Getting Busy

The traffic around the park is really starting to pick up. The official season starts November 1st, and a lot of people apparently coming in during the weeks right before that. Every day there are more people driving around in their golf carts, and several rvs have come in also over the past days.

The new grass is really starting to fill in. It’s been a little over a week and already you can barely see the lines between the individual pieces of sod.

The grass is called St.Augustine grass. It’s a very hardy, tough, hot weather grass. It feels weird to walk on compared to what we are used to from up north. We understand it takes 3 to 4 weeks before it will be rooted and ready for mowing.

Harry replaced the light on the outside a couple days ago. We had another outside light next to the sliding glass door on the inside on what was the older part of the house. When they added the Florida room, they put another light outside but it was very rough looking from 10+ years of being exposed to the weather.

We weren’t using the light on the inside so Harry removed it and put it up outside. Eventually we are going to get a motion activated light for the outside but this will do for now.

We have been going for an evening walk every night. The weather has gotten so nice, and the evening breezes are very pleasant. We’ve even opened the windows a couple times.

We have been doing great with our exercising. Since it gets so warm during the day, we’ve been getting up early and going for our run at 6 am. I love watching the sun come up as we are finishing up. We get to see some beautiful morning skies.

Harry got a call from Publix and he starts work on Tuesday afternoon. I am waiting to get a call from Home Depot, probably on Monday or Tuesday. We are both excited to get going with our new jobs.

Finally!

Well, this blog post title could refer to a few things…finally a blog post!?! Haha I was doing so well with posting every few days before Irma, and then two weeks away just threw us off our game. I’m not sure what we’ve been doing since we got back, but it’s gone by fast anyway.

But happily, the title refers to more than just that. We have had some exciting days!

This has been our view of the house since April….sand, sand, sand. The past few weeks we had really gotten sick of it being tracked in all the time.

But last Thursday we had such a welcome sight!

Yes, our sod finally came in!

Since then we have had great weather for the sod. Not super hot, and quite a few rain showers. Plus our new sprinkler system is working nicely. Love looking out the windows and seeing green grass!

We have had a couple other welcome changes. Last week Harry got a couple calls for job interviews – with Lowe’s and Publix. He had the Lowe’s interview first and then the interview at Publix on Thursday. He had a good feeling about the Publix interview and his instincts were right on, as later the same day he had a phone call offering him the job! Yay! What good news.

Our good news streak continued over the weekend when I got an email from Home Depot about an application I had submitted. They were inviting me to interview for the job of lot associate. I had the interview yesterday. When they heard about my previous job experience, especially the work I did at Amazon, they offered me a job as an order picker. It sounds a lot like what I did as a picker at Amazon, except in a building that is probably a quarter of the size of the Amazon warehouse – and all on one level! So I am extremely happy! And now that we both have jobs, I can take a deep breath and stop worrying about whether we will find work down here. It was a leap of faith for us to give up the sure thing at Amazon and come down to Florida instead, and I am so glad that it has worked out like we hoped it would. We have both taken the drug test and they are doing the background check, so hopefully we will be starting work early next week.

All Fixed Up

When we got back here and checked our place over, we realized that our repairs boiled down to two pieces of siding and a missing piece of soffit. We have some work scheduled to be done this coming week, and we thought about calling the company to see if they could fix those couple things while the other work was being done. But we realized that would probably add a couple hundred bucks to the bill for only a few minutes of work. So Harry decided that he would try his hand at replacing the siding. On our way home on Tuesday, we had passed a place called Mobile Home Depot, and Harry called them to see if they had siding. Not only did they have the size of siding we needed, but they sold it by the piece. On Wednesday we drove over and picked up the materials we needed, and even an extra piece of siding just in case, for the grand total of $46!

Yesterday Harry got down to business working on the repairs. The section of siding to go in the front needed to be cut down to size, but luckily the piece that was being replaced was still intact enough to use it as a template.

You can see the missing piece of soffit on the right side of the peak.

All done!

Harry also took the other awning down. It was bent and in pretty bad shape. Some of the slats were already half coming off.

