I can hardly believe it! We are nicely settled in “The Lewis” and loving it. It has been a crazy summer and it seemed like we were consumed with this move. Once we got back from the south we realized that being 6 months away and managing the house and yard was getting to be a pain rather than a labour of love. We want to continue to take off in the summer as well and explore Canada (and who knows where else) so that added incentive to move. We didn’t really plan this much in advance. We had vague ideas of downsizing at some point and maybe moving to a condo or something. But we started looking around and found Inverlyn Lakes, a nearby adult life style community, to be appealing. 
(These are pics of the new place and it does feel like home already!) This development is less than 2 miles from our other house and we have been watching it for a while. It is like a condominium community and at first had no appeal since you leased the land and bought the house for too much money. But the rules had changed while we were away and it became more palatable. We biked over many times to view the model homes and fell in love with “The Lewis.” A lot was reserved and we put our house for sale in mid June. Then we got the brainstorm to put an offer on the model home rather than building from scratch. What a great idea and what a quick move! Our house sold within 3 weeks and we moved in Aug. 20th. Amazing!
There are similarities to a condo community: rules of conformity and shared spaces but unique also. Since you own the land and house the condo fees are low. We only pay for upkeep of common areas but that keeps going down as more people move in to share the burden. There is RV storage here, 90 acres of trails and a nice clubhouse with workout equipment, pool table and indoor shuffle board, a small lake (kayaking) and lots more advantages. They cut your lawn and remove snow for $20 a month! John sold the lawn mower immediately on hearing that! It reminds me of Florida to tell the truth.
Since we bought a model home we got to keep the window treatments and got quite a few upgrades we might not have gotten had we built a home. It is all landscaped too. Fantastic! I hardly miss the other place. It holds many happy memories since we built it and lived there for nearly 20 years.
But we did not need or use the space we had and it was becoming more and more difficult to maintain with our current life style. 
Downsizing from a 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom house with a fully finished basement was quite a feat. I will have to call it the “summer that never was”. At least the weather cooperated and it was mostly too miserable to do anything else!
There are similarities to a condo community: rules of conformity and shared spaces but unique also. Since you own the land and house the condo fees are low. We only pay for upkeep of common areas but that keeps going down as more people move in to share the burden. There is RV storage here, 90 acres of trails and a nice clubhouse with workout equipment, pool table and indoor shuffle board, a small lake (kayaking) and lots more advantages. They cut your lawn and remove snow for $20 a month! John sold the lawn mower immediately on hearing that! It reminds me of Florida to tell the truth.
Since we bought a model home we got to keep the window treatments and got quite a few upgrades we might not have gotten had we built a home. It is all landscaped too. Fantastic! I hardly miss the other place. It holds many happy memories since we built it and lived there for nearly 20 years.
But we did not need or use the space we had and it was becoming more and more difficult to maintain with our current life style. 
Downsizing from a 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom house with a fully finished basement was quite a feat. I will have to call it the “summer that never was”. At least the weather cooperated and it was mostly too miserable to do anything else!
These last 3 are pics from the packing nightmare at the old place. Glad that is over.
