
3 Months in New York City
What I have learned and where I’ll go from here.
Let’s start in September 2016, (To get some more context for this story I recommend reading this one first.)
Tiny House Belgium started kicking off. A lot of people were interested and ready to order. My cousin and I were working on the biggest Tiny House we had ever built and after that one was finished I took a 2-week vacation to the USA. First: New York, then a 2 day trip to Fresno CA to visit California Tiny House, they are probably the nicest people I have ever met (Thanks, Pat, Nick and Zack Mosley!) to then finish off with Chicago. This trip made a lot of things clear for me.
I realized that I was in a position I didn’t want to be in. I knew from the first time I set food in NYC that at some point in my life I wanted to live here. But if you’re surrounded by people reminding you of how difficult that would be, or how impossible that would be at my age, or how much you would throw away walking away from THB… I guess you start thinking the same way. But on this trip, for the first time, I thought to myself that maybe it wouldn’t be so crazy to at least try moving here.
So I started looking for other people to take over Tiny House Belgium and got a group of 20 people together in the same room that all had an interest in running THB. This is the day I made the biggest mistake of my life so far, not that I wouldn’t do it again today, but I would have thought about who I gave it to a little harder.
I don’t want to start personally attacking the person who took over right now, it is just hard for me to see him doing things so different than what I would do and now looking in from the outside seeing the effects that it’ll bring.
This whole process ended in December. So I booked my ticket and four days later I was back in NYC. This being about a week before Christmas, my family wasn’t so happy about it, but I had to go. The plan was to stay for the next 3 months just like I did now in April, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen. 3 weeks in I got a call from my cousin. Someone broke into our workshop and stole about half of my machines that were being sold and the payment of my own Tiny House that was being sold just before I left didn’t come through.
So I was forced to fly back to Belgium to fix these situations. I still don’t know why this had to happen and why I had to go through all this crap, but that’s life I guess… 2 days after I got back I got sick, really sick. I had not been sick for 3 years and was knocked out for 2 full weeks. The result is that no situation had been solved yet.
When I finally started feeling better I started working, hard, to get at least some money together and in the mean time, I tried to get my own Tiny House sold again. It took 3 months for me to get back to my objective, but I now had the resources and the support of my closest family to go back and not have to worry.
So this brings us to April. A lot of people ask me “do you have a plan?”. And quite honestly, I didn’t. If you’re in a situation and city you have never really been in, it is almost impossible to know what steps you have to take, or what actions would be good or bad. Your walking in the dark. The only thing I was convinced of is that the only way I would make it here is to meet people, lot’s of them.

So in the first month, I used meetup.com at least 3 times a week. I tried to find the not too big Meetups with around 20 people attending and also forced myself to at least talk to one person and to share with the group what I was doing in NYC, what I was looking for, why I was at this particular Meetup…
And this worked. After a few weeks, I slowed down going to new Meetups and started following people I had met on Meetups before, so finding new Meetups or events and most importantly, people.
Now that I build up my network, things are finally starting to work out. I got 2 job offers in the last month and I’m working hard on my Visa dossier, which is now my biggest hurdle to overcome. But I’m confident as ever that I will make it one way or an other!
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