Exploring Living in the Sunshine State

Blog # 6

It was Leap Day 2020, and I was leaping forward. Life in the United States was not yet in COVID lockdown. My 17-year-old daughter, Rachel, and I boarded an airplane to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We were going to start our little vacation in Palm Beach County, where I had booked a hotel for us. A real estate agent was planning to pick us up at our hotel the next day and take me to see homes on the market in Boynton Beach, a small city I was interested in moving to.

After a few days in that part of Florida, we were going to take an Amtrak train to Orlando and stay with my niece and her husband, before Rachel would go on a tour of the University of Central Florida.

Yes, I was looking to take a big step. This was the exploratory stage of my new plan to move to southeast Florida. And I was thrilled to leave winter behind in the DC area and head south to explore warm, subtropical Florida.

We arrived in the early afternoon and were greeted by balmy, humid air and the sight of palm trees as we walked outside the airport doors. We hailed a Lyft car to the hotel. I was happy we didn’t have to worry about our winter coats left behind in Virginia.

We were going to be gone for the March 3rd Democratic primary election back in our state, so we had both voted early a couple weeks before our trip — Rachel for the first time! This was allowed in Virginia even though she was still 17, because she had registered by the primary deadline and would be voting in the general election in November, by which time she would be 18. We both had voted for Elizabeth Warren in our primary, and we were glad to have gotten that done before we journeyed to Florida.

At our hotel, we checked out the grounds and the pool and then went to the nearby beach for a little while, before locating a restaurant for dinner. After returning to our room that night, I opened up my laptop and poured over the real estate listings that Realtor Bob (as Rachel and I soon called him between ourselves) had sent me in recent days.

Realtor Bob had found me because late one evening some weeks earlier, I was surfing the Web for “active adult” communities in Palm Beach County and came upon a site called 55Places.com — 55 being the minimum age that homeowners must be to live in these adult communities. I was 56, just barely old enough to live in one of the communities, which looked like resorts. I filled out an online form requesting more information about some houses and communities in the area that I had selected, and an email popped up in my inbox right away, followed by a phone call the next morning.

Realtor Bob and I talked, and I told him my potential moving plans, my price range, and what I was looking for in a new home. He asked me some additional questions. (Would I be the only resident? Did I plan to work? Approximately how much cash did I want to put down and how much would I be financing?) We discovered that the right type of home for me in the selected communities would be a “villa” — in Florida this is an attached, one-level home with its own garage, driveway, and small back yard. The photos looked great and the descriptions seemed to include everything that I wanted. I didn’t need (and couldn’t afford) a single-family house, and I wanted more than an apartment-style condo. After living in two different apartment buildings since separating from my husband, I did not ever want noisy neighbors above me again. The villa homes seemed perfect.

Over the course of the next three weeks after we talked, Realtor Bob sent me listings of villas that came on the market in my price range in the area I wanted to live. I bookmarked the listings on my computer and was excited about my options, going through them whenever I had a chance and reading online reviews about the communities and the area I was targeting. And now, for the next two days, I would be seeing them in person, with Rachel tagging along for extra opinions and commentary.

As the coronavirus was not yet a known issue in Florida, life was moving along as normal, and on the morning of March 1, Realtor Bob picked us up from our hotel in his car and drove us around to the three active-adult communities that had villas in my price range. They were called Tuscany Bay, Coral Lakes, and Palm Isles — nice names for beautiful, landscaped, gated communities. Besides the houses, he took us to see each community’s clubhouse, swimming pools, and tennis courts, among other recreational facilities that were available.

Coral Lakes and Palm Isles were both large, sprawling communities in several different sections and all centered around a huge, fancy clubhouse including waterfalls, a full theater inside, and other glitzy amenities. One of the communities was hosting an art show inside the clubhouse while we were there, and the other had large signs touting the famed entertainers who would be performing in the clubhouse soon. In both places, I felt out of place with the older patrons as we walked through looking at all the features, and the residents often stared at me and Rachel. I know, as a 56-year-old who looked younger, I was not somebody they thought would be buying a home there. And nobody else was dragging along a teenager on their tours. But as I explained to anybody who asked, I was just old enough to live there, and my daughter would not be a resident, but rather someone who I hoped would be going to college in Florida (and visiting me, of course).

When we went to the third community, Tuscany Bay, I appreciated the smaller size of this development. This homier enclave only included 395 single-family and villa homes, and everything was within walking distance of the houses. If I were to buy a home in one of the other huge communities, I would have to get in my car and drive out of my housing section, cross a busy road, and enter another section to drive to the tennis courts. It was more like a fancy town than a small community.

As luck would have it, I really liked the villas better in Tuscany Bay as well. They were a little newer, with high ceilings, open kitchen floorplans, and spacious bedrooms and bathrooms. All of the villas had an airy living/dining great room, two bedrooms including a huge walk-in closet in the master, a den with pocket doors that could also be a third bedroom, two full bathrooms, either a breakfast nook or a separate laundry room off the kitchen, a one-car garage, a big “lanai” (a bumped-out, screened-in outer room), and a driveway next to lush landscaping and lots of palm trees. The roofs were all of the red terra-cotta style that I liked.

