Steps to America
We found our home.
I'll let that sit for a second too, because for a few weeks I genuinely wondered if those words would ever line up in that order. After two of the most intense weeks I have had in a long time, somewhere between Virginia and Pennsylvania, between a building site in Downingtown and a flight back to Schiphol, we found it.
But let me rewind.
We landed with a plan, a spreadsheet, and a five-dimensional problem. Good school district, field hockey clubs for the girls, horse stables nearby, a reasonable drive to an international airport for my travel, and somewhere in all of that an actual house we wanted to live in. Picking a home is hard. Picking a home that ticks all five of those boxes is 5D chess, and I am not even particularly good at 2D chess.
Two weeks. Two states. Northern Virginia first, then West Chester, Pennsylvania. While SciSports kept its usual full schedule on the other side of the ocean, I had to keep enough headspace clear for the family to actually do this properly. That balancing act alone was a workout.
Virginia hit us hard. Twelve houses in and around Leesburg — new builds, existing homes, a few somewhere in between. Each one taught us something. Mostly that the American real estate vocabulary is its own dialect. Punch list, earnest money, appraisal contingency, HOA, title insurance — all words I had to translate twice in my head before answering. By the end of the week I could hold a half-decent conversation with a builder.
We left Virginia with two houses on the shortlist and zero decisions made. Onward to Pennsylvania.
The first West Chester visit was, to put it gently, underwhelming. We were tired, the house was not the house, and you could feel the family energy starting to dip. Then our realtor suggested something off-script. We had been eyeing a lot in West Chester where we might do a new build, and the same builder had a model home almost finished a short drive away — fully furnished, just about ready, the kind of place you walk through to see exactly how the finished product feels. Same builder, same quality, real-life version of the thing we were trying to imagine on an empty piece of land.
We walked in. We did not walk out the same.
It was the house. Not "a house." The house.
Now, model homes are usually not for sale. They sit there as the showroom version until every other home in the development is sold, and only then do they hit the market. This one was a little different — more of a personal project from the builder, a passion build rather than a sales tool. Which is the only reason any of what came next was even possible.
Except my youngest, who is 13, has a Dutch sense of directness that occasionally surprises Americans. She turned to the selling agent, completely straight-faced, and asked why we couldn't just have this house built for us. He paused. He smiled. And he said yes. The price was right. We were sold.
We did three more visits to keep ourselves honest. We knew. In the four days that followed, we drove past the lot more times than I'd like to admit. We stood in the dirt. We pictured Christmas. We pictured the girls going to school.
We decided to go for it. We're now deep in closing, working through the agreement of sale and the warranty documents — and yes, getting every punch list item, every basement finishing detail, locked in writing before anything gets signed. Old habits. The house is a new build, ready by early July, and it is, quite simply, awesome.
We drove to New York for our flight home a little dazed.
And then, somewhere over the Atlantic, the timing got even better. We landed at Schiphol and signed the agreement with the new owners of our house in the same week. Both ends of the move lining up at once.
We were so happy.
And then the paperwork started.
I want to share this part too, because I genuinely underestimated it. We knew it would be a lot. It is more than a lot.
Take the Social Security Number. The SSN is the foundational document for almost everything in American life — banking, employment, school enrollment, insurance, basically anything that touches a database. To apply, you bring your I-94, your passport with valid visa, and you book an in-person appointment at a Social Security office. Easy. Except the offices are full. Right now we're looking at an eight-week wait for an appointment, while the practical guidance is to apply within six weeks of arriving. The math does not math. We're working on it.
Then there's the credit score. Buckle in for a quick explainer, because this one genuinely surprised me.
In the US, a credit score is a three-digit number, usually between 300 and 850, that represents how trustworthy you are with borrowed money. Banks, landlords, car dealerships, phone carriers, sometimes even employers and insurers, all look at this number to decide whether to do business with you. The score is built on your history — credit cards, loans, payments made on time, that sort of thing.
Here is the catch. If you have no history, you don't have a low score. You have no score. And in the American system, no score is treated worse than a bad score. You're an unknown quantity. Computer says no. To rent a car, sometimes to rent a house, often to get a decent phone plan, you need a number. To get a number, you need a history. To get a history, you need someone to give you credit. Which they don't, because you don't have a number. Welcome to the Catch-22.
There are workarounds — secured credit cards, services that import a slim version of your foreign credit history, becoming an authorized user on someone else's card — and we'll be working through all of them. But arriving as a financially responsible adult and being told the system considers you the riskiest possible customer is a strange feeling.
Insurance is its own world. The Dutch and American health systems are not in the same conversation, let alone comparable. I'm not going to pretend I have this figured out yet. We're learning.
And then there's school. The girls need to enroll. Enrollment generally wants an SSN. Which we don't have. Which takes eight weeks. There are routes around this — schools can usually start a child without one — but every conversation has the same shape. Yes, but. Yes, we can do this, but we'll need that. Yes, you can have that, but only after this.
We will get there. We always do. And we have an army of people helping — Eva and the team at SciSports holding things on the company side, our consultants and realtors stateside, friends who have done this before and have been incredibly generous with both their time and their warnings.
If Part 1 was about getting permission to come, Part 2 is about realising that permission is the easy part. The actual landing is something else.
Next month: cars, banks, and the small matter of deciding what to ship and what to sell.
We'll figure it out. We always do.
