Wishes And Pixie Dust

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

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Apartment Living

The end of October marks the end of our current lease, and the beginning of our new one.  We have always lived in a house, both in Illinois and Wisconsin.  In Wisconsin we were so fortunate to have an absolutely fantastic landlord, and the last house we vacated, well, we really had a problem leaving!  It was the best house we have ever lived in, and we were voluntarily leaving it and heading into the unknown.  There are still times now when I really miss it, but I also realize that it is way too big for us now, as we have a lot less “stuff”.

We are generally happy with the apartment complex we chose, and apartment living in general.  Maintenance is fabulous with responding to service requests, even with items such as changing the fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen, and providing air filters for the air conditioning unit! These are things that we had always taken care of ourselves.   It is also so nice not to have to put forth the time and energy into maintaining the lawn and landscaping.

Recently we have started talking about making the move into a rental home, for a few reasons.  One, we miss the ability to grill whenever we wish.  Yes, there are both charcoal and gas grills available, but it requires a walk to the pool area and the hope that no one is using the grill at the moment.   Two, we miss our outside decorations for Christmas.  We had quite the extensive display in Wisconsin, but only chose to move two to Florida:  our countdown clock and Rudolph.  And three, we really could use a larger living space.  There are purchases we’d like to make but we really have no available space to place them in.  We really have to think out what we buy.  Not to mention the seasonal dilemma of where to place the Christmas tree.   In general I think one loses some privacy living in an apartment, and we’d really like to gain that back.

We don’t, however, foresee this happening prior to 2014:  our lease is up shortly before Thanksgiving 2013, and we have no desire to move over the holidays.  We have so been there, done that, and no desire to do it again!  There is also the question of the extra expenses required to maintain a rental home, including lawn care, pest control (we currently pay $1 a month for pest control, and I KNOW that would significantly increase), possibility of purchasing a washer & dryer (included in our apartment), and pool maintenance.  I think we would need to find a rental home that offers a significant savings over the amount of rent we pay, and of course it would need to be in the same school district for our children, as we refuse to have our daughter switch schools half way through.   Yes, there is school choice, but there is always the possibility it could be rejected, and we’re not willing to take the risk.  She needs the stability of staying at the same school with her friends.

We have no regrets about the decision to move into an apartment, and we really feel fortunate as the office staff really does cater to its residents, but we also recognize that this is probably not a long term situation for our family.   We will stay in the area as we love Clermont and what it has to offer.

 


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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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Choosing Our Florida Home

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.

This is where the work began.  Using websites such as www.greatschools.org, www.homesforthegoodlife.com, www.bardellrealestate.com (Relocation tab), www.discoverourtown.com, www.mydreamlocale.com, www.cort.com/relocation, www.city-data.com/city/Florida.html (city-data is excellent for giving pure statistics on everything) and www.moving.com/real-estate/ (Real Estate Tools section) we researched the ins and outs of each city: schools, taxes, crime rates, cost of living, etc.  The city at the top of our list going in ended up being eliminated early because we could see the cost of living would be far higher than we liked and a city we hadn’t even considered moved to the top of our list.  This process took almost a year of being thorough in looking for what we wanted to see in a new hometown.

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.

~Mark.