Why We are Downsizing To A Smaller House In A Warmer State
In case you have not had a chance to listen to this week’s podcast or read the transcript, we hoped to put our big news into an actual journal post. This is one of the biggest life changes we have made in the last decade, so we want to get everyone up to speed. And a large thank you for all the support and encouragement you’ve shared for this new adventure of ours. We cannot wait to live with less, be outside a lot more, and eat even more fresh-caught shrimp than we ever thought possible. And yes, to everyone asking – we certainly plan to share more about downsizing, moving, renovating, and even things like feeling at home in a brand new area.
Wait, Is This An April Fool’s Joke?!
Nope! We are officially moving to Florida! Seriously. Like full-time. We know it likely sounds insane and rash, but it has in fact been something that we have talked about off and on for years. We kept chickening out for various reasons, the main one being that we have so much established here in Virginia. We have lived in Richmond for 14 years. We have been in our current house for nearly 7 years. We have plenty of family, friends, and neighbors here that we enjoy and will have a hard time moving away from. But there are some reasons why we at last feel like this is the time to go for it – as big and crazy as it may sound. Or, as Sherry so eloquently stated on the podcast: the time came for us to poop or get off the pot.
Where In Florida Are You Moving?
This was likely the #1 question we got! We have pinpointed a spot in the Florida panhandle that feels like a strong fit for our family. It is the Northwestern part of Florida on the Gulf Coast, so it has that especially striking blue-green water and it does not get as hot as some of the more southern areas of the state (although, our family loves hot – hence consistently vacationing somewhere like Florida, which we did for our last four Spring Breaks, or even going to Costa Rica this winter).
We are not ready to be more specific about the area since we do not officially own the house yet (our offer was accepted but we have not closed). The house is vacant right now & not secure yet since it is such a fixer-upper, so it feels unwise to point a big glowing arrow at a smaller region on the map right now, but we are sure we will share more info about the general area down the road when it feels right. There were a LOT of guesses from you folks that it was Destin, since that is the airport we flew into and we’d previously vacationed there (the picture above is from that trip). We did check out a few houses there, but it is not where we ended up finding “The One.” Oh geez, now I have already said too much :)
Why Move? To Simplify!
The thing that truly sold us on the idea of moving to Florida is the quite basic idea that we could have one smaller house that checks all our boxes, and checks them year-round.
Spending summers at our beach house in Cape Charles (shown below) has made us truly fall in love with the lifestyle out there: being near water, being somewhere that is walkable to shops/restaurants/the park, and having a bit more of that small-town urban feel versus the suburban feeling that we have now in Richmond. So while, yes, being close to a beach is one goal of the move, it is not about trying to be on some permanent vacation with our toes in the sand 24/7. It is about the general lifestyle we seem to embrace in an environment that is more relaxed and encourages less driving, less errand running, and more quality time. Small-town walkability, especially to locally owned shops is simply magical to us.
We certainly considered moving to Cape Charles full-time, but the thing that kept holding us back was the weather. Because of the climate here in Virginia, we’d only truly get to enjoy the things we enjoy about Cape Charles for perhaps 4 or 5 months out of the year. In the colder months, it is less comfortable to be outside, there are fewer people out and about, and even a lot of the shops and restaurants that we walk to are closed for the off-season. So if we could magically drag out the Virginia summer to last most of the year, I think Cape Charles would be a near-ideal option for us.
That is why Florida kept catching our attention, year after year. We are not kidding ourselves that Florida = some magical perpetual summer with no cold days. But we knew that extending our current 4-ish months of summery weather in Virginia to the 9-10 months that occur in the area of Florida that we found would be a big improvement for our sun-loving family that simply wants to be outside walking around.
Not only did Florida feel like it could check the boxes of Cape Charles (warm, walkable, beachy), we also hoped it could check some of the boxes that we get from Richmond. You know, like having good schools nearby, plenty of dining and shopping and activity options, and even those little conveniences that might sound silly but certainly contribute to our daily quality of life (like being near a Home Depot or a movie theater).
