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From Away To Nova Scotia

What people are really saying after they move to Nova Scotia. The good, the hard and the stuff no one tells you. Plus new blogs, data from the community, and tools to help you decide if Nova Scotia is actually the right move for you.

People walking on a sandy beach under a cloudy sky.
Featured Post

Do you ever think about moving back?

The question came to the group. The one a lot of us hold quietly. The one we feel a little ashamed to ask, as if it is some kind of failure, or a feeling we are not allowed to have after making such a big leap. Has anyone moved here and now wants to go back to Ontario? Close to two hundred replies came in. When I go back to Ontario, I don't recognize it. I miss the familiarity of old friendships and places. I miss where I grew up. I also know it is not the same place I grew up anymore and...

THE WEEKLY DISPATCH The conversations, posts, and questions worth paying attention to this week. Community supporter · Sponsored Sam + Lottie Aldarwish Carpenter · South West NS Full gut renovations move in sequence: structural, rough-ins, inspections, insulation, drywall, finishes. Most buyers budget for finishes and underestimate everything above them. Budget 20–25% contingency - and more timeline than feels necessary. Beam & Birch buys neglected homes, restores them, and lists them and...

Two pairs of hands planting a small green seedling.

My community keeps pulling me back into the real, raw emotional stuff. They want to say it out loud. They want to feel like it's allowed. So here it is: you are allowed to love Nova Scotia and grieve what you left behind at the same time. You are allowed to be someone who made the right choice and still feel the cost of it. Two things can be true, and this community has space for all of them. Being in the garden this spring has me thinking about transplanting. Some plants take to new soil...

THE WEEKLY DISPATCH Top posts and things of interest from this week Hi, You've been getting The Landing from me. Stories from people who chose Nova Scotia. This is the other one. The Dispatch goes out on alternating weeks. It's a straightforward update: what's been happening in the group, and the most recent posts from the blog. That's it. This week I asked the group what's been harder than expected. One hundred people answered. The thread is still going. Recent articles The Sight Unseen...

White lighthouse on rocky shore with snow.

THE QUESTION Five years in and I'm still trying to figure out if I'm a Nova Scotian yet. I asked a question in the group this week. Not as a poll, not as a prompt to get people talking. Just as the actual question I woke up with on a May morning, standing in the greenhouse with 25 strawberry plants and mud on my boots and three kids who had just helped me shove 55 very unintelligent meat chickens back into their coop. These were things I used to dream about in Ontario. Things I knew I...

Woman walking on path through blooming trees

The move to Nova Scotia is rarely a single decision. It's a slow build and a sudden leap. You think about it for years, maybe decades. You visit once and something catches. You come back. You tell yourself you're just curious. Then one day you're in the car with your dogs ( or kids) and a blow-up mattress, driving through a blizzard toward something you can't quite explain yet. That's the story that keeps showing up in our community. Not the logistics, not the listings, not the market...

Amber glass bottle with wooden lid on white background

You may notice things look a little different. This newsletter is The Landing now. Still fromaway.ca, same stories, new name. The fun thing about managing this community is these aren't just posts and comments to me. These are human stories and connections that happen online but not alone. Somewhere in-between it all, a poet and a lodge owner found each other through a thread about butchers. Here's what was happening. THE VILLAGE This was the thread that hit the deepest this week. A woman in...

Golden spring rolls piled on a bed of white noodles

FromAway Newsletter FromAway.ca · Newsletter fromaway.ca What the group has beentalking about Two weeks of conversations, distilled. All data and conversations in this newsletter comes directly from our 14,000+ member Facebook group, From Away To Nova Scotia. Real people, real moves, real numbers. Over the past two weeks, a few threads stood out -- not because they were unusual, but because they kept circling the same things from different directions. Why people are choosing Nova Scotia right...

Issue #1 What's actually happening in the group right now Hey, This is my first newsletter and I'm really glad you're here. I started the From Away community because I was looking for other people who had done what I did. Moving here was hard in ways I wasn't prepared for, and I felt it. If you don't have a 902 number, it can be genuinely difficult to get someone in Nova Scotia to pick up the phone. The whole idea was to connect people who felt lost in the process with real...