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).
M&I / GBMINI 