I ordered a couple decorative pieces to go on the front of the house and add some color. Plus getting the grass in is going to make such a difference. Our grass had been scheduled for installation the Thursday before the storm, but the company cancelled. No surprise there. We were actually happy about that because we’re not sure how freshly laid sod would have held up to the winds. The sod farm is waiting for their fields to dry up, so hopefully by the beginning of October we will finally be getting some grass.

Taking a Deep Breath

Well, it’s been quite the few days. We spent from last Thursday through Monday at Harry’s sister’s place in Jacksonville. Despite the fact that we were ready to get home by then, it was nice to have a few days to visit with Linda. On Monday we went to Publix to stock up for a while. We knew that everything in the fridge would have to be thrown out, and we weren’t sure about the state of the local grocery stores. We had brought our cooler with us, so we were able to get all the cold stuff packed away for the night.

On Tuesday morning we left bright and early at 6 am! We were so ready to be home we didn’t want to wait a moment longer. We had an uneventful trip, and only hit a couple small slow-downs. It was good to see our place, and the whole resort, generally looking none too worse for wear.

I’ve spent the past couple of days getting some meals cooked up, restocking our freezer with spaghetti sauce and chili.

Last night I made a celebratory meal of stuffed pork chops and acorn squash, and we just took a deep breath, and had a nice meal while we enjoyed being home.

---

I took this picture today. Harry has already taken down the awning arms that were left attached when the awning was taken by the wind. It tore out the piece of siding from above the window where the awning had been attached.

We lost one piece of siding at the very top on the right side. The awning is bent, and Harry is going to take it down.

We had some skirting out, but we were so excited to find it all laying around the house undamaged. Harry has already replaced it.

Today we took a trip to the Mobile Home Depot. I saw it on our way home on Tuesday and saw a sign on the building that said they had siding, skirting etc. We were able to buy replacement pieces of siding for less than $10 each. Harry has never put up siding before, but I guess he is going to give it a try!

(On an aside…when we bought our place, of course we had to buy insurance to cover it. We have all of our other insurance through GEICO, but they don’t cover mobile homes, or at least they don’t in our part of Florida. We found two possible companies to buy insurance from. One offers a higher coverage limit than the other, but of course is more expensive. Both of them cover hurricane damage, but the hurricane deductible is 2% of your total insured value. For us, that is over $1k, and thankfully we don’t have that much damage. To cover floods, we would have to buy actual flood insurance, but we didn’t as we aren’t close enough to water to be concerned about flooding. Our park model policy costs $463/yr. )

---

Yesterday we drove over to the storage place. The rig looked awesome. We didn’t even lose our wheel covers as we had expected. I guess they came off but didn’t go far, and the owner put them back on.

The only damage we had were bolts pulled loose from the roof where the vent covers were attached. Harry has already gone over and caulked the holes. He will replace the vent covers before we hit the road again next year.

---

Today, in other exciting news, our dresser finally arrived!

Just as a reminder, this is what the bedroom looked like when we bought the place…

And this is the finished product now…

I am so happy with the finished result.

Harry wants to get the repairs completed first, and then we will get back to working around here.

Hopefully we can just get back to normal life now.

What a Relief!

We have been so thankful throughout this whole experience to have such great park owners. The morning after the storm, one of the owners, who works in the office, took time first thing out of her day to drive around the park and post video of the park models. Even though our place was not shown, we were reassured to see what great shape the houses were in. A couple days ago I emailed her just to touch base, and yesterday afternoon I got a reply back, and she included pictures of our place.

The front awning is completely gone. We were going to have it taken down in October when we got the windows replaced, so that is no big loss. Harry will just have to take those hanging brackets down. He thinks he might be able to just snap that siding back together.

On this side we lost a little skirting towards the back. But it looks like it’s still there on the ground, so we may be able to just put it back up. And if not, it doesn’t look like an awful lot of skirting to replace. We are very blessed to have had hardly any damage from the storm!

We also found out that our power was restored yesterday! Harry signed in last night and was able to see the thermostat for our a/c. It is up and running. Another relief.

