to see the current job openings. I had some friends looking and wanted to see if anything fit. That same day, they posted my exact job, in Germany. Now, one of my sisters is moving to Germany for work, and I thought maybe this is my chance. I updated my resume and applied! A few days later I received a call to discuss the opportunity, and knowing that I had no “right to work” in Europe and spoke zero German, my chances were slim. After having my suspicions confirmed I moved on and embraced the life I was starting to create where I was. Well, low and behold, you guessed it; two weeks later I got a message, “you still want to work in Germany?” and 3 months later, I packed up a little bit of my house, sold the rest, grabbed the pups and was off!

View from my first day trip to Nanstein Castle

Now, here I am in Kaiserslautern Germany, living a life I had once only dreamed about. Don’t get me wrong, those were three very stressful months, but totally worth it. I’ve been thinking about putting together a guide of the steps I took to get over here and the additional things it takes to actually become a resident in Germany; it’s not the most intuitive thing coming from the U.S. Plus, I didn’t have any help from my employer - I did it all myself. Have any of you moved abroad or thought about living overseas? Let me know some things you would be interested in knowing so that I can cover everything in my guide.

Although I am SO excited about being here in Germany, I was sad to leave my little house that had been completely remodeled from top to bottom. The last thing to be done was the bathroom, and I just loved how it turned out! Leave me a comment if you would like to hear more about the process and the design I choose.

Before

After

I’m currently in the midst of settling into my new apartment here in Germany and will be sharing designs of each room as they come together, so stay tuned!

As my dad always said. “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” And it’s always more fun with company. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it ❤️.