BIG News!

Yes, Harry and I have big big news! (Well, unless we are Facebook friends, in which case this post is just….the REST of the story! haha)

Have to give a little backstory…anyone who knows Harry and me knows that we are not super spontaneous people. In fact, we are pretty big planners. We’ve been talking for a while about what our next step might be. We love rv’ing, and being fulltime rv’ers, but we’ve known all along that we were not interested in spending the rest of our lives as fulltimers. Over the past three seasons here at Adelaide Shores, we’ve been more and more interested in the possibility of having a small place here for the winter and then traveling the rest of the year. Yeah, so you can probably see where this is going.

However, having said that, I have to say that we both thought this was several years out. The places here can range from 35k to 45k for the used ones, and up to the mid50k range for a new park model. So we had planned to start looking in a few years, checking out places that go up for sale…taking our time. haha

So, last week at cards, Friday night to be exact, the subject of buying came up amongst the group, and one of the residents happened to mention a place for sale on the next street over from where we have been staying. We never go down that street, so we didn’t even know it was for sale. Not only was it for sale, but the owners, being in their late 80s, had decided that it was too much for them to travel to FL for the winter, and had significantly lowered the price. Not only that, but they had already contracted for the replacement of the sod and the installation of an automatic sprinkling system, usually one of the first expenses if you purchase a place that doesn’t already have that.

This did perk our interest at the time, but we didn’t talk about it at all when we got home. It wasn’t until Saturday morning when we were on our walk that we started tossing it back and forth. Like… “so what do you think, should we look at it”… “well we aren’t really thinking of buying now but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to look”… haha famous last words!!

We walked over and had our first look at the place. It has a Florida room, which we definitely wanted. Of course, the brown grass doesn’t add anything, but we know that the sod is going in the next months, so we tried to picture what it would look like with the nice grass, all manicured. We both loved all the windows on the Florida room, and we could see that the roof looked pretty decent from a distance. Also, although you can’t see it in this picture, there is a huge Trane air conditioner on the other side, bigger than what we see on many units. Overall, it was a positive first impression, and it perked our interest enough to call the number listed on the sign on the door.

To cut a long story short(er)…from a phone call to the broker selling it, where we found out that there was an open house Saturday afternoon and that the sellers had just lowered the price another 3k from the already tempting really low price…everything moved at a whirlwind pace and fell into place very quickly, so that three days later we found ourselves the owners of a small winter home base. Is it perfectly what we wanted? No. But with the price that we got it for, we can afford to make the changes that we want to make to get it there. And there’s so much more excitement in making changes that are going to be for us, and not just to sell it in a couple years.

Since this post is already long enough, I’ll just post one picture of the Florida room, which I think is my current favorite part of our new home base, and then tomorrow I will give a full detailed tour…