---

We left AL yesterday morning around 8 and traveled to Jacksonville. Once we got to I-10, traffic was a little on the heavy side, but it never backed up at all. We had to stop a few times but the trip was uneventful. We are settled in for a few days probably. Now that the resort is back to normal functioning, we can go back anytime. However, we understand that the grocery stores here are still working to get stocked up, and we will have to buy food here before we head back to the Sebring area. From the updates we have seen online, food and gas continue to be in pretty short supply in Highlands county, so we don’t want to go back until we can bring everything we need with us. Hopefully by Monday we will be able to go home!

Good News

Well, we have had some updates from back home and so far all of the news about our property is good. The owner of Adelaide Shores put up some video on facebook of the park and while we didn’t see our place in it, we were relieved to see overall how good it looked. The major damage to the park models seemed to be shingle damage, so we are happier than ever with our decision to do the Roofover back in May. We heard through a friend that someone had looked at our place and said that we lost some skirting and an awning, so sounds like we fared pretty well. Then yesterday I got an email through to the owner of the storage place. She said that from the outside of the lot our rig looked good. She didn’t actually walk in and examine it, but at least it’s upright! At some point, soon hopefully, we will be able to get down there and see for ourselves. Right now the fuel situation is so bad that we could get down there, but then we wouldn’t be able to leave again.

The park itself seemed to fare pretty well also. They lost some fencing and there has been some damage to the sewer system. They will start repairing the sewer system as soon as they have power, which sounds like it might take a week or more. Highlands County was pretty badly hit with the storm, and the electric system has to actually be rebuilt, according to Duke. They aren’t even providing an estimate of when residents of Highland County can hope to have electric. Hopefully we will know something more next week.

We are still in AL. We were planning to leave today, but I-10 and I-75 were pretty jammed up yesterday, and with fuel still in such short supply, we are concerned about getting caught in a lot of slow traffic. So hopefully by tomorrow or the weekend, we will be able to make our way to Jacksonville to Harry’s sister’s place. A little bit closer to home!

Watching Irma

We traveled to Alabama on Thursday. We got up at 1:30 am and were on the road right around 3. It was very weird to be walking around trying to see if there were any last minute additions to throw into the truck just in case everything is gone when we go back.

We ended up not taking any highways until we got up to I-10. The secondary roads were clear and I could see many traffic slowdowns on Google Maps on my phone so we just stayed off the highway. Harry and I switched off driving  every few hours so the other person could nap for a bit. It was a really long day of traveling – a little over 12 hours later when we arrived at our destination in Cullman, AL. The cats were so good – hardly a peep out of them and no accidents. I wouldn’t have blamed them since they spent almost 13 hours in their carriers.

We are settled down for the weekend. The cats have somewhat adjusted to another new location. I feel sorry for them since they don’t know what’s going on, and just feel confused to be out of their normal space.

We have been watching the weather coverage of Irma. Now that the storm has shifted a bit to the west as opposed to going through the center of the state, we have a little bit of hope that our house might make it through. And maybe even the rv, although I don’t even want to imagine what 75 – 90 mph winds would feel like in an rv.  Just keeping up the hope and waiting to see where Irma ends up going tomorrow.

Hope For the Best, Plan For the Worst

For the past few days, we’ve been keeping our eyes on Irma as she has developed into what looks to be a major hurricane event for FL. When it became evident that FL was definitely in her sights, we started thinking about which direction we should head. We were very thankful to get an invitation from Phyllis (My Own Highways In My Mind) to come and stay with her and Len while the storm is passing through, which we have gratefully accepted. We have packed up some of our more important items, a few irreplaceable things - pictures and such, and will be heading out before bright and early tomorrow morning for Alabama. We are hoping that our home will be here to come back to after the storm moves through.

A Month of Changes

As we come to the end of August, I was thinking back about what a whirlwind month it’s been. We started out this month in Ohio, spent a week in Charlotte, and then for the past 15 days we’ve been down at our new place in Avon Park. We spent a few days hooked up on the area they call “the hill” while we got the place cleared out, and then we moved it to storage. A couple days ago, we swung by there just to check things out and all was good there. Having the rig in storage only a couple miles from here is going to be so convenient.

I still don’t want to do any pictures of the bedroom because our dresser still hasn’t come in. We called Badcock to check on the progress and it sounds like we may get it next Thursday. I am really pleased with how the room looks already. Even though a king sized bed is not the usual size for the room, it fits really well, and we have more room on either side than we have around the bed in the rv. So it feels plenty roomy to us. It will be nice though, when our dresser comes in, so we can get some of our clothes out of the closet.

