Wishes And Pixie Dust

Follow the journey of a Wisconsin family of 4 who relocated to the Walt Disney World area in July 2011

Category Archives: Apartments


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6 months & counting……..

We passed the one year anniversary of our decision to move to Florida a couple of weeks ago, and it felt a little strange that we didn’t even think to recognize it.  We now have been residents of Florida for six months, so in recognition of both anniversaries, we thought it a perfect time to update our readers on how life is progressing for us now.

We love the city of Clermont.  It has everything we need within a five-to-ten minute drive, and the people here are very friendly and welcoming.  I don’t believe we have encountered one rude person here yet.  We love our apartment complex; it was a little unnerving when we first moved in, because we have always rented houses in Wisconsin, and were a little concerned about noise and privacy issues.   However, we never hear our neighbors, so it’s totally not an issue at all.   We really have embraced apartment living–we love not having the responsibility of lawn care and pool upkeep, and maintenance is extremely efficient when it comes to repair issues.  The apartment is a little smaller than we’re used to, but we have plenty of room for the four of us, and when our lease is up in October, we plan to renew.  We may consider purchasing a home in the future, but for the time being, we are content here.

A favorite saying of ours is “Toto, we’re not in Wisconsin anymore”.   As much as we love the area, it becomes obvious that there are definitely different attitudes and experiences that are prevalent here.  Some experiences are very good, such as 80 degree weather in January.  What northerner wouldn’t absolutely love that!  We’ve had a couple of chilly evenings (30s and 40s), and cooler days, but we’re proud to say that we have not yet turned the heat on, nor have we needed to use a winter coat.

Unfortunately, the middle school experience we have to put in the negative column of attitudes and experiences.  The school Ben attended is very strict, and really not supportive of children with special needs.  It was so detrimental to him that we made the decision to pull him out and homeschool him the rest of the year.  It was very discouraging to us to think that all schools in Florida may be similar, but we recently learned of a middle school in Orlando that is autism-friendly, so it really gives us hope that not all schools are deficient in addressing the needs of students with special needs.  We will not be able to send Ben to this school next year; it would require a three hour daily drive just to take him and pick him up, and that’s simply not feasible.  We are in contact with another middle school in Clermont, and we are hopeful that it may give him a more positive school experience for seventh grade.

Another regional difference is the availability of our favorite foods.  In Wisconsin we shopped at one store, Festival Foods.  In Florida, we shop at five different stores:  Publix, Sweetbay, Winn-Dixie, Super Target and Walmart.  Each store offers something unique that the others don’t, in terms of products and specials.  Prices on groceries do tend to be higher here than in Wisconsin.  Our most-missed snack products from Wisconsin, apart from the variety of cheeses available in the dairy department, were bagel dip (from Festival), Baker string cheese and Johnsonville Summer Sausage.   Festival Foods, bless their hearts, gave us the recipe for bagel dip, we’ve discovered certain brands of string cheese that are an acceptable substitute, and we believe we may have found a store that sells Johnsonville Summer Sausage.  We will say that the Florida citrus is amazing!  We’ve never cared for grapefruit, but when it’s fresh off the tree, it’s a whole new experience.

You may be wondering if we have any regrets.  We need to be honest with our readers and say yes, there have been regrets.  It was extremely hard to say good-bye to Nick at the airport after Christmas.  We know that Ben would have had no issues with the middle school back in Wisconsin, and he would have been successful there.  It’s very difficult to walk away from what is familiar, and it is very easy to look back and say “what if”.

However we wouldn’t trade the moving experience for anything in the world.  Nothing can recreate the atmosphere in the car as we drove through the state of Florida towards Clermont.  It was absolutely amazing.  The kids are settled and happy, Ben a lot more so now that he is away from the negative school environment.  Really, who suspends a child for being autistic?  They have a lot more experiences here available to them:  we’ve been to both the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean, Walt Disney World numerous times, a Disney Cruise is in the works, as are passes to Sea World and Lego Land.  It’s been amazing to meet people we’ve known only from Facebook, but meets are so hard for our son Ben that we don’t make as many of them as we’d like.

Will we consider moving back?  For us, it’s not an option.  We believe that when you allow it to be a possibility in your mind, you always have one foot in the past and one foot in the present.  You will not make a concerted effort to acclimate yourself totally, and eventually will rationalize the move back.  Will we look back on Wisconsin?  Of course, we have friends and family there, and it was our life for several years.  However, we are Floridians now.  We embrace the Floridian life, all that it has to offer or not offer.   We hope our blog provides some insight and perhaps even wisdom as to what a relocation a thousand miles away looks like, and we hope our readers know that even though our posts are now infrequent, we still welcome any questions regarding the relocation process.  Thanks y’all for reading and following along!


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Living Life In Florida

When we were planning our move to Florida, we were excited at the possibility of our expenses being lower than in Wisconsin.  Now that we’ve been here for over six weeks, we thought we would take a look at our actual expenses and share them with our readers. For a reference point, our apartment is 1,389 sq feet.

