T-Minus 496 days: One story or two story house?

I have always lived in a two story house. In fact... count the basement... three story house. Stacking floors on top of each other is the cheapest way to get square footage. It is also nice to have that separation between activities happening upstairs versus downstairs. Having a house with stairs helps to keep you healthy because going up and down stairs is great exercise.

But who hasn't fallen down the stairs? Whether it is a full top to bottom fall, or you just miss the bottom step? Falling on stairs is dangerous and painful. I know - I just went to go up the stairs, my toes didn't have a firm grip and slipped off the step mid stride. My foot hurts, my knee is skinned, the hip I landed on hurts. What a pain!

I am fifty years old. I'm not a young guy anymore. I have decided that I don't want to use stairs in my Florida home. Many of the houses we have rented in Florida during the summers do not have a second floor, and those that did - I never went up stairs. We would get a two story house and put the kids upstairs. The upstairs was their domain.

When we go to Florida, I will likely get a two story house to minimize the cost per square foot. When I do, my adult children and guests can have that second floor. I'm getting a suite on the first floor and plan to rarely, if ever, see that second floor. If my adult children are on the second floor, I'll make them maintain the second floor as part of their rent.

What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear them.

T-Minus 497 days: Florida with Five, SunRail, PODS, and more

A three day weekend meant three days of purging! We finished the kid art, then moved to kid books, some baby items, old notebooks from work, and my wife went through several totes containing her desk items from previous jobs.

We have now sorted 33% of our 270 totes! And 15% of our totes are now empty. 15% doesn't sound like much - but that is 41 empty totes!

We continue to watch YouTube videos as we purge. This weekend we binge watched Florida With Five, a family with five kids who moved to Florida one year ago. The area they live in sounded so familiar, so, we decided to figure out where their house was. I know, that seems super creepy. But we have lived in that area for 8 or 9 summers and know it really well. What got us interested was when they talked about the Sun Rail, a commuter train that goes to Orlando. In all the research I had done and all the time spent in the area, I had never heard of the Sun Rail before. How was that possible?

It took some work during lunch time, but, we narrowed it down to what street they lived on. I had drove by that area five years ago and was amazed at how developed it had become! I had never considered that area because when we drove through it, it was just fields and golf courses.

And that is where the creepy part ends. I found the street, but I probably couldn't find it again without a ton of work. I would never tell anyone or care to go there. I just wanted to better understand the SunRail and now I see how developed that area has become, which I didn't previously know.

The SunRail extension to the south completed in July 2018. You can now take the rail from Poinciana all the way into Orlando and beyond. I plan to learn more about this because it could be a way to beat the I4 traffic!

We watched many videos that showed how people packed a pod. From what we saw: people don't move to Florida with furniture! I don't know how anyone can afford to move to Florida and buy all new furniture - furniture is expensive! We decided we needed to take a trip to Florida to do a final search for houses, and during that trip, visit some of the furniture stores in the area to see what the trick is.

A few other things we noticed was the use of different sized boxes to maximize every inch of the pod. A final thing we noticed was how much packing material often gets used: they'll wrap something in a blanket, then wrap that in plastic. Then they'll line boards and cardboard around that. The trick, from what I learned, is to pack the POD in sections - building walls of belongings. After each section (or wall) you use rope to hold it in place. This continues, section by section and wall by wall until the entire POD is filled.

I also learned that a POD can hold 10,000 pounds, however, the pod itself is 2500 pounds, so, really it only holds 7500 pounds (the same as a 22 foot moving truck). That may actually be a problem because I have a home gym filled with weight machines, dumbbells, and free wights.... how the heck am I going to move all of that? Perhaps I'll just sell everything and use a health club membership in Florida.

The weekend ended with three days of purging. We filled eight garbage bags with trash, and two garbage bags for the yard sale/donation. It was a lot of work and we are exhausted!

T-Minus 498: Take A Picture And Keep A Memory

Purging is difficult. We look at something and all the memories come back. It might be some clothes that a child wore as a baby, or a book that we read each night. Nearly everything we have has memories attached to it. If we throw it away, we are throwing away all of those memories.

To make it easier to throw treasures into the garbage, we decided to take pictures of items so we could look at the pictures and relive the memories. It isn't the same as holding it in your hands, but it is pretty good.

We make a pile of the items we want for pictures (which isn't everything, but it is a lot) and then I line the picture under a good light and use my phone to take a photo. The last step is to do any necessary cropping and adjusting of the photo (which just takes a few seconds). I have probably done 1000 pictures this way in the past several weeks.

After a few days, our Apple iCloud starts to fill up. I download the pictures to my laptop and make a couple of backups. Then I copy the pictures into our Google Drive so it can live in the cloud. This process assures we have four copies of each picture: one in the cloud, one on the laptop, one on a USB drive that goes into our fire safe, and one on a USB drive that goes into my wife's desk draw at work (offsite storage).