We’ve also painted the hall and an accent wall in our guest area/sitting room, taken out the valences over the windows and replaced all the window shades. A lot of the changes are little ones, but we really like the overall effect.

This morning we worked on a change that I have really been looking forward to. As a reminder, here is what the kitchen looked like in April.

There wasn’t a ton of counter space, and what there was wasn’t very functional because of the way the cabinet space was configured.

Here is Harry at Easter trying to carve the ham without bonking his head or hand on the cabinet.

We removed the doors to the cabinet a couple weeks ago.

Today Harry first removed all the trim and paneling, so he could see how the cabinets were attached.

Then he placed blocks underneath the cabinet to support it, and used his drill to removed all the screws anchoring it to the ceiling and walls.

Then we carefully lifted it down onto the countertop below, and Harry just took it apart, piece by piece. I didn’t get any pictures of that last step though.

I just love the open concept look. It feels so roomy. Eventually we will paint the cabinets and update different parts of the kitchen. But for right now we’re just going to do some painting, (you can see the new color on the wall), and put up a shelf on the wall to hold some pots and pans.

I love how the place is coming together!

Becoming Florida Residents

First of all, just a note of support to all those dealing with the effects of Hurricane Harvey. Harry and I are thinking about those who are still in harm’s way this afternoon. Sure hope that they don’t get the amounts of rain that they are possibly anticipating!

---

We’ve been prepping the next area of the house for painting. We have the hallway and one wall of the sitting room area taped up and ready to go. So the plan for tomorrow is to do a little more painting. Harry also finished up replacing the towel bar and other bathroom accessories to something a little less gold. We still have to paint in the bathroom, as the walls in there have more of those “lovely” flowers that we had in the bedroom. But that project is down the road a bit.

---

A reader left a question on the last blog post about our changing our domicile to Florida and what was involved with that. This address change has been the easiest of all of them because we were already Florida residents.

We started out back in 2010 doing lots of research about which state we should make our domicile after we sold the house. We knew for sure we didn’t want it to be NY!! According to the research we did, the “best” three for rv’ers seemed to be Texas, South Dakota, and Florida, mainly due to the fact that they don’t have state income tax there, and they seem to make becoming residents a little easier for people who don’t actually have a physical home in the state. We were leaning towards FL, when we went to a seminar about choosing a state for domicile, and SD seemed to have a little more going for it because supposedly the insurance rates in FL were more expensive. So, after going back and forth, we decided to use SD.

In hindsight, we would have been so much better going with our original thought. For us, at least, SD didn’t end up being very convenient. They had originally changed the law so that your license could be renewed online. What they didn’t mention was that you had to have stayed a night in the state within the year. Also the license expired on your birthday. You could renew it so much ahead of time and so much after. However, with Harry’s birthday being in Feb and mine in October, they were just far enough away from each other that we would have to make two trips to SD, in the same year. So we decided that when our licenses came up for renewal we would switch to FL. Then our plan was accelerated when our mailing service moved, and since we had to do an address change anyway, we went ahead and switched.

When we “moved” to Florida, we went with St. Brendan’s in Green Cove Springs, FL for our mail service. They were really good about answering any questions we had, although most of the process was pretty clearly explained on their webpage. (We will continue to use them during the summer season to have our mail forwarded to us, as they have been very convenient, and we have always appreciated their excellent service.) When we started going through the process of becoming residents, we discovered that while the insurance was a little more expensive, the yearly registration fees were much cheaper. So it ended up being a wash. The costs involved were the charge to file the domicile documents, to get our licenses and register our vehicles (our truck and fifth wheel). That was a few years ago now and I can’t remember exactly, but I would estimate that the costs to do everything at DMV totaled around $500, give or take a little. The only thing I didn’t like about FL is that they passed a law a couple years ago, that if your address is a mail order facility, they put the registration number for the RV as your physical address on your license. While it never caused any problems, I just didn’t like how it looked on my license.

