Where Is The Valhalla Homestead?

Today I want to give you more details about where we are, here at the Valhalla Homestead. So if you’re just getting to know us and you want to figure out what’s our story setting, read on. 

As I told you before, Greti and I are the proud owners of a beautiful countryside property we purchased at the beginning of 2018. After we figured out that we were not excited at all for the hustle and bustle of the city life and that what we really wanted was a better, more peaceful and healthier lifestyle we decided to buy a land nearby Cluj. That’s how we got to Vechea and started our homestead adventure.

So, where exactly are we?

This is the main point I’ll focus on today because I feel it changes a lot about what we do. We’ll try our best to keep our content mostly in English so more of you can enjoy and follow along in our story, but we’re not from the US like most other homestead bloggers, we’re from Romania.

Romania is a small country in the west of Europe and our land is in the heart of Transylvania (no there are no vampires here, I’m sorry to burst your bubble).

Homesteading in Romania

This means that our gardening tips might be different from what you usually get since we have a different climate.

It means we won’t be able to “just grab that from Home Depo” because Home Depo doesn’t have a store in Romania. We do have other hardware stores but keep in mind that materials, dimensions, models and most important prices might not be representative of what you know from your own country.

As I said before, we’ll try to keep our content mostly in English, but whenever you have no idea of what we’re saying it means we switched to Romanian, our native language.

For everyone who’s following us from Romania, please learn English, it’s going to help you a lot in life, but in case you can’t or don’t want to, we’ll occasionally add content in Romanian as well.

The land we bought is 20 km away from downtown Cluj-Napoca (yes, we’ll be using metric units, I’m sorry for all Americans, the rest of the world won’t mind).

It’s not that far away, but this area is actually 95% rural. And a rural area in a poor country is vastly different from a country-side setting from the US.

We’re still working in the city for now, first of all, because we have to finish paying our mortgage and second because we’re neither self-sufficient for now, nor do we have an alternate form of income. But we’re planning for that. I’ll do another post on the financial aspects later on and I’ll link it here.

We have 3400 square meters of land (that’s 0.84 acres) which might sound tiny for you, but it’s huge for our country. Most homes around us have 200 to 700 square meters of land. That’s 2000 to 7000 square feet for all you imperialists out there.

On this land, we have a 2 room house (not 2-bedroom, just 2 rooms),  a detached kitchen, a small barn and a small stable that we might end up demolishing eventually.

We also have a beautiful orchard with 20 or 30 trees. Nothing much but it will give us cherries, apples, plums, nuts, pears and mulberries, so that’s good enough for me.

The rest of the land is just an amazingly beautiful grassland that we’ll soon have to turn into hay for our neighbours since we don’t have any animals, yet.

So that’s the jest of where we are, what we have here on our land so if you want to follow along in our story and watch us do our best to turn this old impoverished land into a beautiful homestead stay tuned and follow us on social media.