Oct 28

Oct 28 Why We Chose to Downsize Our Home

In my last post, I announced that we bought a new house and eluded to the fact that it will be quite a bit smaller than our current home. There are a few reasons why we are downsizing, but here’s the short answer: Being able to boat from our backyard in the very specific location we liked was more important to us than the size of the home. Now, if you’d like the long answer, keep reading!

Before we bought our first house, we lived in Jacksonville Beach a mile from the ocean. Below is a picture of my view from the hammock in the backyard there.

Why We Chose to Downsize Our Home | House Full of Summer - living on the water, boating, waterfront property, Florida living, coastal home backyard tall pines palm trees

We missed our old stomping grounds, so that’s where we focused our search. It may also come as a surprise to you, like it did to me, that there really is not a ton of waterfront real estate in the beach areas. What some call “waterfront” here, is simply a pond or man-made lake. You’ll find a ton of properties like that in Florida. Our current home backs up to a large pond and preserve of tall pines, as seen below.

Why We Chose to Downsize Our Home | House Full of Summer - living on the water, boating, waterfront property, Florida living, coastal home

If you’d like to see more, I shared all about our backyard makeover in a previous post, “How We Turned Our Boring Backyard Into Our Own Little Slice of Paradise”.

Properties in the area we wanted to live that also have boating access are scarce. Especially if you’re not looking to spend millions of dollars on a home. Here’s an interesting tidbit: After a month or so of looking for homes on the intracoastal waterway, I began to feel discouraged and very unsure about downsizing into a much older home. Because relentless researching is often the way I go about solving a problem, I read all about the mass-planned boating communities in south Florida and on the gulf. I was blown away at how much cheaper the houses were there! I thought for sure we were making a mistake by staying in Jacksonville. I recall staying up til 1 am that night watching old to current news reports on YouTube for these particular communities and reaching the conclusion that you can’t always judge a home or an area accurately at first glance. I suppose it’s not a spoiler alert to say that we will not be moving to south Florida anytime soon! :D

We were dead set on having our boat in our backyard. While keeping our pontoon in a wet slip (a personal dock space that is rented out from the marina monthly or yearly) down the road on the river is a major upgrade to trailering and launching/loading your boat every time you want to use it, it still had its challenges.

For instance, after a storm, we’d have no clue that one of our covers had blown off and relied on the friendly dock master and others who had boats there to let us know. Not being able to see the boat out our back door was a bit frustrating. Additionally, if you boat up north, or really anywhere else in the country that isn’t as humid and salty as Florida, you probably don’t have even close to the amount of cleaning to do every time you get on your boat! I cannot stand dirty looking seats and it was nearly impossible to keep our boat clean and tidy, even with covers!

We were blessed to be able to hop on our boat after work with the convenience of our wet slip, but having our boat at the new house will be even better. :) If you’re in the Mandarin/Julington Creek/Fruit Cove/St. Johns area and are looking for a wet slip or dry storage yourselves, contact Mary at Julington Creek Pier 3 and tell her Jessica sent you. We had a really wonderful experience docking there!