Postcards: Why I Sold The Florida Republic

I want to watch my daughter grow up and experience her childhood with her... and I can't do it from five feet away, hovering behind a laptop computer screen.

Dear Fellow Expat:

The Florida Republic is a 1.25-acre slab of weeds, mud, and grass in the middle of a Bonita Springs swamp.

Atop it sits a 2,390-foot home patched together in the 1990s.

When we bought it, multiple rooms weren’t up to code on an attachment to the house.

Lisa and I bought this house at the onset of COVID-19, eager to build an above-ground pool so my wife could teach survival swimming to children aged six months to six years.

We spent a fortune “inside the walls” on an air conditioner, new water lines, and ventilation.

It was a money pit.

We had to build a secure pool deck and bring it up to code.

My wife still doesn’t have the hardwood floors she wants so badly.

At the time, I thought it’d be our forever home, a place Amelia would inherit in a few decades.

A place she’d grow up.

A place she’d drive away from in 12 years on her way to the University of Florida or, gulp, Florida State.

How we’d look back at this 2023 picture… in 2035.