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WHS: Why live in Ukraine near Kremenchuk?

This page is based on my talk in 2023-3-16 in the Goncharenko centre in Kremenchuk on 2025-3-16 and my page about my base for projects in Ukraine, i.e. my house, about 10 km from Kremenchuk, with additional material.

Page in progress.

My journey to do what I had been wanting to do for years, started finally in June 2022, after years of house renovations and then the sale of my house, with a trip to Ukraine to buy a house and start a business. I had a look for houses in various areas, including Zaporizhya and Kharkov but I felt it was too risky to buy there (in 2024 I met the owner of a furniture factory and his sister, whose houses in the Kharkov region got destroyed during the invasion...). Choosing a house was delayed because of the actions of a friend, who later became a former friend, who 'helped' me look for a house near Zhytomyr. See my travel pages Ukraine/2022, for more on that.
Then in 2023 I changed where to look for a house. A bit more to the centre, Poltava, Kremenchuk, and I found a cool house close to Kremenchuk. See my travel pages Ukraine/2023, for more on that.

Update: 2024-9-7: I decided in July 2024 to buy the house close to Kremenchuk that I visited in 2023... This house is going to be the base from where I will be working on new ideas and for finishing the projects that were going on or were already being planned.

You can read all about what happened on my travels on my pages with travel experiences, especially UA 2022, UA 2023 and UA 2024. See for more background information the rest of my travel pages.

Getting ready to do actually useful things took a lot of time and work: You need so much in stuff, it only becomes clear when you start out with almost nothing... I mean plates, cutlery, pans, electric kettle (I used my travel kettle but it died in 2025), tools such as a battery powered drill, impact driver, jig saw, belt sander, standard or excentre sander, hammer drill, plugs and screws such as Spax stainless steel screws with torx head for in the house and outside, clamps (for gluing), paint for the house and gate, bed linnen, pillows, blankets for the couch, electrical devices such as a toaster, deep fryer, and so on! Then finding all options (stores) for all that and for building materials, such as wood, tiles, elecyrical equipment (circuit breakers, electrical wires), etc.

If you want to visit, such as to do bicycle touring, email me for directions.

The house

The house that I bought (needed some finishing so I have been busy with that in 2025) lies at about 11 km from Kremenchuk. This is a good distance, close enough to get there quickly (30 minutes by bicycle at a moderate pace) and far away enough to have a huge garden, a forest on 1 side, a small lake on another side. This gives space to do a lot of things such as to have work space for building prototypes for ideas, but also something I had been thinking about since a few years: bicycle tourism in Ukraine. Give tourists a place to stay with their tent, or in small houses to be built (say 4x6 metres inside), or tents like yurts, or I could start to let the bath house that is included with the house.

Why Ukraine?

I didn't see what I liked in Germany, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary.

Why near Kremenchuk?

Nostalgia (such as it was the first time I stayed a longer time in a city in UA to see what life in UA is like, and I stayed in a cool hotel with an unusual name, the 'Jolki palki' hotel), some cool features such as the parks, the "most dangerous bridge in the world".

I travelled throughout Ukraine except just a few places in the Donbass (such as Mariupol) so I got a feeling that I like it more in central and eastern Ukraine rather than western Ukraine.

My favourite cities are probably Zaporizhya and Kharkov, in the east, but they are too close to the war zone.

What I miss from the Netherlands

What I like in Ukraine that you cannot find in the Netherlands