If we could find a place like that it would save us from driving back and forth between two houses that are 2.5 hours away from each other – and we’d get to own less/spend less/maintain less/clean less. Way less. Because as much as we are thrilled to be lightening our load by selling our duplex, we still have to maintain two houses, pay for two houses worth of utilities, care for two yards, etc. Again, I know it sounds like one of those “I am playing a compact violin for you” memes, but we have truly come to believe that mo houses = mo problems. And we have talked about our simplifying goals for years now, so it felt like a chance to put our money where our mouth is.
Why Move? Also To Downsize!
In addition to simplifying our housing situation (no more multiples), we also saw this move as a chance to literally cut down on square footage (and yard size!). We confessed nearly two years ago in Episode #95 of our podcast that our current house in Richmond is too big for us. It is about 3,200 square feet and we feel like our beach house, which is closer to 1,800 works better for our family. Heck, even that feels big for us sometimes! Right now we simply have much more space than we need or would like to maintain (both inside and out). And that has been something stewing in our brains over the last few years for sure.
For a while, we did not truly know what to do about it. It is not like we are going to close off rooms or knock down portions of the house, right? One obvious option would be to move somewhere nearby into a smaller house, but it felt like a lot of trouble to pack up and move simply to be in a smaller home but not have the warmer year-round weather that we were looking for. So we would daydream about moving into a smaller house in Florida, and then we’d talk ourselves out of it because we had planned on this home being a long-term house and a long-term community for us – and you know how hard it is for me, John “Spreadsheets For Days” Petersik, to deviate from a plan!
Why Now?
One definite reason that we at last felt confident sufficient to change our plans was the fact that we had simply gone through another big change of plans lately: selling our duplex (that is all covered in Episode #160 – with a full transcript here). We realize the timing of this Florida news might seem like “Oh I get it, that is TRULY why they are selling the duplex…” And part of me wishes that HAD been the order of our decisions (it certainly would’ve made selling the duplex easier, ha!), but it was in fact going through the process of selling that house that made us more open to idea of moving. Kinda like “if we can deviate from the duplex plan and be truly excited about it, perhaps we can deviate from other plans too.” Taking one thing off of our plates and feeling that lightness made us itch to do more of that.
It still does not make changing plans straightforward. Because as much as we enjoy the duplex, we enjoy our Richmond house and our beach house even more. So it is not lost on us that this is a BIG change. We do not want to seem like we are downplaying it. But if we have been doing all this talking about downsizing and simplifying, and for the last few years we have been yearning for a more warm and walkable lifestyle… it simply felt like the time to go for it instead of putting it off and talking ourselves out of it.
We mentioned that we have tossed around the whole moving-to-Florida idea on and off for a few years. It all began because some of our friends moved to Florida three years ago and they’ve been telling us what a strong change it has been for their family ever since (they have three kids around our kids’ ages). When they told us about their big move three years ago we were like: “That is so cool! What a big and ballsy decision! We could never do that…” But 2020 is the third year in a row that the idea has crossed our minds and each year we have taken the notion a little more seriously than the last.
Last year, after it came up for the second time, instead of simply daydreaming about it, we in fact took some time out of our annual Florida Spring Break trip (that is our Airbnb below) to drive around and look at neighborhoods. The idea still felt harebrained, but we hoped to see if we could find any street or neighborhood that we could picture ourselves calling “home.” We were in the Fort Lauderdale area last year, and for whatever reason, we simply did not come across anything that felt like a fit for us. So, we tabled the idea for yet another year. We did not mention it to family, friends, or you folks. We simply assumed that was the end of it.
Then the idea bubbled up again last month. Like clockwork. Did it mean something?! Why did it keep coming around again?! And now that we were feeling a bit more emboldened by learning to pivot on our duplex plan, and feeling the lightness of letting that go, we felt like now was the time to decide: are we going to at last do this?! Or let it go once and for all?!
