Moving | Wishes And Pixie Dust

March 6, 2011
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Inventory day!

As we reach the 140-day mark today, we thought it would be a good time to update our readers where we are in the process of relocating our family to Florida. We contacted Mayflower to begin the moving process; as we are waiting to hear back, we decided it would be a good time to survey our belongings and make a final list of what furniture and electronics we will keep, and what we will donate. The following items made the final cut:

Ben’s Room: headboard, bed frame, wall shelf, red toy storage unit, metal shelves & metal cubes, TV and DVD player.

Catie’s Room: headboard, 2 shelf cabinet, Noah’s Ark stool and shelf, 2 wall shelves, TV/VCR/DVD player

Downstairs Hallway: corner shelf and wall shelf

Kitchen: baker’s rack, filing cabinet, Kitchenaid mixer, dining room table, Ben’s chair

Master Bedroom: headboard, green corner 3-shelf unit, 1 wall shelf, jewelry armoire, TV

Living Room: 2 shelf cabinet, stand fan, slide-under-couch table, stool, round table, 2 end tables, 3 hanging shelves, wall perpetual calendar, Wii, computers

Sunroom: 2 wooden scrapbooking carts, laptop table, black rolling cart, long bookcase, short bookcase, ribbon shelf, bulletin board

We have made the decision to leave most of our furniture behind, for two reasons: one) they are older pieces, and while still functional, are not worth moving; and two) our son Nick will be moving into an apartment this summer and he can use them. We have a huge and extremely heavy oak desk that we are going to sell this summer. It’s a high quality piece of furniture, and in excellent condition, but we just don’t want the burden of it any longer. We don’t expect that our first apartment or house in Florida will be our permanent residence, and we would be unable to move it ourselves to a new place.

The only unknown as far as furniture right now is our video cabinets. We have 2 free-standing units, and our original goal was to go through our videos and only keep those that would fit in one unit. However, we have recently heard of a friend who moved to Florida whose video tapes melted in the moving process; so we are now considering buying a Video/DVD Recorder to put all our videos on DVDs. It would make it easier to move them, and it would allow us to sell the video cabinets.

Now that the basement is cleared out, our new goal for March is to declutter as much as possible the downstairs area: living room, sunroom, kitchen, master bedroom. IWe expect this goal will carry us into April, and have set April 17th as a completion date for this. After Easter we intend to step up our packing process. We have very few boxes packed now, and really have not disrupted our living area, trying to keep it as normal as possible for our kids.

Thanks for following along, and we welcome any advice you have to share.

March 2, 2011
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Keep Moving Forward!

Monday, February 21, 2011

We are sending through an update on where we are with our move.

For those of you following our journey, you may remember that we had set a goal of completely clearing out our basement items by March 31. We are pleased to say that 90% of what we had in the basement is either gone or in the process of being dealt with. If you had seen how packed our basement was, you would be amazed. We are amazed, really, at the amount of things we had that really were there because we were lazy. 🙂 It’s easier to place things in a box and put in the basement instead of deciding what to do with them. It really feels great knowing that it’s all gone.

Otherwise we are slowly moving forward. We had the flu bug visit our household the past couple of weeks; thankfully our unwelcome visitor seems to be finally gone. Last weekend our checking account was compromised; thankfully no funds are missing but we are still working with the bank to get it all straightened out. We have put some items on Craigslist and Ebay, and have made some money, which goes into our piggy bank to help with the move. However most of our belongings are being donated, either via Freecycle or Goodwill. We believe strongly in paying it forward and helping others in need. We are both co-owners of our local Freecycle group; Jen started it in July 2004, and two years later Mark agreed to come aboard as group owner. We are currently 3,170 members strong, and has proven to be a great resource in our community. If you are not a member of Freecycle, we encourage you to visit http://www.freecycle.org and join a local chapter.

Mark and Jen

March 2, 2011
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Top 5 Reasons Why We Are Moving To Florida

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

As I write this we are in the beginnings of a blizzard. So it’s really not hard for you to guess what our #1 reason is:

#1. It’s Warm.

Some folks enjoy the snow, and winter sports. Sledding, ice skating, snowmobiling, ice fishing, … the list goes on. However, to enjoy the weather, you need to dress for it. Hats, gloves, scarves, snow pants, winter coats, boots, and don’t forget the layers of clothing. Then of course, there are the negative degree temperatures, and the snow falling every day (or so it seems). You can spend an hour shoveling the snow only to have it snow two hours later and have to do it all over again.

We don’t want to play the winter game anymore. 🙂 We realize Florida does have it cold spells, but as northerners we’ll be able to handle it just fine. We are looking forward to not moving the winter gear, and we are looking forward to being able to wear a hoodie in December while Wisconsites are in the middle of a blizzard. 🙂

#2. Disney

We love everything Disney. We absolutely love the idea of being able to go to the parks whenever we choose. We have not been able to participate in either Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party or Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, and we are so looking forward to being able to do that. One of the reasons we chose the Clermont area is because of it’s close vicinity to Walt Disney World. We plan to go on a Disney Cruise as soon as it is feasible for us to do so.

