Florida, Our New Home

Florida, Our New Home

The Miller family was finally all in Florida together. Like I said in the previous post a very pregnant Bea and Jameson flew to Florid from Las Vegas, while a buddy and I drove cross country with an SUV full of suitcases, two dogs, and a chinchilla. I arrived in St. Petersburg around three in the morning and after saying my hellos to Bea and Jameson, I was finally able to get a decent nights sleep. We didn’t drive straight through, we did stop in two separate states to get some sleep, but between the dogs and my friends snoring, it wasn’t the most restful sleep.

A few days after getting settled in we started right into the search for a new home to move into. We initially wanted to live in St. Petersburg, but soon learned for the size house and yard we wanted it was not going to happen. A lot of developers started buying up properties and drove the prices even higher than they were before. I mean $500,000 for a 900 sq ft home built in 1960 was a little out of our price range. But it also wasn’t going to fit the three of us, two dogs, and the baby that was on the way. So, we expanded our search a little farther out. Cities that were within an hour or less of Tampa and St. Petersburg.

Why not move farther out? Because I was hoping to land a job at one of the Veterans Affairs hospitals either in St. Petersburg or Tampa. But that was looking to be a lot harder to achieve than I had originally thought. 

But, with a search area established our realtor got work and started showing us a few homes a week. We were looking at all sorts of homes throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Some were new builds, but most of them were older homes. But none of them were very good fits for our growing family. The layouts of the newer homes didn’t make a lot of sense, or they were super expensive and not yet completed. And the older homes needed so much work, they weren’t worth the price tag.

With the wider search radius when started to finding more homes, while older, they were better maintained. They also had a lot more yard to offer. They did have down sides though, they were all under the 1,900 + sqft we were looking for. We were finding houses that were laid out well, so they didn’t feel as small as they were.

After the first house in Tampa fell through, because of a failed inspection, a week later we found another house. But that one went to a cash buyer. Then after a morning full of house hunting our amazing realtor found us the perfect house. It sat on just shy of an acre, was in a quite neighborhood, and it had a two stall barn/workshop. But it wasn’t meant to be…after putting in the second highest bid, we lost out on the house, or so we thought.