Välkommen till Mot Portugal

It’s a pretty original title, right? But the reason for that is that our blog is celebrating one year ? It doesn’t feel like we have been running this blog for one year already! It feels like we just bought the house and started this funny and amazing adventure.

But when we started going through all thousands of picture that we have taken we realised that it was almost a year ago since we bought our house ? We started the blog a couple of weeks before we even knew that we would buy our dream-house during our weekend trip to a beautiful Lisbon.

We really recommend that you visit Lisbon if you haven’t been there, the trip from Sweden is around 4 hours which is perfect for a weekend-trip and you can go around by foot in Lisbon, just enjoying the city and all the beautiful houses and architecture.

Or you can just grab a cab or a tuk-tuk pretty cheap ? We tried this tuk-tuk when we were in Lisbon the first time, we walked a bit too far away from the hotel and didn’t have the energy to walk back ? It might not be the most beautiful means of transportation ? but you will see a lot and it’s good for the environment as most of them run on electricity ?

When we started to work on this post we quickly realised what an amazing journey we had already done. Buying a house, getting a real-estate agent, lawyer, electricity, gas, water and making sure that we had all the necessary papers, numbers etc that we need to be able to buy a house and live in Portugal. When we think about all that we are truly overwhelmed and very happy that we come this far ❤

This picture is one of the pictures from the start of our first Portugal adventure.

Already at our first trip we fell in love with this country and we had not even seen our dream-home yet ❤ But check out this approach that Lisbon (and TAP) gave us ?So amazing and beautiful and so mighty to finally be there ❤

The bridge is called Ponte de 25de Abril, it’s so beautiful when you see it from the air during inflight but also very powerful if you see it from the ground ? If you have the luck to come in from the right path and the weather is clear you will see most parts of Lisbon when you are going to land, it’s so beautiful. You really land in the middle of the city. ?

Portugal really showed it’s beautiful side after we had checked into our nice city-hotel. Warm weather and beautiful colours. So during the next couple of days we just enjoyed all the beautiful things to see. After that it was finally time to check out some houses!

We had already researched the areas and decided on what houses and areas to look for a house in, and when we finally arrived in that area and saw this beautiful sight we were sold! ❤

The picture is taken at one of the beaches that is around 10 minutes from our house, sadly the houses we wanted to view was not what we wanted when saw them live ? but thanks to our real-estate agent that quickly understood what we were looking for showed us another house that she had found on her own. And the rest is history, we fell in love with both the house and the area directly. Then there was no choice for us ? We didn’t have to think long, this was just our house from now on.

Everything went so fast after that, from putting in an offer on the house to getting our sought-after keys to the house. Thanks to competent and helpful people (for example an awesome lawyer) around us we succeeded to complete most parts of it from Sweden.

A really mighty day! The day when we finally got our keys ❤

Ofcourse there is a big part of the journey left as we have decided to trade our planned summerhouse into a permanent home ? But oh my god how much we are looking forward to that journey too ❤ It’s been crazy, stressful and nervous during the historic part of this journey but most of all, it’s been CRAZY fun! ❤

This week has just rushed past us together, partly filled with moving boxes and bubblewrap (But i still have been able to find perfect excuses to not pack more porcelain ?)

But the main reason for me to write this post is thanks to all the positive energy and feedback we have received from people we, in some cases, even don’t know. Strangers that has read our blog has come to us and told us how brave we are and how much they enjoy to follow our journey here on the blog. It has really given us a lot of positive energy in everything we are currently doing.

We visited Lukas school the other day and a complete stranger (who turned out to be Lukas needlework teacher) came to us and asked if we were Lukas parents and when we confirmed that we were, she started to give us kudos  and tell us how cool and brave we are when doing this adventure ❤ It gives you a lot of warm feelings and a lot of positive energy.

We had a meeting with Lukas principal regarding the future of his schooling. We are so lucky to have both teachers and the principal, they are really understanding and helpful when it comes to this move ❤ Instead of judging and see problems with all our trips they enter with positive energy and help us in any way they can, with the focus on giving Lukas as ”normal” schooling as possible, it’s really mighty!