While that was what spurred us on to consider it more seriously this year, the reason we are deciding to in fact move this year is based around our kids and their schooling. We felt like it would be best to transition them to a new community and a new school while they are still in elementary school. Our son is simply in Kindergarten, but our daughter is in Fourth Grade – meaning we are coming up on her transition to middle school.
Here in Richmond, middle school starts in Sixth Grade, so we originally figured we had about a year and a half to decide if we truly were going to move or not. But then we found out that in some of the places we were looking in Florida, fifth grade is in fact housed in the middle school. So that kinda lit a fire under our butts because in case we ended up in one of those neighborhoods, we’d want to move before this August so our daughter could start Fifth Grade at the same time that everyone else is transitioning to a new school right along with her. In short, if we were going to go, NOW suddenly felt like the time to act instead of twiddling our thumbs for another year.
Why The Timing Is not Ideal
We will be the first to admit that the timing is not ideal when it comes to our house. First of all, we literally Simply wrapped up our bathroom renovation and I know Sherry was counting on a lot more time to soak up (and soak in) her new tub. Plus we still have a hall bathroom that we have to renovate and we have hoped to add a back patio for years. We still had renovation plans for this house, things we could do to increase the value, and things we could journal about. We can totally see how this might look like, “oh because you wrapped up your bathroom it is time to go – this has to be driven by blogging about Hands-on, right?!” but our house is not wrapped up. I mean, we still have two seashell-shaped sinks to deal with. It is a lot of look.
As a side note, there are much easier ways that we could scratch our perpetual itch to do home projects without moving (let alone moving 5 states away). And speaking of simply finishing the bathroom of our dreams, we in fact joked that there must be a curse when a blogger finishes their bathroom, because we watched our friends Chris and Julia move shortly after finishing theirs last year and we gasped right along with many of their readers at the time (“How can you leave that striking bathroom? Simply stay there a little longer and enjoy all the work that you put in!“) but now that we are in a similar position, we get it.
There are bigger life factors that drive where someone chooses to live and some of those are hard to communicate online. You know, a lot of us do not talk in-depth about our neighborhoods or schools or communities for privacy reasons, so it is understandably hard for people on the outside to see why we would ever live somewhere based on more than simply a house itself. But in reality, you can enjoy a house but simply want a distinct lifestyle, location, commute, daily routine, climate, etc – something that has nothing to do with how fairly your four walls are. There are plenty of things that go into why someone moves or stays put, and they are not all based on what the house looks like at all.
So, long story short, we know it is a hard pill to swallow that we simply wrapped up our bathroom (that we are reeeeeaaaally glad with, btw) and we are only going to get to enjoy it for another five months or so. But I think we have also realized that there is something funny about renovating houses that reminds you: You had the power to do that before, you can do it again.
How Did You Find The Neighborhood?
Earlier this month, Sherry and I took a little recon trip to Florida. Our friends (the same ones who moved there three years ago) invited us to stay at their house on the Florida panhandle so we could do some in-person house/neighborhood hunting – not only in their area but a few others that were a bit further away. We did not share the trip on Instagram (hard as that was, especially since Sherry is extremely gifted at boomerangs) because we hoped to make sure that we were making this decision for ourselves and our family. It is obviously a truly personal life change, and we hoped to make it privately, purely based on what we think is best for us (without being subconsciously swayed by anyone weighing in online).
For 2.5 days solid, morning to night, we drove to tons of distinct towns, through various neighborhoods, went into over a dozen houses with a realtor, and even met with a contractor for his thoughts on a couple of fixer-uppers that we found. We checked out the schools, tested out walkability to the beach/local shops/restaurants with shrimp, and even road-tested the drivability to things like Target and the movies and the craft store (priorities people). Again, this is a BIG decision so we truly tried to gather as much information and test our gut feelings as much as possible.