Anyway, this past week, when we went to change our address, it made it really simple since we were already Florida residents. We just went to the webpage, supplied the identifying information so they could pull up our record, and changed our address – as well as giving our credit card information for the fee, of course! (Florida is really up to date on online access. It is really easy to order absentee ballots, and you can even go back in after you send your ballot back and see what date it was received.) We think we now have most of our address changes done, and it feels good to know we’ve changed our address for the last time for hopefully quite a while.

Unexpected Bump

The last time I wrote a blog post, I had promised pictures after the arrival of the furniture on Thursday. Sorry – no pictures yet! Because most of the bedroom furniture has not yet arrived. We were expecting our bed and dresser to arrive Thursday afternoon. So when we got up in the morning, we happily picked up the pullout couch and got everything cleared out for the arrival of the delivery guys. Around 12:30 we got a call – they had just loaded the truck and realized that they didn’t have our mattress. We were pretty disappointed, especially when we were told that they wouldn’t be getting the mattress until next week, so it will be at least next Friday before it is delivered. After some discussion, the woman offered to send a mattress from the floor to take us through to next week. So we were happy to not have to set the pullout couch bed back up.

A few hours later, when the delivery van arrived, we were looking forward to getting the rest of the bedroom set up. But when Harry looked at the chest of drawers, he found that it was pretty badly damaged. It was scratched up and the drawers wouldn’t even open. So, in the end only our box spring was delivered. We had a great experience in the showroom, but so far the other side of the process has not been as impressive. We’ll see what this week brings.

We are making much better progress with our address changes. We were going to make the trip to the Florida DMV to get our addresses updated on our license. In preparation for that, Harry went online to make sure we didn’t need to bring anything with us, and he was happy to find that we could actually make the changes through the website. So we went ahead and changed our address and our new licenses will be mailed to us.

We were going to go over and take a quick look at the RV yesterday. (We plan to just stop by every week or so just to make sure everything looks good.) But it actually rained pretty much all afternoon yesterday, so we will wait and go over to the storage place on Monday instead.

Now that we’ve been able to slow down with the work around here, we’ve gotten back to our exercising. We walked 5 miles for the past three days. It felt so good to be out and moving!

By my next blog post, I’ll try to have some more pics.

Making It Official

Yesterday we finished up the painting in our bedroom, and removed the painter’s tape from the edges. (No more pictures until our furniture arrives tomorrow!) We are really happy with the color we picked. We didn’t want to take the time to get a sample can and paint a swatch on the wall, and you never know how much it’s going to darken when it dries – until you see it. But the color we picked just darkened a little to a pleasant tone and I think our furniture and bedding colors are going to complement it nicely.

Now that we are settled in Avon Park for a while, I happily dragged Harry off to what used to be my favorite place – the local library! We brought a piece of mail with our address and it’s a good thing we did, because we had to show it to get a library card. I picked out a few of my favorite authors, and have been reacquainting myself with the unfamiliar sensation of reading an actual book – with pages to turn and everything! haha

This morning we did some more bookkeeping business and went online to the majority of the rest of our accounts and changed our address. I really love being able to just sign into an account and change information like that. In that case, much better than having an actual piece of paper. I’m also not going to miss having our RV registration number on our licenses in place of the street, which is the way FL does it when your permanent address is a mail service place. On Friday we will be going over to the FL DMV (that’s not what they call it here but can’t get that term from NYS out of my head) to get our new licenses with our address on it. We will be keeping the mail service address in Green Cove Springs, but will be switching to a part-time basis for the summer months, and placing our account on hold while we’re here.

Now that our bedroom is done, we’re going to slow down and work on the painting and improvements we want to do more gradually. We actually got out this morning and went for a 5 mile walk – our first in a long time! We went out at 7:15 am and it was 76 degrees already. I keep hoping I can sweat off a couple pounds. :)

Ahh! Making Ourselves Comfortable

Our first priority has definitely been to work on upping the comfort level. The chairs in the living room were not comfy – at all. Only one was a recliner, but it didn’t recline. When we went to the furniture store yesterday, we were so happy to hear that our chairs could be delivered today. Well, they arrived right on time, and they did not disappoint!

Our other priority has been to get our bedroom put together. We have been sleeping on the pullout couch, and it hasn’t been too bad, but it’s a firmer bed than we like. I did the prep work for painting the other day, and this morning we were ready to get started.

