Room with a View

View from the bedroom

We are currently in the process of completely remodeling a condo in a marina overlooking the Caloosahatchee River in Fort Myers, on the Florida gulf coast. Fort Myers, as you may recall from one of my previous posts (see sidebar), was the winter home of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and their homes are one of the main tourist attractions of the area. The climate is tropical and the winters are normally warm and mild. After living in the islands for ten years, you could say we’re spoiled and much prefer our winters warm now.

Our condo is located in a marina with some cute waterside restaurants that we can walk to. The marina has direct access to the Caloosahatchee River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico, making it ideal for boating and fishing. When we lived in the islands, our boat was our only mode of transportation, except for a golf cart that we used to visit our friends that lived on the cay. We referred to it as our “station wagon of the sea.” Once the remodeling is completed and our credit card returns to normal, we hope to get another run-about and keep it in the condo’s marina.

The building we are in is twenty-eight years old and our unit has never been remodeled. As you can see from the pictures, it looked pretty bad. I counted the other day that in our forty-one years of marriage, we’ve owned fifteen homes, lived in twelve of them, and remodeled ten of the twelve. With twelve remodel jobs under our belt, this hopefully will be lucky thirteen.

Kitchen before

The kitchen has been gutted, the carpet and tiles have been ripped from the floors, the bathroom vanities have been torn out, and we’re ready to start putting everything back together.

Gutted kitchen

We have spent a great deal of time with kitchen designers and decorators in the past month. New kitchen cabinets and counters are on order along with bathroom vanities and tile for the floors. Colors throughout the unit have been chosen from Martha Stewart and lighting fixtures have been purchased.

It boggles my mind to think about all of the decisions as we’ve made in the last month. The decisions regarding lighting alone can give you a headache trying to figure everything out. Fortunately, we’ve hired a great contractor to take care of most of the projects for us. Normally we would have acted as our own contractor as we’ve always done in the past. However, as you get older (horrible to admit, but true) your mind thinks you can do the same things you did just a few years ago, but your body rebels and reminds you very quickly that you can’t lug sheetrock up three flights of stairs or chip tile off of the floor anymore.

Bathroom before

The fun part of remodeling for me is feathering the nest, choosing fabrics and furniture, and color schemes. This will be a winter home for us, so our good furniture won’t be making the trip south. I’m hoping to eventually have some modern office furniture in the library where I plan to have the computer and comfortable outdoor furniture for relaxing on the lanai (elsewhere in the world known as a screened porch) watching the boats come and go. Stay tuned.