T-Minus 294 Days: The Size House We Want

We are now under 300 days! The progress of saving for our move is coming along nicely because we sold several large items (including the old mini-van!)

When the real estate agent asked us "are there any show stoppers or must-haves for the new house?" and I said "No! We just want to get to Florida". But then we thought about it and.... there are a lot of show stoppers. In fact, we already have an idea in our mind for what this new house needs to be. As we search and search for this idea - it is very rare that we ever find exactly what we are looking for.

One thing that boggles my mind is how a 2700 sqft house in Florida looks tiny compared to our house. The picture shown above is our approx 1800sqft basement which is mostly finished. It is that large because we have an in-law apartment attached to our house. 

You can see the inlaw apartment sitting behind the garage in the picture above. If you remove the inlaw addition and the basement under it, our house is around 2700 sqft

I do A LOT with 2700 sqft. We have a huge living room, a giant toy room, four bedrooms, an office, a gym, and a large dinning room. I look at some of these 2700sqft Florida homes and I don't see how a dinning table would fit in the dinning room, much less add a dinning room hutch!  And the bedrooms? The real estate pictures all show tiny beds to make you think the room is large.

For what ever reason, 2700sqft in Florida doesn't seem to get you as much house. In fact, the only houses we have seen where we feel comfortable about the square footage are houses at 3000+ sqft. Houses run $110-$130/sqft, so, you can do the math. And then add a $60K pool?

We spent all day Sunday searching through houses (similar to what we did at the cabin in the woods). When we were in the woods my wife took the approach of "Could I find a house if I needed one today". On Sunday, I took that approach. It was really disappointing. Most of the houses that had what we wanted were out of our price range, and the houses in our price range weren't what we wanted. 

The killer is the pool - so many Florida houses don't have a pool. Adding a pool after-the-fact is challenging and expensive (ripping up the irrigation system, getting neighbor permission to get construction vehicles down between the houses, etc). 

The search continues....