Hello! I want to share what's been happening in the From Away community. Our Facebook group had a ton of posts over the last two weeks, since summer in Nova Scotia is hitting its best season. No bugs (ok, some bugs), great weather (ok, it was actually pretty humid this week) and everything is open (except Mondays, you know how it is). Outside the group, out in the province, some other stuff came up too. It's all good though, read below for the scoop.

Recent Blog Posts

The Dog That Finally Got Her Contractors to Call Ahead Her contractors kept showing up unannounced, truck in the driveway, no call, no text. One small true sentence fixed it completely. What it reveals about how work actually gets done here is worth knowing before your first renovation. Read

The Old House Paradox: Why Your Neighbour's Basement Door Is Wide Open One person keeps her basement sealed tight with a dehumidifier running. Her neighbour leaves the door wide open on a summer afternoon. Both of them are right, and the reason comes down to how old Nova Scotia stone foundations were actually built to work. Read

Disability Supports in Nova Scotia vs Ontario: What Families Need to Know Before They Move A caregiver with disabled adult children asked the group if the math would ever work here. It does, but Nova Scotia's system isn't Ontario's system with different names. It's a different structure entirely, mid-overhaul, with real numbers and real gaps worth planning around before the move. Read

IN THE COMMUNITY​
The province eased the non-resident deed transfer tax rules this week. The rate itself remains unchanged but there is a lot more wiggle room. If you're buying here and you don't plan to live as a resident of Nova Scotia right away, you are affected. I updated my blog on this so you can see if you're affected.

Also, the Tancook Islands just off Chester are getting Bell Fibe internet. A nice reminder that connectivity is expanding everywhere in the province all the time. Even where I am, things are so much better since 2020. When I first moved here, the only internet we could get was so slow and so limited we rented DVDs from the library because we couldn't stream. When we finally got fibre internet it was such a relief. It's hard to believe it was ever like that. Nova Scotia is working hard to get connectivity everywhere.

A new long-term care home, Adeline Hall in Bedford, had its official opening this month too. Worth knowing if part of your move is getting closer to aging parents.

There's new funding for public transit in Cape Breton, if that's the part of the province you've got your eye on. Oh, and Amazon is putting in a massive distribution centre in Burnside Industrial Park in Dartmouth. That one is getting a lot of people going.

In the community we've had so many posts come up in the last two weeks that it's hard to quantify them all. Property taxes are still coming up in a big way. People are just shocked. If you're on your way here, know that your taxes will largely be based on your purchase price. Some municipalities have higher tax rates than others. If you're considering a municipality, look up the tax rate there and run it against the purchase price to see if that's something you can handle.

Insurance came up too. Turns out people are giving pretty different answers depending on where they came from. I made a little graph about it:

I asked people to rate their bugs from 1 to 10 and mapped their answers by whether they're on the coast or inland. Short version: if you want a breeze, get near water. Almost everyone right on the coast said 0 to 3. Once you're inland or in the woods it swings a lot more.

Ticks are the interesting exception. A few people rated their overall bugs mild but still gave ticks a flat 10. That was specific to April through June. So a low overall score doesn't mean you should skip the tick check every spring. In my personal experience, the ticks really kind of go away for the most part after June. Here in South West Nova. They come back in the fall a little bit when it cools down.

Outside of all the money talk, there was a really sweet thread too. I asked when Nova Scotia actually started feeling like home for people. The honest answer wasn't some big moment of arriving. It was going back to visit their old province and realizing they were relieved to leave again, not relieved to get there. A bunch of people said that hits somewhere around year three to five for them.

Friendship is definitely the slow part here. Nobody just makes friends by living somewhere. You have to actually show up somewhere, work, volunteering, your kids' activities, whatever gets you out the door.

But when you do show up, this group shows up for you too. Someone posted about their move to a small Valley town a few weeks ago and got 154 likes and a wave of restaurant recommendations before they'd even unpacked a box. That part is real. It's honestly my favourite part of running this group.

My other favourite thing, is talking to you guys. Are you thinking of moving here and want a safe space to chat? E-mail me by responding to this e-mail or feel free to join our next Landing Table Call! It's a video gathering of folks from the community every month to just talk about being here. What we love, what we don't, what we need and if you're new here and have questions you just want to ask people living here, this is the place to do it.

Back in two weeks,
Kristina