It is very convenient to have everything captured electronically. It is a breeze to just flip through all the pictures, to be able to look at the pictures on any device, and to put the pictures into slide shows that act as a screen saver on our smart TVs. Instead of these memories being tucked away in a tote for a decade, never seen - we now have the memories at our finger tips. I share the pictures with our family, and the kids have access to all their old art work. I don't have to worry about it getting destroyed by fire or flood. And best of all? It takes up no room. We don't have to move it to Florida! It is in the cloud and it will go where ever we go.

T Minus 499 Days: Kid Art and Tote Inventory

I talked about Tub City and our Tote Inventory in my last post. I completed the tote Inventory update and I was wrong... we do not have 250 totes. We have 270. How many totes is 270? It is enough to fill an entire16 foot moving pod with totes left over!

Last week, started purging the nine totes full of kid art. The kids come home with a backpack full of papers, the papers get dumped onto the kitchen counter, the counter gets full, and all the papers go into a tote and sit there for a decade or two. The tote is in Tub City - out of sight, out of mind. We don’t care about it... u til we have to. As part of purging we had nine totes to purge.

We finished the purge today and got it down to one tote (with some room to spare). We filled another four trash bags! As mentioned before, to help with the purging decisions, I took pictures with my phone  of anything we thought was valuable. 750 pictures! The great part, however, is those pictures are taking up space in the cloud instead of in my basement.

As we cross over the T Minus 500 day mark, we have sorted through 30 percent of the totes, most of which are now piled up empty!!

T-Minus 500 days: overwhelmed

We have hit the 500 day mark! After a decade of waiting, we are now only 500 days away from our move!

For a long time I have warned my wife that it is expensive to move things 1200 miles and some things will not go with us. Defiantly, she has said “yes it will”. Tonight, some reality sunk in. 

We watched a YouTube video that estimates a 16x8x8 pod would cost $2500. The pod actually only hold 870 cubic feet, and only that much if you are really good at packing it. One pod would hold at most 230 of our totes. It would cost approximately $11 to ship each tote!And that’s just the totes! 

A large cabinet in our living room would take 20 percent of a pod. Panic set in as we realized we might need four 16 foot pods! That sounds insane. 64 feet of pod space? 3500 cubic feet to move a 3500 square foot house (counting the basement)? 

The magnitude of this endeavor is settling in, and it feels a little overwhelming today. 

T-Minus 501 Days: Florida Suburban Dad

My wife and I have been watching a ton of YouTube about moving to Florida. We came across the Florida Suburban Dad and watched many of his videos. Suburban Dad has several... odd... tattoos on his arms and when we watched his first video, my wife said "Change the video!" but we stuck through the first video and found that we enjoyed what he put together.

Suburban Dad has over 9000 subscribers! I live that he is from upstate New York (because we are too). Something else I like about Suburban Dad is that he doesn't just sit in front of a camera at his kitchen table and talks. He walked around his neighborhood, drove to work, walked down the beach, sits by his pool (or in his pool) and talks. He does sit by his pool and talk a lot, but that is OK - I can imagine me sitting out by the pool talking with people!

Something we notices with all the YouTube videos is people do not tend to think much before they record. They just turn on the camera and ramble. Suburban Dad does suffer from that. IMHO, someone should think about what they want to say, jot down a few ideas, and record with a clock. If the clock says you have talked about a subject for five minutes? You've probably covered the subject and can move on. Instead, youtubers repeat themselves, clarify, make the same points over and over, and circle conversations. It can get annoying. Suburban Dad does this, but... you get to enjoy looking at the beautiful Florida back ground when you get bored hearing the same thing repeated, so, it is OK.

The best video that everyone needs to watch? How he maintains his pool. If you plan to have a pool in Florida? You need to watch this video.

Suburban Dad has a ton of videos and I have only watched a few, but, I look forward to watching more while purging the house.

T Minus 502 days: Tote Inventory

I have previously mentioned that we have 250 totes. Nearly all of them (with just a few exceptions) are 18 gallon. I have a 600 square foot area in my basement that contains nearly all the totes, stacked five totes high in four rows. This area is known an "Tub City" and I am the "Mayor of Tub City".

Every tub is numbered and inventoried into a spreadsheet. If we need the camping gear? I know where that is at. Time to decorate for Easter? I know where the Easter tubs are. Need to decorate for a birthday party? All the tubs with decorations are over here.

Our purge has caused many totes to become emptied and moved around, so, it has become important to update the tote inventory. The updated inventory tells me how many tubs have been purged and when they were last purged.

I am happy to announce that we have went through 26% of the totes! And we have emptied 17% of them. We still have a long ways to go with purging the totes (and the rest of the house), but we are making progress!