Craigslist | Wishes And Pixie Dust

July 3, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 2 Comments

Saturday Doings :)

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.

June 30, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 3 Comments

Hold On Tight

The evening star is shinin’ bright. So make a wish and hold on tight. There’s magic in the air tonight, and anything can happen.

Tiana– Princess and The Frog

It has been 1, 276 days since we first dared to dream the dream of moving to the Walt Disney World area, and with only 21 days to go, we can honestly say that we have no regrets. We can only imagine how incredibly difficult it will be to leave our son behind; it’s a parent’s mission to protect and care for their children, and even though he is nineteen years old and a sophomore in college, it still seems wrong to not bring him with us. We are reassured that he does have a solid plan in place, and in fact he signed the lease papers today on his new apartment.

We have been busy scheduling our disconnects in Wisconsin, and arranging our utilities and cable hook-ups for Florida. The comment that we have been hearing a lot refers to the fact that we’re moving at the wrong time of the year. 🙂 Yes, granted, July is not an ideal time of year to be moving to hot and humid Florida, but we wanted the kids to finish out the year at their respective schools, and would rather not have them join a new school in Florida after the start date. The first day of school in Florida is August 22, which gives us less than a month of summer vacation left after we arrive in Clermont.

Wednesday we went down to the AAA office and ordered our Trip Tix and picked up a complimentary guidebook for Tennessee. Silly us, forgot to get the Florida book, but we will make sure to get that when we pick up the Trip Tix in a couple of weeks.

We are pleasantly surprised at how inexpensive the utilities and cable bill are projected to be compared to Wisconsin. We didn’t realize the extent to how much more we are paying here, and it definitely is one of the perks of moving to Florida. Our rent will be $286 more than we are currently paying, but our bills will probably go down by an equivalent amount, more or less. Of course, there is the monthly payment plan to Disney that we add on 😉

The Florida Department of Education released today its school grades based on the FCAT results, and we are very pleased to see that the middle school the kids will be attending received an A for the third year in a row. Click here to access the database.

We are still packing boxes and listing items on Craigslist, and we have lists all around of what we need to do yet. We titled this blog post “Hold On Tight”, because we feel like we are in a queue area, waiting to experience the attraction. It’s like packing and planning for the ultimate Disney trip, afraid we’re going to forget to plan for something, but uber-excited about the final destination. It is going to be so weird driving through Wisconsin for the final time, and knowing we won’t be returning.

Happy July 1st to all our readers~may all your dreams come true.

June 21, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust Leave a comment

Just Around The River Bend

As we approach the one-month milestone in our long journey, it seems wild that we will no longer be residents of Wisconsin; it’s almost too much too take in at times. In the early planning stages, we decided to make this our future reality, but we always knew that if things didn’t work out, we could always postpone the move. Even as we moved forward with our dream in January, our “escape route” of delaying the move was always a possibility. We have reached the point now, however, that backing out is not an option 🙂 It’s kind of scary to go out there without a safety net. The quotation by Robert Burns “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” really applies. It doesn’t matter how much you organize or how hard you plan, there will always be something that changes. It may be a good thing, it may not be so good, but you need to go with the flow and accept it for what it is.

As we approach our 30 days countdown, we thought it would be fun to make a list of 30 things that haven’t gone according to plan:

Our first moving date was going to be September 15, 2012
Our second moving date was going to be in 2013.
Our third (and final) moving date is July 22nd, 2011.
We considered renting a U-Haul truck at one point.
We thought about renting Pods.
We considered driving both cars down.
We considered letting Mayflower do part of the packing for us.
We considered renting a house.
We decided against the first city we picked.
We paid much less in a security deposit than we anticipated.
We didn’t get the apartment we wanted.
We got a better apartment!
We didn’t meet our packing goals.
Car repairs cost way more than we thought it would ($1564) Some might question the wisdom of this given the age of our car, but we expect to get at least two more years from it, it purrs like a dream now, and it also means no car payments, which totally rocks.
We didn’t sell nearly as much stuff on Craigslist as we would have liked.
We considered having a rummage sale but decided the grunt work wasn’t worth it.
Disney raised ticket prices so the cost of an annual pass will be higher than anticipated.
We’ve gone through 33 end rolls of paper that we use to pack boxes. We received 5 free, so that totals $56. We didn’t expect to use so many, and we’re not done yet.
All our boxes have been free so far, from either Mayflower or the seafood restaurant, and we currently have 138 boxes packed. $138 x $2 (average) = $276 savings. We expected to have to pay for boxes (although we’re not done yet!)
We don’t even want to total the cost of packing tape 🙂
Our bank decided to drop the Disney Rewards program for our bank cards. This was a disappointment, however, we currently have $172.44 saved in Disney Reward Dollars, will probably accrue a few more dollars before it ends, which we will be able to use at Disney World. Good news.
We didn’t realize just how much stuff we had. Let’s put it this way: we should have our own wing in the Goodwill store!
We didn’t think we had so much paper/documents/art projects stored in the house, and it took weeks to go through it all.
We didn’t realize how hard it will be to move away from businesses we’ve frequented for years.
We weren’t able to sell our oak desk, but we were able to dispose of it a lot easier than we anticipated. It will not be missed!
We acquired a lot more medical bills than we would have liked.
We didn’t expect that our son Nick would be able to get one month’s free rent at his new apartment, which saves us on needing to rent him a hotel room for a week, and a storage unit for his furniture.
We were hoping to take a visit down to Wisconsin Dells to ride the Ducks, but given the cost of the car repairs, we are unable to do that before we leave.
We were also hoping to possibly visit Chicago for a day trip, as our son Ben absolutely loves the city of Chicago, and Mark was born and raised in Chicago.
We are fine with putting off the day trips, because it gives us an excuse to come back. 🙂 Not that we need one with Nick here, of course!

