Our Home Renovations Over The Years
The saga begins forty years ago when we first moved to Palm Bay, Florida. I accepted a position with a large defense contractor to start my career. Ann soon found work as a nurse. We were married in 1983 and started our family late in 1985 when our daughter Courtney arrived. We had many dreams and worked hard to achieve them. Some became reality. The rest are lost to time.
Fast forward a decade later and my "Christmas present" for 1994. Time for me to find another job. Not only did I find another job, I found a much better paying job. But it meant a daily commute from the East coast to Orlando, the last 15 miles of which was the last 45 minutes of the 90 minute drive in, bumper to bumper, stop and go traffic. After several months of the dreaded daily commute, I knew we had to move before I lost my mind.
Ann found a place in Longwood, just east of I-4. It was fancy and all, but the lack of a yard for the dogs made it less than ideal. Talking with a coworker about it on our way to lunch, I told him what we were looking for. He knew just where to look. He drove us through the area of Wekiva where we found the home we moved into Spring of 1995. We bought it six months later in October, just in time for Halloween!
We've always made renovations to our homes, using skills learned from my parents when I was growing up, helping them restore their rental properties. Many important skills, like carpentry, plumbing, even electrical wiring. The key is learning what the building codes are and meeting or exceeding them to pass inspection. Those skills have been passed down to our son, Nicholas. He was born shortly before my "Christmas present" and our move to Wekiva Springs.
We signed a six month lease with option to buy. Those first six months of our twenty years there were dedicated to getting the house ready to pass the wood rot inspection so we could close on the sale. Even though the price was more than twice that of our Palm Bay home, it was a deal. More like a steal! It's now worth three times what we paid for it all those years ago!
Over those years, our daughter was married and she and our son-in-law moved out on their own. Eventually Nick struck out on his own as well. With just the two of us "empty nesters" left in a four bedroom, two bath home, we thought about downsizing. At least Ann was thought about it. I was more than happy with all that space for my HO scale model railroad empire that spanned two of those bedrooms and the now growing garden scale layout than consumed the side yard.
Nick moved back in after his time away, more than happy to no longer have to deal with black bears and his HOA nagging him about the constant damage they caused trying to get at his trash barrels. As many times as he called animal control, they did nothing about it. Let's just say it was one less headache for him to deal with. Downsizing wasn't on hold, it slowly morphed into the idea of having a place to stay on the weekends in our home away from home, Mount Dora.
In case you haven't noticed, we're talking about things progressing forward from the past to the present while presenting them from the present and going back in time. The presentations closer to the present have more detail and better captured the details using more modern technology. Much of the older details are either older digital photos of rather dubious quality, say 320 x 240.
Much of our early life in Florida is captured by actual photographs, then scanned using "high resolution" at the time, now depressingly low quality. Many of those old photographs have yet to be scanned to electronic format. Seems like every time I started a scanning project, the scanner would die on me halfway into the venture. Much of our life in Palm Bay still sits in a foot locker waiting to be remembered and revisited.