  • Our monthly rent increased by $186; however, we are no longer responsible for lawn care.
  • Our monthly cable bill for phone, internet and television decreased by $5.
  • No more gas bill (averaged $35-45 in summer; $300 in winter)
  • Our electric bill is $220, which is not bad considering we haven’t been careful about our usage, we had many pool days which means more towels to wash, and it’s summer 🙂  We expected it to be less, but it’s less than it would be in Wisconsin.
  • Our income increased because there are no withholdings for state income tax.
  • The biggest change is our water bill.  In Wisconsin we were paying $135 monthly. In Florida we paid $8.64.  We do expect the bill to go up for September, as the meter was read August 5 for the water, which resulted in only 12 days of water, but we don’t expect it to be a significant amount.
  • Our gasoline usage has increased significantly, due to the fact we are approximately 40-50 minutes away from Disney (one way), Clermont is much more spread out than Fond du Lac was, and approximately an hour’s worth of gas is used daily for bringing the kids to and from school.
  • Groceries are approximately 15-20% more expensive here than in Wisconsin, and significantly lacking in a variety of dairy products 🙂  We find that we shop at four different grocery stores:  Winn-Dixie, Publix, Sweetbay and Target, which is an extremely different routine for us.  (We’re used to shopping at one, and we’ve really been missing it lately).
New bills for Florida:
  • Disney annual passes are $150 per month
  • Pest control fee is $1 per month
  • Valet trash fee is $15 per month
  • Sunpass:  this varies on how often we go into Orlando, but in six weeks since we’ve been here we’ve spent $17.50 in tolls.  It will go down considerably from here on because we’re not using the Turnpike as much now.
So are we paying less in expenses than Wisconsin?  No, but we’re not paying more, either. It all seems to equal out in the end.  We do acknowledge the fact that if we were renting a house, we would be paying more in expenses; in terms of lawn care, pool upkeep and a higher bill for pest control.  We’re quite satisfied with the apartment complex and love not having the responsibilities that renting or owning a home entails.  We recognize that apartment living is not for everyone, but it suits us perfectly.  


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3 Weeks & Counting…

Today marks the three-week anniversary of our family arriving in Clermont, and we thought we would take the time to just make some observations about what we’ve experienced so far, the good and the not-so-good.

We had certain expectations before we moved here regarding the size of the city.  We knew the population to be roughly 28,000, we knew the area to be hilly, and we knew Clermont was located 22 miles west of Orlando.  In our home in Wisconsin, we lived in a city of approximately 48,000; we were able to travel from one end of the city to the other in ten minutes–everything was very centrally located.  We assumed Clermont would be similar, only smaller.  (Our friends who live in Clermont or know the area–you can stop laughing now.  LOL)

We didn’t realize how encompassing Clermont is!  Wow.  We will say the views are absolutely amazing:

When we were looking at apartments, we knew that Cagans Crossing was further away and not as centrally located.  What we didn’t realize was that Cagans Crossing was thirteen miles and twenty three minutes away!  For our Wisconsin friends, it takes us just as long to drive from our apartment to Cagans Crossing, as it does to travel from Fond du Lac to Oshkosh.  It amazes us that we can travel from our apartment, past houses, businesses, and even a state park, arrive at Cagans Crossing, and STILL be in Clermont!

When we were going to the Disney Parks the first couple of days we were here, we always seemed to lose track of time, and couldn’t understand it, as we estimated our travel time would be around 35 minutes.  When we finally tracked our time last week, we realized that it actually takes us a lot longer:  23 minutes to Cagans Crossing, 28 minutes from CC to the Magic Kingdom parking lot, and for that particular day we took the ferry over, and it was an hour later that we were finally on Main Street USA.   It was an unusually busy day, however, and we’re sure the monorail would have been a lot faster.  But it’s still almost an hour drive to the parking lot, which is a lot more than we estimated.

One observation we’ve noticed is that we use a lot of gas here, because everything is so spread out, and because the traffic lights take absolutely forever to change.    It’s going to be an adjustment in getting used to that.   We are starting to get acclimated to where everything is, but we still use the GPS on occasion.

We picked up a membership at BJs, not so much because the club prices are spectacular, but for the discounted gas.  The gas at BJs is five cents cheaper than anywhere else, and we estimate that we should at least get our money’s worth on the membership fee over the course of the year in gas savings.  And, it’s really not fair for us to comment on the club prices, because everything here in terms of grocery and Walmart type items is more expensive than in Wisconsin, and right now we’re fairly bad judges at what is a good or not-so-good price.  To us it’s all bad….LOL!    One feature that attracted us to BJs is that they send out their store coupons, and you can also apply a manufacturer’s coupon to it as well.

Our apartment is slowly coming together.  We only have a handful of boxes to unpack, and most of those are boxes that contain books, and are just waiting on a bookcase to put them into.  The living room is a lot smaller than we’d like, but we’ll make the best of it.   It really is an exercise in making the best use of what available space there is.  Right now the storage closet is totally unorganized–we’re thinking some shelving units in there will help, so that we don’t need to pull everything out to get to an item in back, but it’s not a priority at the moment.

