It seems wild to us to think we only have sixteen days left in Wisconsin. When we made our decision back in January to move , it certainly was an easy one to make, given the blowing snow and bitterly cold temperatures, and of course our love for Disney. In the past six months we have overcome obstacles; we share this bit of information because we want to let you know that it is impossible to plan a move across several states without hitting at least one or two roadblocks along the way. Things will not always go as you plan, you will have bad days and moments of “why did I ever decide to do this?” pop into your head. We’re here to let you know it’s okay, keep moving forward with your dream, and deal with the obstacles as they occur.
One such obstacle is our car. We brought it in to the shop in March for $700 worth of repairs, $900 in June, and yes, we are bringing it in again in July (tomorrow). As we mentioned earlier, the check engine light came on and while that didn’t necessarily alarm us too much, the large puddle of coolant on our garage floor that leaked after we drove around for a couple of hours did. We are hoping it’s nothing serious, and we would appreciate prayers on this issue, because we really don’t want to pour more money into repairs, as this is money that is not buying furniture for us when we move.
One of the things we are most looking forward to once we are in Clermont and inside our apartment, is to just enjoy the moment, knowing there are no boxes to pack, no rooms to clean, no furniture to unload, and nothing to do except realize that we did it. That is the moment that we hold on to now, that helps us to get us through these next two weeks, whatever they may bring.
When we started our blog, it was mainly for our own purposes, to keep track of different aspects of our move. We feel honored that so many of our readers follow us regularly, and some readers aspire to follow in our footsteps and make their own journey to Florida to be closer to the Mouse. 🙂 In response to that, we attempt to post regularly, and to provide more informational blog posts that may help you with some of the major decision making that goes into a multi-state move. There are times that we share a blog post, and think “Really? No one is going to want to read that, it’s boring!”, and then we receive a few comments that encourage us that yes, you really want to hear about it! Today we wanted to share with you what our day looks like three weeks before our move, to give you a feel of perhaps what to expect when you experience your relocation.
Saturday is typically a very routine day in the Vitek household. We always begin with a trip to the library to return and check out different materials. We are very heavy users of the public library, it’s not very often we miss a visit, and we intend to keep up the routine once we make the move. We have two libraries in which to choose from in Clermont: Cooper Memorial and Cagan Crossings: we will most likely select Cooper Memorial as the library we most often frequent as it is closer to us than Cagan Crossings. Library cards must be applied for online, so we will do that the week of our move, so that they will be ready for us the following Saturday.
After the library we came home for lunch, and waited for a Craigslist exchange, twenty more dollars earned for our piggy! We then went to our oldest son’s apartment again, then off to Festival Foods to do some grocery shopping. We’ve been researching grocery stores in the Clermont area, and we do believe Publix will probably end up being our store of choice, although we’ve heard some good things about Sweetbay, so we may check that out as well. We pulled up the advertisement on the internet and the prices are quite comparable with what we are currently paying in Wisconsin.
We came home and unloaded our groceries, and went through the kitchen cabinets to see what else we could offer to Nick, and it ended up being quite a nice pile. He will get more once we are down to our last couple of days, but it felt good to be able to clean out items and not have to pack them! Saturday is also pizza night, and the big decision of where to order ensued. We want to make sure that we have our favorites one last time, and tonight we chose Rocky Rococo, a large sausage pizza with breadsticks. We waited to order until after 5:00, because we drive to pick it up, and we had another Craigslist transaction that netted an additional ten dollars. We always watch a movie with our pizza, and tonight’s selection was Cars. We still have yet to see Cars 2 in the theatre, but we plan to do that soon.
We did have a couple of minor *bad* things happen today. One, the check engine light came on in the car. We are hoping it’s just a glitch, as we just had the car undergo a 30 point inspection for the trip, including an oil change, and really can’t afford to put more money into the car at this point. The second thing involved an accident with a glass of soda and our external hard drive. At this point we’re not certain if any data is lost or if the device works. The cord did get severely bent, however. This is also another item that is not in the budget to replace.
Tomorrow we hope to finish up Ben’s room and make some progress in Catie’s. The kids are a little nervous that their belongings will not be packed in time, but we keep reassuring them, that yes they will. No toy gets left behind. LOL Nick is coming over on Monday to get some more of his things, and we plan to move the unwanted furniture into the garage, so we can Freecycle them. We have a lot of odds and ends in the garage, and are going to be letting people come and take what they want. Kind of like a free yard sale. 🙂
So that’s our day. We didn’t get a huge amount accomplished today in terms of packing, but some days are like that. We really like the fact that we’ve had plenty of time to sort through our belongings, so that we are not feeling hurried and rushed right now. Six months notice was perfect for us; it was far enough away to not feel pressured to do everything at once, but close enough that we weren’t discouraged that it was so far away We do better with short term goals, but that’s just us. You may find that a longer time period works best for you.
We wish all our American readers a very Happy Independence Day Weekend and please stay safe! We’re planning a new blog post for Monday which highlights our local haunts, so please watch for that. Mark is also working on a post that highlights a favorite Walt Disney World resort hotel, hoping to put that out later this week.