Tuscany Bay was single-handedly my favorite. The homes were nicer, the beautiful community was easy to walk around, and the clubhouse wasn’t overwhelming and glitzy. It was more down to earth, which is, I realized, what I really wanted.

Realtor Bob knew that I wanted to play tennis and pickleball when I moved down there, and he assured me that Tuscany Bay had good programs for both, even though it was a smaller community. Information sheets on this community also listed all the clubs and activities offered there — including Friday night happy hours, social events for New Year’s Eve and other holidays, and planned group trips to see shows and other events. It was just what I needed as a newly single person who would be moving down to Palm Beach County not knowing anybody!

So in my house-hunting tour, I eventually eliminated the other two communities and just focused on Tuscany Bay. We toured several villas there over two days, and I liked what I saw. The villas in this community are basically like townhouses in rows of six units, but instead of going up — as they have no staircase or second floor — the homes are long and deep, with the rooms going far back. I also appreciated that the rooms all had airy, high ceilings, which made them feel very spacious. And it was a nice touch that the master suite was always located at the back of the villa, which, like the lanai, overlooked the private back yard. It was a very peaceful and tranquil setup.

I noticed that the end-unit villas had two more windows and brought more sunshine inside the house than the interior units did. I always like large windows and sunny interiors; I’m not one for thick shades and darkening a home. So my favorite villas were the end units. It wasn’t until our second day back at Tuscany Bay that we went to see a villa on Toscana Trail that just had landed on the market overnight. It was a beautiful end unit set far back from the street, and you entered it from a lovely, landscaped side yard.

Walking inside, I instantly fell in love with this home, which was in pristine condition. The widowed man who was selling it had told his real estate agent that he didn’t need to take the furniture, and it conveyed with the home. That set the price a little higher than some of the other comparable villas. But transporting my furniture down to Florida in a big moving truck from Virginia? That would cost me many thousands of dollars. The small bump-up in price for this villa with nice furniture would be a bargain, because then I wouldn’t have to haul my own furniture down there. I furtively wrote down notes about this home on the listing sheet with lots of explanation points. Best of all, the lanai was completely surrounded by beautiful, colorful landscaping. This home was a winner!

Back at the hotel that evening, Rachel and I went through all the listing sheets and I asked her for her opinions on all of the homes we had toured. There were photos to remind us of each house. I was very excited about the villa on Toscana, which had a lot of good things going for it. Namely, it was a sunny end unit, it had the best spacious lanai in the back surrounded by colorful foliage, and it was the home that included all the nice furniture (a lot better than the furniture I had back in my Virginia apartment!). I felt like it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. Rachel agreed that it was a nice house.

The only problem was, it was only the beginning of March. In my hazy plans to move forward with this big venture, I hadn’t really seen myself doing it until at least mid-summer, after Rachel had graduated from high school, her brother Jacob graduated from college, and I had had a chance to help get both of them set for the next stages of their life. But if I put an offer on this home now, I would probably have to close on it within a month or two. A little faster than I had hoped.

The next day, as we took the train to Orlando, I emailed Realtor Bob and told him I was interested in the villa on Toscana Trail. I didn’t want to lose this great opportunity for my Florida dream home. As he knew, I wasn’t planning to move until the summer; we had discussed this “shopping” trip as mainly just being a chance to check out the available homes, not necessarily put down an offer. But I wanted to see what he thought of asking this seller if he was in a hurry to sell, or if I could have a little extra time. I would have to wait to hear back.

Rachel and I arrived at the Orlando train station and were picked up by my brother-in-law, who drove us to my niece Nicole’s house, where we all were going to have a family dinner. Nicole’s husband Billy worked at the University of Central Florida in Orlando as a physical trainer for the school teams’ athletes, and their house was pretty close to campus. So we were staying the night there and then the next day going for Rachel’s university tour.

After we attended the scheduled information session and campus tour at UCF the next morning, we wound around back to the admissions office where we had started, and Rachel requested through a computer portal to have a private session with an admissions staffer. She had a good friend who would be attending this university and we thought it would be a nice place for her, where they had a good psychology program, which is what she planned to study. But she was on the “deferred” list for acceptance, possibly due to the fact that she had applied after many high school seniors had already been through the application process and been accepted, and we also had heard that there was a high preference for in-state students (which she would not be until I had lived there for a year).

So Rachel was nervous about her chances at acceptance, and about talking with someone there to help sell herself, but I had encouraged her to do so. She had come equipped with a recommendation letter written by her employer, and after a short wait she was ushered inside an admissions room to meet alone with two people there. I didn’t get to go inside with her.

Afterward, she said it went okay, and we walked around the grounds some more and took photos. It was a nice campus, and she would be a three-hour drive from me if she went to school there. I was hoping Rachel would get accepted at UCF so that I could move to Florida with no regrets. We talked about how I could come and visit her with my dog Lex, whom she adored, or she could take the train to my new home for occasional weekends. It seemed like a great solution if she went to college in Florida starting that August. She had been waitlisted at her favorite Virginia university (Virginia Tech), although she was accepted to several other Virginia schools.

So it was all a waiting game, for both her future university prospects and for my future place to call home….

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