The trip was SO essential because it is incredibly hard to judge things like community-feel or walkability from a real estate listing online. Before our trip, we had likely saved 75+ houses on our Zillow and Realtor.com apps that we hoped to check out in person (and yes I pinned them on a map so we could drive by them all AND made a spreadsheet of stats like square footage and number of bedrooms BECAUSE I AM ME). But despite our best efforts to scrutinize satellite maps and street views from afar – and even consulting sites that give “walkability scores” – most of the houses felt quite distinct in person.
And in fact, the neighborhood that we ended up falling most in love with was one that I nearly wrote off entirely (!!!) based on the limited street view that I could see on Google. But in person, we enjoyed how wooded and walkable it was. Not only is it right near the beach, it is walkable to so many shops, restaurants, green spaces, etc. We even saw a deer there – A DEER! NEAR THE BEACH! – which felt like a sign that we had in fact found the place that checks the boxes of both Richmond (deer) and Cape Charles (beach).
Falling in love with a neighborhood was a strong first step, but we fully surprised ourselves by finding “The House” – and oddly sufficient we hadn’t even “hearted” it during all of our extensive online searches back in Virginia! We nearly did not even see this house! Thankfully we stopped by to take a look at it once we realized we enjoyed the neighborhood… which led to coming back the next day for another look…. which led to meeting with a contractor to get his thoughts on a few things…. which led to excitedly putting in an offer (simply 12 hours before getting back on a plane to go home). And the next day on the tarmac, right after our plane had landed, we found out our offer had been accepted!
Tell Me More About The New House!
We are going to hold off on sharing photos or details of the house until we are officially closed on it (it feels jinx-y to say too much before it is 100% ours), but there are a bunch of reasons why we are so excited about it – including how it is helping us check the boxes of a warm and walkable location along with a downsized interior and exterior space near the beach.
The house that we are buying is less than half the size of our current house – so it certainly checks the “downsizing” box. It is in fact closest in square footage to our quite first home, which was around 1,300 square feet. As former NYC residents who literally could not fit a sofa in our minuscule apartments, we know that many people live with way less square footage, so while it is not a compact house or a studio apartment, it is a big change from what we have been living with for the last 7 years.
We are excited for the challenge and think it’ll be truly good for our family – but we are also not kidding ourselves that it is going to be a challenge to get things pared down. We know from having lived at the beach house this whole summer that we can live with much less space and way fewer items, but getting there and making the choices about what we keep, what we do not keep, and what in fact fits in these smaller bedrooms will be interesting to work through.
It is also a fixer-upper, which you know is our go-to kind of house. Right now it only has one bathroom and that bathroom does not even function (literally no water runs to this house – which seems to be a tradition for us at this point) but we have big plans to change the layout to create two full baths. Also, the only sink is right now ripped off the wall and sitting in the tub. And the HVAC system does not work. And there are holes and buckles in the floor. In fact, we are fairly sure the seller assumed whoever picked up the house would simply bulldoze it and build something bigger on the lot (it is in a truly strong location), but we are so excited to save this charming little beach house on this charming wooded lot.
Speaking of the lot, the yard is certainly smaller too, but in the best way possible. We are going to have about 90% less outdoor space to maintain than we have in Richmond. Literally, we are going from an acre lot to a tenth of an acre. While there is certainly something striking about a big sprawling yard, the pink house’s compact but lush & private lot has taught us that we ENJOY smaller yards in a more walkable neighborhood (the park you can walk to – and the beach – they are your yards too!). And this lot is wonderfully wooded and lush. Brought in bonus: no lawnmower required. Seriously! Also remember: beach deer!
We even have long-term plans like adding a pool and a small guest house for our friends & family (in short a glorified shed – you know how much I enjoy a shed) since this house is significantly smaller than our pink house, so there are only sufficient bedrooms for us. In fact it right now only has one technical “bedroom,” but we will have three after some layout tweaks that we planned with the contractor the day we met him at the house. That is why it was essential for us to meet with him during our visit, so we could make sure we felt good taking the initial steps to get this house to a safe and livable condition from afar. Having someone we could trust to fix the holes in the floor, create operable bathrooms that in fact have running water, and replace the broken HVAC system before we descend on the house with our kids and our dog and a big old moving truck is key.
