Ten years ago, I traveled to Europe and spent a few days with MINIs and MINI USA in the Netherlands, at the second MINI United. A fun weekend! Here’s a video review of that weekend:
Home design choices
When we bought our current Lennar Independence home, our design choices were very limited: one of three exterior color styles, a couple of almost identical kitchen colors, and whether or not to pick the upgraded appliance/carpet/tile package. Even the “shape” (garage side, etc) had already been decided.
But for our next home, Jones Homes USA has provided us with a nearly unlimited amount of choice – quite overwhelming! Not only did we get to choose the home design, and the lot, but nearly everything within the home, even switching one bathroom from tub to walk-in shower. We’ve now spent a total of 15 hours at their design center in two visits, but we’re finally happy and pleased with all that we’ve picked!
Here’s a collage of some of our final choices – hints of a future some months away …
Rainbow!
With Margaret driving us home this afternoon, we watched the rain get heavier while the sun continued to shine – a rainbow formed of course. But as we got back to Independence the rainbow showed really strongly, with a strong second too; we stopped so I could take photos!
I was very surprised to see the rainbow continue “below” the horizon; not sure if it’s a camera glitch or a real effect!
MOT2007, ten years after
Another Apple Photos Memories creation, revisiting MINIsOnTop 2007:
Moving closer to Winter Garden
Back in 2013 we chose Winter Garden as our new home town, and purchased our current Lennar Brandywine home; we love living here, with our beautiful pool / patio and Lake Koval water view, and heaps of space (too much space, really – six bedrooms for two people!)
The one thing that’s a bit disappointing is that while our address is Winter Garden, we are quite a long way out from the town center – at least by English standards! It’s a 20+ minute drive to the town, and so we feel less part of Winter Garden than we wanted to be.
Now that we’ve finally sold 8002, we felt ready to take a look at homes closer to the town center; our hope was to find a home within easy walking distance, without compromising too much compared with where we live now. But there’s very few homes for sale – smaller town, people like where they are, that sort of thing.
We found only 4 or 5 homes worth viewing, and of those we had: too old, too small, too far, the Goldilocks principle at work! The last home we looked at appeared to back on to new construction – the owner said it would be no problem since there would be a retaining pond, and encouraged us to check it out … which we did.
While checking out the site, we figured why not visit the show home too – what we found was a brand new development of “estate homes” built to a very high specification; and only 10 minutes walk along the West Orange Trail, to town (the new development is where the cluster of trees is, top left):
What’s more, there’s a home design which is basically a single level home with a second level “bonus room”, perfect for my office. The downstairs master suite offers a huge walk-in shower, and no tub – which is what we wanted (we’ve only used the tub maybe once a year in our current home!); other nice features include high ceilings and an extra large garage:
Choosing to move here, we get our desire of walking distance to the town center, along with a home that’s a better size for the two of us, and more elegant. We do lose our beautiful view (there will just be a street and other homes behind) but hopefully that’s an acceptable exchange … we signed a contract a few days ago!
I’ll post more updates in the months ahead, although we don’t really expect the new home to be finished this year. We’re also going to need to work out selling and buying at the same time, which we’ve not had to do before (we’ve always had somewhere temporary to move in to).
Behind The Seeds again
At Disney Epcot the Living With The Land ride takes people through various huge conservatories planted beautifully with interesting and educational exhibits – it’s also possible to take an inexpensive tour into the area, seeing everything in more detail. We’ve done this before but chose to do it again today because Epcot was very busy and the tour is a relaxing alternative to standing in queues!
Another Clubman recall
There was a recall last year on my Clubman, that didn’t sound particularly serious, but was resolved during my service visit a few months ago. Today, I received notification of another recall – and this one seems a bit more serious and also very surprising that it’s taken such a long time for a software light control issue to be noticed!
I guess I’ll be needing to call Orlando MINI some time …
