T-Minus 288 Days: Housing for In Laws

 Our house has an inlaw apartment with.... inlaws, of course. And they don't want to move to Florida. Therefore, as part of our move to Florida we need to find them some place to live. They asked if we could simply sell the house with an inlaw apartment that comes with inlaws already populating the apartment and the answer was "no". People buy a house with an inlaw apartment because they have inlaws they need to take care of, not because they want to take care of someone else's inlaws!

Our plan is to get the inlaws settled in their new home in February. Put the house on the market in April. And be gone in June. We can't replace carpets and do repairs while we moving them, so, they need to be all settled. In addition, we don't know how the house selling will go. We might have to rent an apartment for a while if there is a gap between selling the old house and moving into the Florida house. It is all going to just work out better to have them happily settled in their new home away from the chaos of us trying to move.

My wife and I have been researching various options, but the inlaws have only recently became interested in the topic. I think they were hoping the move wouldn't happen and they would be able to stay.

This past weekend we went over their finances, discussed options, and made a plan. Then we traveled several hours to tour a 55+ apartment they might be interested in. The tour lasted two hours as the office manager tried to pressure us into moving in five months early - not happening! 

We will continue to look at other facilities in the coming weeks. Most of the facilities have long wait lists so we want to find something and get our name on a list by November.

There is a lot to think about: moving closer to family means they need to find new doctors. They like their doctors. And they like the area we live in. But staying in this area will be expensive and too far away from family. There is one family member 30 minutes away, but, he can't do it all. That means some difficult decisions will need to be made.

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....

T-Minus 302 Days: August Yard Sale

 The August yard sale was no where near the success of the July yard sale... and the July yard sale wasn't all that successful. We were open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. On Friday we barely broke $80. Saturday was a wash due to rain. On the last day, we drop the price 50% and try to just get rid of stuff. We ended the sale at $220 - almost a quarter of July's sale.

Sunday is the most fun because that is when we just give stuff away. Friday and Saturday are for making money, Sunday is for getting rid of stuff so we don't have to store it. We gave kids bags to fill with free books and free toys. We took 50% off everything and then rounded it down. If anyone looked at something and then passed it by? We told them to just take it. Linda gave away an entire tote of maternity clothes at the end of the day. One family had two little girls and they each got a bag to fill with whatever they wanted.

At 7pm Sunday we were still giving things away. We pulled the remaining items into the garage, closed the door, and will deal with it on Monday. Do we donate it? Or do we store it for the spring-time yard sale? Difficult decisions will have to be made.

We don't like donating to the Salvation Army and Good Will. They put the items in their stores for a few weeks to sell. If they don't sell, they rip up the clothes into rags. This is our cherished children's clothes that we have cared for two decades - we don't want them ripped into rags! We would rather give them directly to a family that needs them. Therefore we have never favored donating very much to them.

While we didn't do a great job helping our move budget, we did a good job at reducing our belongings. We are slowly... ever so slowly... chipping away at a house filled with belongings. 

T-Minus 306 Days: FWF's Moving To Florida In 8 Easy Steps

 

T-Minus 310 Days: Packing The Rooms

Several weeks ago I created a schedule for packing every room/location in the house. According to the schedule, if we packed one room/location per week (got it completely ready to load onto a moving truck) we would have just ten weeks to spare! That isn’t a lot of time.

I decided to get a jump start and do the easiest room in the house myself: the basement storage room. This storage room is filled with (mostly) my stuff. Everything is placed into neat uniformed boxes with labels, and all the boxes are in alphabetical order. I need a cable strap? Those are under “C”. Need a power cord? Those are under “P”.  

I thought this would be easy: I would just throw away stuff, put it in the yard sale, or sell it online. What I discovered is shelves hold a lot of stuff! By my second day, the room looked nothing like I thought it would. I thought it would be all empty and swept clean. There was just so much stuff in that room... I still am not done.

Another room in the basement was once the kid’s toy room. When the kids became older and stopped using it, I turned it into a man cave. That made my boys say “this would be a perfect room for playing video games” and they took it over. Then the room became the staging room for the Facebook Market Place sales: the room that we cleaned things up, took pictures, and stored until the item sold. My wife thought: let’s pack up that room. After 8 hours of dusting and cleaning and sorting, throwing away three garbage bags, and getting stuff ready to sell? The  isn’t “move out” ready yet, but it went from looking like a bomb went off in the room to something much nicer.

Packing a full house is a ton of work! I am not sure we can do one area every week!

T-Minus 312 days: Searching For New Builds

 We locked ourselves away in a cabin in the woods, free from distraction, so we could focus on searching for Florida houses. Our third day was spent looking at new home buiilders.

It can take six to eight months to build a house, which means: if we want to move into the house at the end of June? We need to lock in the new house in the November/December time frame. That gives us three months to make a decision.

To get started, I opened Google Maps and searched for new home construction. That showed me all the different home builders in the areas we are looking at. Then, I went through each new home builder one at a time. I looked at their home designs and prices to see if they had anything we would be interested in. If I found something, I circled them on the map. If I didn't find anything, I crossed them off. 

