Big Pine Key

Back in December our family had the opportunity to drive our camper down to the Florida Keys for a little vacation. If you got our Christmas card in 2019 you would have seen us pictured at our campsite in Curry Hammock State Park, which is halfway between Key Largo and Key West. We loved the Keys. It's a great place to escape from winter if that's your thing.  (Right now in August it is blistering hot outside with high humidity.)  Naturally curious about all things real estate, Josh looked into land and home values and found it to be Very Expensive in the Keys. Also very hard to build anything new (you have to tear something existing down to be allowed to build something new).

One thing you have to know about Josh: he loves a challenge! Hearing someone say that something can't be done is synonymous with throwing down the gauntlet to him.  You might as well double-dog dare him! So when he heard that owning property there is expensive and restrictive and generally very exclusive, it made him that much more interested in acquiring a property in the Keys. He added to his 10 year goals Own a Property in the Keys. In his spare time he began looking at the property listings.

In early April Josh found a listing for a mobile home on a canal about 10 houses from the ocean in Big Pine Key, roughly 38 miles from Key West. The mobile home was built in 1965 and had been flooded in Hurricane Irma in 2017. It was being sold as a "tear-down" and so was listed very cheaply. Basically they were selling the lot and factoring in that whoever bought it would have to tear down the existing structure and rebuild. Josh saw all the photos and viewed the virtual tour online and said, "I think that house can be salvaged!" We prayed about it a good deal and he made an offer, quite a bit below the already-low price. His offer was accepted, and we bought ourselves a mobile home in Big Pine Key!

On May 1 we loaded up our camper and our family and headed down to see what we had bought. The Lord poured all kinds of blessings into our lap! We found that yes, the house was ugly, and it had water damage all throughout about 3 feet up the walls (someone had already removed the sheet rock on most of the lower walls), but that in general things weren't that bad. There is a usable boat house on the property, a car port (which this far south is surely a blessing!), a covered patio area, 2 (very small!) bedrooms, a working and not too outdated bathroom, kitchen with salvageable cabinets, and a living room. It has a nice big yard, and it had a working washing machine out in the back under an awning! And did I mention it is a block from the ocean?

Our current plan is to fix it up and then use it for our own vacations, and also to make it available to friends and family or missionary friends who want a getaway. We want this place to be a blessing to many people! It will not ever be a spa-like gorgeous vacation home with all the upgrades, but at least it will be clean and functional and mostly updated, Lord willing. And now for some "before" and "in progress" pictures! You'll have to tune in another time to get the "after" ones, as we are still working on this place!

This picture above is the "back" of the mobile home taken from the backyard. That end of the house is actually the living room though, so in my opinion, the mobile home was placed backward on the lot. But what can you do? Those 2 windows at the end we added on our first trip down here. That whole section of the house, including the silver part under the windows had been a sliding glass door that had broken in Irma and been removed. When we first saw the house, this section was a boarded up gaping hole!

This is the view from the front of the lot under the carport, which is actually the back of the house. That door closest in the photo goes to the "master" bedroom.

This (above) was taken in May during our first trip to Big Pine Key to start fixing this place up. Josh and Noah are in the living room working on framing up the windows that they put in that end wall. And this next photo is what it looks like today:

Next time we come we hope to bring a couch and some other living room furniture. For now we're using the space to eat (because it's right in front of the window a/c!)

This (above) is what the kitchen looked like before we did anything in there. Keep in mind that this whole place had 3 feet of standing water when Irma blew through. The cabinets are a little bit damaged, but overall not bad!  And this (below) is how it looks so far today:

The curtain over the hallway entrance is to keep the air-conditioned air in the kitchen. We have a window unit a/c just to hobble us through until the central a/c is completed. That curtain keeps it bearable in the kitchen at least. The rest of the house is an inferno!

This (above) was the boat house when we first started working on it. We repaired the cracks, fixed the roof, gave it a fresh coat of paint, and now it looks like this:

I'm not a fan of the orange shutters, but Josh really likes them so we'll see. I vote WHITE! The blue is a huge improvement though! A lot of houses around here are painted vibrant colors, so we figured this was our chance to go big.

Another time I'll have to show you the bedrooms and bathroom. We've been working hard on this place!