Because the rooms have a vinyl covered wall board, we had to buy a special primer called “Gripper Primer.” Harry did the edging and I used a roller to do all the inside part. I have realized that it’s so much nicer to do smaller rooms. We were completely done with two coats, even allowing for drying time in between, by 1 o’clock.

We are so pleased with how it came out. We will be starting the wall color tomorrow.

In fact, we got it done so much faster than we expected that Harry called the furniture store this morning to see if we could move the delivery day for our bed up to this week. Yes they could! So our new bed is arriving on Thursday. We can’t wait!

Like Riding a Bike

This morning, as we were prepping our bedroom for the updates we want to do, I was reminded of that old saying about some processes being so familiar that you can jump right back into them, just like hopping back on a bike, even after years of not riding it at all. Over the ten years that Harry and I have been together, working on home improvement “stuff” has been a common thread…first in the condo that I had bought right before we met, then again in the condo when we were prepping it for showing, then in our house. So this morning it felt really comfortable and familiar, (like an old song we’d heard many times), as we got down to the business of cleaning our room up, spackling, taping, all that good stuff.

One of the parts of the project that Harry really wasn’t looking forward to was getting those dressers taken apart, as they were attached right to the wall, and he wasn’t sure what taking them apart was going to entail, and whether removing them would do any damage to the wall. So we tackled that first. The drawers did not come out easily, but it was helpful that we weren’t trying to save it, so Harry was able to overpower the hinges and wrestle the drawers out of place.

Then it was just a matter of Harry using his drill to remove the screws and take the “dresser” apart.

That’s better!

The second one came out even easier. It only took about an hour to get rid of both of them. Yay!

The other part that we weren’t sure about was getting rid of that mirror. It was glued right to the wall. Harry had never removed a glued mirror so I consulted our local expert – AKA Google.

Following the listed steps, we taped the mirror with duct tape, and then Harry used shims to slowly remove the mirror from the wall.

All gone!

The trim that runs along the wall did not go behind the “dresser” so Harry bought some one inch trim at Home Depot and finished the trim pattern so it wouldn’t be noticable that something had been removed from there.

Harry making our walls look good!

In between working on our updating project, we made a trip to a local furniture store and back to trusty ol’ Home Depot (for the trim and a couple other miscellaneous items we forgot to get the last time we were there). At the furniture store, they were having a great sale, and there was only one other customer there, so I think it was our fastest trip to a furniture store EVER. We now have a couple new recliners (arriving tomorrow!) and a new bed and chest of drawers (arriving a week from tomorrow). The woman we dealt with at Badcock Furniture (who was the store manager) was nice enough to split our order into two deliveries at no additional cost. That will give us time to finish the painting before our bedroom furniture arrives. We are so excited that within two weeks we are going to have a nice new updated bedroom.

Everything is coming together!

First Full Day and Getting Settled

This has been a great day. It’s the first day that we didn’t spend running back and forth between our two homes. Harry and I feel like, for us, we now have the best of both worlds. I asked him this morning, if we had been able to swing keeping both the house in NY and also rv’ing down south for the winter, would we ever have started fulltiming. We both agree that we don’t really know for sure what we would have done in that case. Our main objective has always been to get out of the cold NY winters. Having this place in FL is much more affordable (despite the somewhat rude non-welcome by our a/c unit), so we now feel like we have the perfect situation for us. We are feeling pretty content. And, as you can see, so are the “kids”.

After a more leisurely start this morning, we both got to work in our respective rooms. I had the kitchen pretty well set already, but our clothes were in piles everywhere.  Harry, in the meantime, was working in his workshop area. It desperately needed some organization.

Just a couple before pictures! The place was a MESS.

Now, for some after photos…

Our living room area – pretty much set. We are going to look for a couple recliners.

Our “guest bedroom” area… Right now we are using it for our bedroom until we finish painting and making the other changes in our bedroom.

The kitchen…

And the miraculous transformation in Harry’s workroom!!!

I can’t believe the change in just a few hours. Harry was in organizing heaven!

It feels good to have everything unpacked and in its place. Now, hopefully we will be able to find things again when we need them! haha