When I visit a new home construction site, I go straight for the plans. The plans usually have prices and square footage. I quickly learned that we weren't happy with any house that had under 2700 sqft, so, I was able to discard those. The way to get the most house for the money is to buy a two story rectangle. While I did look at the one story houses, most of those were too much money versus their two story counterparts. 

Builders list the plans with the price as "Starting at....". That starting at price is really the base bottom. A decent lot up charge, for example, could add up to $45,000 to the price of the house! Then, there are options (like... do you want a window in the bedroom?). Finally, there is the design center cost. If you want tile floors instead of vinyl, for example, the price is going to jump. 

One of our requirements is the house must have a pool, after all, what is the point of going to Florida if you don't have a pool? I understand that after a few years in Florida, pools loose their magic for most people, and the cost and work of having a pool become too much of a hassle. Nevertheless, we want to start with a pool. The problem, however, is none of the new home builders are putting in pools. That means pools get built by another company after the house is built, and they cost $50K-$60K. When we look at the price of new construction, we have to immediately add $60,000 for the pool. And that puts most of the new construction prices outside of our budget.

Adding a pool to a new construction house is not a financially wise decision. A pool depreciates 50% immediately because the next person to buy your house isn't going to pay a lot extra for that pool. That is one of the reasons why buying an existing house with a pool is a better choice.

After a lot of searching, we found two builders with designs and prices we liked. One is way out in the middle of no where in Haines City in a community called Highland Meadows. The other is in Lakeside Community in Apopka, although, that has very small rooms compared to what we are used to. Another location, called John's Landing, had an interesting design that we could compromise on if necessary. 

We had many questions about Lakeside, so, our real estate agent went right out to tour the community (which was impressive!). For example, we didn't like the fact the living room's ceiling was two stories tall. Yes, we like that, but in a house that is constrained for square footage - that seems like a waste. Unfortunately, there is no option to build out the second floor overtop of the living room. The community has a $107/mo HOA fee, versus Highland Meadows that has a $100/year HOA fee.

From a price point-of-view, Highland Meadows was the best. The house is cheap enough for us to afford a pool and some simple upgrades. From a location point-of-view, Apopka is the best because we have friends there, and, it is only 15 minutes to Maitland where most of my job opportunities would be. If I had to commute to work from Haines City, I would probably add a never ending $350/mo+ car payment to the budget. So, better house? Or better location?

The search for new houses concluded our three day virtual house hunting tour looking for our Florida house. We learned a lot, we established some leads, and we made some progress. Probably the most important thing we learned was to take most of our "must haves" and move them to optional (the must haves that are on my list, not the ones one my wife's).

The next step in our Florida House search is to visit Florida in November and continue the search in person.

T-Minus 313 Days: Search Existing Homes

 We locked ourselves away in a cabin in the woods, free from distraction, so we could focus on searching for Florida houses. We spent an entire day looking at existing homes.

Our Financial agent told us to look at existing houses instead of new builds because he believed we should be able to get more house for our money on an existing house. So, this is where we started.

One of our reale state agents has put our requirements into a home search database. The database sends us an email every day of the houses that match our criteria. At first, I thought our agent was actually sending these emails and I was impressed with how much effort she was putting into our search. But after noticing all of the emails were identical.... I caught on that this was all automated emails. She isn't doing any work at all.

Nevertheless, we had a large number of houses to look through. We know none of these houses will be available when we are ready to purchase in May or June 2021. The purpose of looking at existing houses was to see what kinds of houses are available in the different areas for different prices. 

We discarded most of the houses our agent sent us because they really didn't meet our criteria. After a lot of searching, we narrowed it down to two houses that met our criteria, both were in Davenport. 

Next, we continued to search the existing houses. My wife and I took two different approaches to the search. Her approach was a scatter-gun with no systematic approach. Her thought was "If we had to move right now, could I find our house?" 

My approach was to explore the different communities to see if there was a house design we liked. When a developer builds a community, they only have 5 or 6 designs that they put into the community. If I find one house that I like, there is a good chance there are other similar houses in that community. When we are ready to buy, we can start our search by looking at the communities that have house designs we like!

Unfortunately, searching existing houses was time consuming and NOT fruitful. Out of the hundreds upon hundreds of houses we looked at, we only found two that we liked ( Occoee, and Apopka).

    

Many of the houses had smaller bedrooms than what we have now. Some of the houses claimed to have more square footage than our current house, yet all the rooms were smaller (how is that possible?). In the end, we were fairly disappointed with this part of the search. Our criteria comes from spending many years renting houses in the area, so, we expected to find a lot of houses that met our criteria. The low number of matches was discouraging.

In conclusion: searching for an existing house while holding a lot of preconceptions for what you want is difficult. We keep telling ourselves: we are only going to live in this house for 5 or 10 years, we aren't making a life long decision. But even with that knowledge, it was difficult to find a house with the layout, features, and price that we wanted.