#3 Non-Disney Fun

We are looking forward to exploring Florida. While we admittedly have not done everything there is to do in Wisconsin, we feel like we are at a stalemate, doing the same things year after year. We are looking forward to the beaches. For those of you not familiar with Wisconsin, we have lakes, and we have what we call beaches, but in terms of coastal beaches, they’re really kind of sad. 🙂 My children have never been to the ocean, and we are really looking forward to the expressions on their faces when they experience it for the first time. We are planning to do Universal, Sea World, GatorLand, etc and just look forward to the abundance of choices that are there.

#4 Meeting New Friends

We are so excited to be able to meet our Disney and non-Disney friends who already live in Florida. We have found the Disney community to be a wonderfully supportive and accepting group of people. We will also be able to meet our Disney friends who come on vacation to Florida more easily, as we won’t have to coordinate trips- we will always be there!

#5 A Variety of Choices

This is a minor reason, but we are looking forward to experiencing the variety of retail stores that are completely new to us, such as Costco, Winn Dixie, Publix, CVS, etc. The stores that exist in Wisconsin tend to be midwest-specific for the most part, so we will need to discover our new favorites through trial and error. On our Disney trip in 2009, we were able to tour parts of Kissimmee, walk through Winn Dixie, and experience a very slow ATM machine (it took 15 min to withdraw money from an ATM!)

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We are looking at our move as an adventure, and part of the joys of an adventure is discovering new things and keeping an open mind about all the new things we can experience. It’s very hard to leave everything familiar behind, we are very sensitive to our children’s feelings with this, but we also feel the end rewards are well worth the temporary inconveniences.

Thanks for following us! We appreciate all the support!

March 2, 2011
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A Time For Sharing

Friday, January 21, 2011

We have been planning our move to Florida since 2007, when it was more of a dream. A plan to do “someday”. In 2008 we became more serious about our long-term goal and in Fall 2008 we set our moving date as September 15, 2012. It still seemed so far away.

We discovered The Relocated Tourist blog www.relocatedtourist.com, looked at each other and thought, “What are the odds?” Here was a family in Wisconsin who was planning to do exactly what we wanted to do. In June of 2010 we set up our own blog to document the moving process. We initially had some discussion on what to call it, but decided on “Wishes and Pixie Dust”, because we felt we would need a great helping of each to achieve our dream of moving our family to Florida! We chose When You Wish Upon A Star as our theme song because the words fit perfectly, and we have clung to those words over the past several months.

Last fall Jen picked up her dream of becoming an elementary school teacher and attended the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh part time. This meant pushing back the move to June 2013, after graduation. While it was for a worthwhile reason, it was also very disheartening to have to wait even longer.

A couple of weeks ago we had the distinct pleasure of meeting Amy and Craig Petermann, www.relocatedtourist.com, and over dinner their enthusiasm in their move to Florida made us re-evaluate our plans. Afterwards, Mark and I had a long discussion, and asked ourselves, “Can we do this in a few months?”, and the answer was a resounding “yes”! We have waited to share who we are with the Facebook community until we were sure details were worked out with Mark’s workplace. It is definitely in place, and we decided to use the Petermann’s blog as a way to reveal who we are.

So, we are the Vitek family: Mark, Jen, Catie and Ben. (Nick is our oldest son, but is not choosing to move with us).

We will keep our Wishes and Pixie Dust presence on Facebook, and this is where we will share all our moving updates. Some of our friends on Wishes and Pixie Dust are also our friends on our personal Facebook pages. If you are not, please feel free to add either Mark or myself as a friend. We will keep our website up and running, but the Facebook friend Wishes and Pixie Dust will disappear after we make our move, and we’d love to stay in contact with everyone.

We so appreciate all your support and love all the new friendships we’ve made.

Jen and Mark

March 2, 2011
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Long Distance Moving

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Everyone should prepare for a long-distance move. Now, before you think I’m crazy, hear me out.

I think I shared that one of our goals is to have our basement emptied by the end of the March, and that we intend to go through at least one box a day to achieve that goal. We’re definitely on track with that. The interesting thing about this is that we are not keeping most of it. As we go through the boxes, we are very selective about what we keep.

To preface this, we have moved four times in our thirteen + years of marriage. Our first move was from Chicago to Fond du Lac, each of us driivng a U-Haul truck through rush hour on the expressway. Yeah, that took a few years off our lives! The other three moves were within the city, using U-Haul each time. For each move, we have brought all our possessions with us, minimizing some but not really taking an intense look at what we own.

So as we go through the boxes now, for our fifth (and what we hope) our final move, we find that it’s really freeing to let go of what we own. Do we really need to move a 24 year old typewriter to Florida? What about all the saved baby clothes? (Our youngest will be 11 in March). No, really we don’t. We keep what is truly important to us, take pictures of/and discard the rest. We are not doing a huge rummage sale before we leave, but we are donating to Freecycle and Goodwill.

It’s not always easy, and sometimes it’s downright hard to part with items. But for us we are keeping our eyes on the goal, and we would much rather be in Florida minus possessions, than in Wisconsin with possessions. Yes we could move with all our stuff, but it begs the question, do we really want to? And our answer is no.

It’s a wonderful feeling, which is why I say everyone should prepare for a long distance move. Even if you have no intentions of actually moving, pretend you are and discard the clutter out of your life.

You won’t be sorry you did.

Jen