It’s hard to believe looking back, now that we’re at 32 days, but we began this journey with a decision way back on January 1st, 2008 after our Christmas season visit to WDW. Then came our next decision, where to live.
We started by deciding that we wanted to be no further away than a 20-30 minute drive. Then by reading through the blogs of people we knew online who lived in various areas of Central FL we had many ideas as to which areas we’d like to make our new home. We then made a list of all of the cities we had found from that reading as well as those we knew of from past visits. Then using Google Maps we scouted other cities within that 20-30 minute ‘zone’. That gave us our original search areas of NW Osceola County, NE Polk County, S Orange County and S Lake County.
With the areas “narrowed down”, our plan was then to visit as many of these areas as we could on our 2009 Disney trip (our first time driving down); with our primary focus being the areas just south of WDW. We were able to drive through several places and stop in a few stores (to gauge prices, etc.) and made some notes to take back home with us. The drive-through was cut short by a FL rainstorm, but we did come away with a new perspective.
At this point I want to say that where you choose to live will depend a lot on your personal feelings, choices and lifestyle. And keep in mind that when choosing a new home in the WDW area you will need to make some trade-offs. From many months of research online and from having mailings sent from many different commerce groups, I did learn several things. As an example, the closer you live to WDW property, the higher the prices tend to be in the local grocery stores; but further away you’ll have a longer drive to WDW but the grocery prices are lower. This is especially true in the “tourist corridor” to the immediate south of Disney property where many stores raise their prices to catch the tourist dollars from those staying in Vacation Homes and/or Suite Resorts. So you’ll want to keep things like this in mind when you start your adventure, and everyone’s choice is theirs, there is no “right or wrong’ choice…just the choice that is best for you.
Once we narrowed our choices to Clermont, Windermere, Winter Garden, Reunion, Groveland and Minneola we started “visiting” these cities virtually using Google Maps, Google Images, YouTube videos, blogs and also through the help of local friends who live in these areas or who would visit for us. This helped us to ‘see’ what areas looked like and to learn what shops, restaurants, etc. were in each area. We also learned at this point that apartment and home rental costs were very similar. Sites such as www.rent.com, www.rentalhouses.com, www.apartments.com, www.forrent.com, www.trulia.com and www.realtor.com are excellent resources for viewing apartments and rental homes. The last two are great if home-buying. We also read the online versions of all the local newspapers.
By this time Clermont had risen to the top of our list and we do have friends living there who were able to give us great info on the city in general. Then it was a house-search. We decided mid-way along that we wanted to rent an apartment to start so that we could personally learn about the communities and neighborhoods. Using the apartment search sites above we narrowed our search to 3 apartment complexes. Our preference was to have a first floor apartment and we needed 3 bedrooms, so this narrowed the search to 2. At this time an ‘outside contender’ popped up unexpectedly. There was a house for rent in the city which had topped our list early on. The house seemed great; a pool and yard (lawn care and pool maintenance included), a nice sized house and the price was right. But the owners couldn’t get licensed to rent and so we dropped this house from the list and we had our final contenders: Village at East Lake and The Gardens at Citrus Tower.
We spoke and emailed with leasing reps at both apartments and Carrie at The Gardens just really sold us on them. She took the time to answer all our questions and we came away from our calls knowing everything about The Gardens and only half as much about Village at East Lake. The rest is history.
This blog will follow our family as we prepare to move from Wisconsin to Florida, and we’re excited that you’ve chosen to join us! We decided to name our website Wishes and Pixie Dust, (and included the Disney song above), because it is our love of Disney that has precipitated this move, and with a little luck and pixie dust, our dreams will come true.
Our dream first began in 2006, after our first family trip to Walt Disney World. It grew to a distant wish, to a real possibility by 2008, after our December 2007 visit, and confirmed after our August 2009 visit to the World. We live in a state where the weather is totally unpredictable six months out of the year, and instead of asking ourselves, “Why do we live here?” we’ve made the leap to do something about it.
We have set a move date of September 15, 2010. We are a family of five, but only four of us will be moving to Florida. Our oldest son will be a junior in college, and will relocate to Madison. Our daughter will be a freshman in high school, and our youngest son will be in eighth grade. We will be moving after school starts, but feel it’s important not to leave before we get our oldest son settled.
Like Carl and Ellie of The Relocated Tourist, we will be selling all our possessions except those that have sentimental value or are not practical to replace, and plan on having professional movers do the bulk of the work. We drove down to Disney last August, really enjoyed the drive, and look forward to being able to do it again. We just don’t want the stress of U-Haul for this move. We plan to host a huge yard sale this summer, not so much to earn money but to pare down our possessions.
We welcome all comments and suggestions! Right now we are very much still in the planning stages, but have decided on Clermont as the city we’d like to relocate to. We will update our blog and hope you’ll follow us along on our journey!
Wishes And Pixie Dust 