Obviously, the best part about our new house has nothing to do with its current condition and everything to do with the fact that we were able to find a place that has that small-town community feel in a warmer climate, where we can walk a few blocks to the beach, shops, restaurants, and even a legit grocery store – twelve months out of the year! Other than our lives in NYC where we could walk to little corner bodegas, we have never been able to walk to a grocery store – so that is oddly exhilarating to us.
You are Selling Your Houses?!
Obviously, the other side of this change is that we will be selling both our pink beach house in Cape Charles and our home here in Richmond, which is extremely bittersweet. As much as we are excited about this next phase and the new adventure, it is sad to leave these houses that we enjoy deeply and that have meant so much to our family. But we feel like we can treasure what they are and what they’ve meant to us and still move on to something else. Heck, we still have an emotional attachment to our first house (where we got married in the backyard) and we have not lived there for a decade!
So we are certainly feeling all of the emotions of closing this chapter in Richmond. We plan to stay here through the end of our kids’ school year (mid-June) which also gives us time to get the pink house and our house in Richmond ready to sell, sold, and all packed up. It also gives our contractor some time in Florida to get our new house in livable condition.
What About Your Family & Friends?
Hopefully, it goes without saying that one of the toughest parts of this move is leaving our friends and family but we are certainly going to come back to Richmond to see the people we enjoy here – and they’ve already called dibs on staying with us in Florida… and we have not even moved yet! So we plan to host plenty of them and hugely appreciate their enthusiasm for a free place to stay near the beach ;)
Their support for this next chapter of ours has meant so much to us. My parents have already volunteered to drive the moving truck, and my dad cannot wait to hit the bike paths there with me. It likely bears mentioning that our families are also already accustomed to being spread out around the country and traveling for family events and holidays – so that gives us some truly pleasant reassurance too. My little sister’s family and Sherry’s mom are on the West coast, Sherry’s dad and brothers are in New Jersey, and my oldest sister and her three kids are in New York City where they’ve lived for the past decade. So we already have strong examples of how other members of the family have stayed connected – even when they do not live in the same state.
How Do Your Kids Feel About It?
This was another popular question yesterday, partly because some people were saying they’d have a hard time making such a big change if their kids resisted it – but in our case our kids have been campaigning for this longer than we have. They fairly much beg to permanently move to simply about any warm beachy place that we go on vacation (remember how long we have been going to Florida on spring break – it is a fairly constant refrain). So we have not had any trouble getting them excited for the move – but honestly if they did not want to do this (or we did not think this was the best thing for our whole family) we would not do it.
Sherry and I have seen how they thrive in a simpler, more outdoor environment like our beach house, so we knew this move would be good for them. And it certainly made the decision easier seeing that they felt the same way. We are literally working on patience for the move with them, not excitement for the move. They have that in spades.
Long story long, we have a giant mixed bag of emotions about this whole thing, but the overarching feeling is excitement for the life ahead. It is scary to make big changes, but we are eager to take action on some of the things we have been feeling (and thinking about) for a long time.
When we told one of our friends they said: “I am simply surprised you did not do this sooner. You can work from anywhere. You are such beach people. This feels SO YOU.” And that was likely one of the best things we could’ve heard – especially from someone that we were so nervous to break the news to. Then they asked when their family could come stay with us. Jackpot.
I am sure there are details that we missed and questions you might have. We may not have all of the answers yet (like when our houses will be for sale – likely within the next few weeks but we are not fully sure) because this truly did all simply come together this month. But we are truly looking forward to sharing this adventure with you. Now if you will excuse me, I am off to google if BeachDeer is an available license plate in Florida…