We don’t know what the following weeks have in store for us……just around the river bend….. but we are excited to see how things will unfold and begin our new life as Floridians. Walt Disney said it best: “Many of the things that seem impossible now will become realities tomorrow.” Since we first imagined our dream, it has been 1,266 days in the making. Wow. Hold on to what you believe in, and keep persevering. If you believe in it, you will do it.

We hope all our readers have a magical Disney-filled week! 31 days and counting! What are you doing now to pursue your dreams?

June 18, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 2 Comments

Relocating Your Furniture. Or Not.

As you contemplate a long-distance move (or perhaps you have already made the decision to move), one of the early questions that arises deals with the moving of furniture. If you are using professional movers, you will want to think about this prior to the appointment, as the contents of your house will be inventoried, and you will generally need to know if you plan to move an item to your new home.

There are a few questions you need to consider as you think about this. How old is my furniture? Is it worth moving hundreds of miles? For us, the answer is no, it’s not worth it. The majority of our furniture are older pieces, and realistically, the cost it would add to our invoice is more than its value. We are only keeping a select few pieces of furniture, and most of it is being discarded on Freecycle.

We will state, however, that it is kind of stressful to dispose of your furniture and not move it. We made the decision early on that we were not going to move our desk; it is solid oak and extremely heavy. It has been the thorn in our side for every move, and we’ve simply had enough with it. We made arrangements with a local person to come and pick up the desk. In order for this to happen, the desktop computer and work laptop needed to be disconnected, which is not a small feat given the massive piles of cords and modems involved! They were temporarily placed on the kitchen table, while we moved the desk out to the middle of the room. Unfortunately, this person never showed up, and we were faced with an enormous desk in the middle of the dining room, and computers disconnected and sitting on the table.

Thankfully we have a large foyer by the front door, and we were able to drag the desk out there and reassemble the dining room into some semblance of order. We used four smaller tables/bookcases to replace the desk, and while not an ideal situation, it should be okay for the next five weeks. We have someone new scheduled to come tomorrow, so if all goes well, the desk should be gone by tomorrow afternoon.

We have been slowly giving away our furniture; this week alone we have parted with 2 bookcases, a rocker & ottoman, three chairs, and (hopefully) a desk. We prefer Craigslist and Freecycle as means to dispose of our furniture because you can set the time frames when you want people to come buy to pick up your stuff. Another option you have available is to hold a rummage sale, but then you are responsible for hauling your furniture outside, sitting outside with it all day while hoping it sells, because if it doesn’t, you will have to bring it back inside (or place it in a garage if you have one available to you).

There are a few furniture stores that we are considering in Florida, recommendations given to us by friends:

Clermont Furniture on Hwy 50
Ashley Furniture
Rooms to Go Outlet in Altamonte Springs
American Freight
Sears (for mattresses)
Original Mattress Factory
IKEA

We’re putting them in our blog mainly so we have a reference point to go back to later. If any locals have some other great furniture or mattress stores to add to the list, we’d love to hear about them! Our plan is not to replace everything immediately, but only buy the essentials first and then add pieces as we can. One of the reasons we chose the apartment complex we did is that is comes furnished with a full size washer and dryer. This is a huge expense that we did not have to assume and are thankful for that!

Thanks for following along!

June 14, 2011
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The Eye Before The Storm

There comes a point in every move where you are lulled into a false sense of security. You think there’s no need to alter your daily schedule too much, there’s still plenty of time to pack boxes and make arrangements. You go on with your routines, only to discover two weeks have passed, and you realize you really are behind schedule, and thus the “storm” begins. We feel right now that we are in that “eye before the storm”, the calm period when everything feels okay. Our goal, however, is to make sure the hurricane storms dissipate to sunny skies, and we never see the storm clouds on our horizon.

We wanted to share just what our daily life looks like lately. The kids are now out of school for the summer, and we’re just enjoying the laziness and schedule-free qualities of not needing to set alarm clocks or rushing dinner times. During the day we are packing boxes or sorting through items; today we made a run to get more paper rolls for packing, and we were graced with free shorter rolls today. Apparently an individual had come in about an hour ahead of us and bought all the large rolls, but we were given the shorter rolls, and to be honest, we probably received just as much paper and saved twelve dollars in the process!

As we reflect on first making the decision to move in January to it now being almost the middle of June, things have gone pretty much according to plan. We had anticipated saving a little more money than we have, but we’re still in the comfortable zone, and well, it is what it is. We made the decision to hire professional movers and we stand behind that decision one hundred percent. Yes, it may seem like an extravagant cost, but we have items that have sentimental value, and other things that just would prove to be too much of a hardship to replace. We have disposed of a lot of our possessions, which we know has probably halved our cost of the move, but we choose to keep the items that matter to us, to provide security to our family. Let’s face it, moving across several states is a huge life decision that will require many months of adjustment. By choosing to transport some of our items with us, we are helping to ease that transition, and our apartment will seem more like a home.

We are keeping our storm clouds at bay by making sure we accomplish a few things each day in regards to the move, whether it be packing boxes, taking care of items on Craigslist, or just simply making lists. By not procrastinating, and doing the move in little chunks here and there, it really has become not that painful. We are grateful that we do not have the worries of needing massive amounts of energy and strength to move boxes and furniture, nor the stress of driving a moving truck across several states. For more times than we care to remember, we have been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and are simply not doing it again.

We anticipate that our lives in Florida will basically be the same as our lives here in Wisconsin, only with much better weather and lots more to do in our free time. We know it’s not going to be an easy process, but with the promise of being able to visit Walt Disney World at a whim’s notice, and meeting our Floridian (and non-Floridian) Disney friends who have been cheering us on for several months, we know it will be well worth the effort.