We have also received a lot of different questions this week (and before that too), for example Why Portugal? How did you come up with this idea? What are you going to do while there? It’s really fun to see that people are so interested and that they dare to ask, I will try to summarise the questions in an upcoming post and try to answer them all (It might be really boring ? but hopefully you will enjoy it ?)

But I’ve got one question that I will answer in this post that we’ve received several times, the question is how can you be so brave and pack down a whole house, buy a new one in another country (that we have never visited before we bought the house) and really turn your life upside down?

Hmm I’ve never thought about it in those terms, that the things we do are brave, for me it’s pretty normal but I completely understand the question.

My answer to that question is the man on the picture, he makes me braver each day ❤ Together we have sooo much fun, even if we are doing really boring stuff (like bubble wrapping somewhere 1700 plates…)

These pictures are from our wedding, we haven’t published them before. But we are doing a game about how well we know each other, as you can see we are pretty clear on who does what (you should answer a question, for example, who clean the plumbing at home? and raise the shoe for the person that does that ?) It was crazy fun! And we were not always on the same page ?

It was a really happy and blessed day, i’m so happy that he wants this madcap as his wife ?❤

My best friend, my man and the dad of our wonderful kiddo ❤ So there is the answer to the question ”How do you dare to do this?” – We do it together! ❤

Mm I don’t think that i can avoid that bubblewrap + porcelain so much longer, in some weird way it has been placed infront of the tv ? so I see it all the time ? I think this porcelain is trying to tell me something – ”please wrap me so we can go to Portugal?” ?

A REALLY big Thank you ? to everyone that is cheering on our adventure, giving us positive energy and feedback, asking questions or giving us comments/ideas, it’s really helping us and giving us a lot of joy and warmth ❤

So it’s finally time! Lukas has longed for this day to come! So what’s going to happen? Well, Lukas dad is going to come to school with him on a visitors day ?

Lukas school sent an e-mail a couple of week ago and invited all parents to a visitors day this week. We haven’t been in Lukas school during school-time before as he’s not been really keen on having his parents in school with him together with all his pals ??

But this time he really wanted us to join him, or at least Fredrik (It seems that my invitation got lost in the mail ?) So ever since it was decided Lukas has REALLY been looking forward to the day when his dad will follow him to school, he’s so cute ❤

The mom that was not invited ? got regular updates from the kind dad ? It was pretty hard to know which one of the boys that was the most excited when they left this morning ?

The day started out with woodwork where junior made a nice doorstop to his mom from some left-over wood ? So cute! (If you read this post Lukas you know that I can still call you cute ?)

After woodwork it were a lot of different subjects, like math and Lukas also managed to do some reading aloud for the whole class, at least he doesn’t seem to suffer from stage fright ??

His dad was carefully checking out so junior maintain his desk in perfect shape ? But by looking at the picture a.k.a. the evidence it looks like he passed the inspection ?I wonder how you get him to keep his desk at home that neat ??

Fredrik really enjoyed visiting school and he found it very interested to join junior during a schoolday. It was a really nice initiative from school to invite parents to a week like that. But they will always let the parent visit in school, even if it’s not visitors-week and that ’s really appreciated.

We are two VERY proud parents over this miracle ❤

So .. Packing.. How does it go ? Well it actually goes forward ?We have small isles that we can walk in between our cartons now ? Our living room is currently a warehouse for most of the cartons now, both the stuff that are going to be given away and the stuff that will be sent to Portugal.

We did a really good job this weekend and got a lot of stuff cleared and packed so it feels really nice. I’ve been able to avoid the bubblewrap whole weekend, I’m still hoping that another solution will ”pop-up” for the porcelain that we have to pack ? But i haven’t figured out any better way to pack it ? So I guess I have a date with the bubblewrap soon enough ? But I might still have a couple of other things to pack before I have to face that boring task again ?