Would we change anything, if we could go back in time?  We really wished we lived closer to Disney, but we would still choose Clermont as our home city and would still choose not to live at Cagans Crossing.  The only three bedroom apartments in that complex are on the third floor, and we really like the convenience of first floor living.  We love the area we are in, and we love the management team with the apartment complex.  Even though Cagans Crossing is closer to Disney, we would probably use just as much gas (or more) coming back into the main area of Clermont to do shopping or run errands.  We feel the trade-off of having to travel farther to Disney is worth it in exchange for the area we live in.


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Stuff.

As you consider a move across several states, the question that is always top-most in your mind <at least it was in ours> is trying to figure out how much stuff to move.  We finished unpacking Ben’s room today, and he was thrilled to have all his belongings back and put in some semblance of order.

We’ve discovered the little things that you don’t think will make a difference once you move really do.  We packed plastic storage containers–we could have easily donated them and purchased new–but it was nice to have that storage available when unpacking, and it really didn’t add that much weight to the truck.  You can never have too many storage containers, as what works in your house now will not necessarily be functional in your new home.  Ditto with toilet paper and kleenex.  It can be used as filler in the box, and it sure is helpful to have in the new place.

Pack as much in terms of everyday kitchen utensils and cookware and make sure it is the last box on the truck, and the first box off.  If you are using movers, remember it can take as long as a week to receive your boxes.  We enjoy eating out but it gets tiring after awhile, hits the budget hard, and is not the healthiest option.  You will need items for making meals, such as cookie sheets, pans, etcetera.  If you can, make up a list of what you will need to buy once you move into your house.  We had gotten rid of a lot of our items, and as we walked into Target our first day, we were really overwhelmed with trying to remember what we needed.

We’ve been saying from the start, pack only what you love.  However, we’d like to make an addendum to that:  also pack what you need.  We’ve had several items that we disposed of in Wisconsin, only to have to buy back in Florida.  It’s hard to spend money on items you know you had two weeks ago, that were in perfectly good condition.   It doesn’t make sense to dispose of everything you own.  We’re grateful for what we did pack, and it helps to make the apartment our home.  It really helps with the adjustment process, whether you have children or not.

Tomorrow the plan is to unpack the kitchen boxes.   We also need to contact maintenance as a lot of our outlets are not working, and Catie had ants crawling on her wall this morning. We believe its due to the fact they sprayed our building yesterday and the ants were coming inside to get away, but we will alert them anyway.  We need to contact Brighthouse as a couple of our cable outlets are not functional.  We’re also supposed to have ceiling fans installed this week in the bedrooms.  We have to say management is totally on top of everything and we are impressed with the way things are handled here.  We are blessed with living here.

 

 


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Home Sweet Home

We’re not even sure how to begin the blog tonight because this day was simply the best day ever.  The 2 1/2 hour drive from the Florida Welcome Center to Clermont was so awesome, because we put Princess and The Frog music on, and we all just sang along to the tunes.  The music literally spoke to us, because as Tiana sings “there’s been trials and tribulations, you know I’ve had my share; but I’ve climbed the mountain, I’ve crossed the river and I’m almost there”.  Well, we’ve had our share of roadblocks, we’ve climbed the mountains in Tennessee and crossed many rivers, and now here we are, and it is just truly amazing.

The Gardens at Citrus Tower is a gated community: just look at the pure joy on Ben’s face as we enter!

When we first started looking for an apartment we were able to find out a lot of information on the internet, but you never know for sure what you are getting.  Honestly, the pictures do not do it justice.  It is way better than we originally expected, and we almost feel like we have “checked in” to a resort.  The main lobby is plush, with a few different areas branching off:  one is the office, one is like a recreation room for the kids to watch TV, hang out or play Wii; one area is the fitness center, one is the business center, where computers and printers are available, and then there are doors that lead out to the pool area, which features Wi-Fi, all new lounge chairs and a large pool with jets spraying out from each side. Grills are also available for resident’s use.

The apartment itself is wonderful.  It’s a three bedroom, two bath apartment, with gourmet kitchen and enclosed laundry room off the kitchen.  It features tiled floors in the front hallway, bathrooms and kitchen; all appliances (including washer and dryer, microwave, dishwasher and garbage disposal); and valet garbage.  Seriously, someone comes and collects the garbage Monday through Friday.  There are these cute little bench-like containers outside each apartment, and we suspect you place your garbage in there.   There is also a screened-in patio area off the living room:  we definitely plan on using that area once we are able to buy a table and chairs to set out there.

Front hallway and off to the right you can see the patio door:

Patio:

Master bathroom decorated Mickey-style (you can’t see it but it has a garden-style tub):

Kitchen with laundry room door in the back:

We couldn’t be happier:  palm trees out the window, and a new home to live in.  From what we’ve seen of Clermont, it has everything within close driving distance.

Thank you all for following us to this point; watch for future posts regarding what relocation looks like.  Tomorrow we have our car insurance and DMV appointments, and will blog about that later in the day.