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Break out the finger foods and fuzzy socks! With working and learning from home becoming the new normal, a night in with the whole family is a great way to shake off those social distancing blues and bring some life to the living room.
Think of the Theme
If you’re looking to shake things up, try out a themed dinner and game! Have your whole family dress up in their fanciest attire and enjoy a home-cooked five star dinner. After you finish up, set up a card table in the living room to play some (not so high stakes) card games like Uno, blackjack, or anything your heart desires! Card games are quick to learn and quick to clean up, which means you can keep things fresh by playing a few different games throughout the night!
If getting fancy isn’t your fancy, take things to the Great Outdoors and go on a backyard camping trip! Spend your afternoon cooking s’mores in the backyard, and when the sun starts to go down, pop up your tents and unroll your sleeping bags. You can spend your evening telling stories, and a backyard camping trip is a great way to really shake up your routine. The best part is, when you come back to sleeping in your bed, it’ll feel like you’re coming back refreshed from a vacation!
If you miss going out to the movies, why not bring the movies to you? Put together a blanket and pillow fort in your living room, or rearrange your furniture to make the room feel like a theater! Once you put together a setup you’re satisfied with, pick out your favorite movie franchise and let the binge begin! To make your movie-going experience even more exciting then when you head to the theater, have one family member find some trivia about the movies so you can watch them like never before!
Whether you’re taking on the Great Outdoors to get refreshed or you’re binging your family’s favorite movies, it’s easy to keep things fresh while you’re sticking around at home. For more ways to make the most of being at home, be sure to Like Lennar on Facebook.
Over the past few weeks, most of us have spent an unprecedented amount of time at home and what the word home means, has been completely transformed.
Home has always been our safe place, but now our homes are so much more. They’ve become classrooms for our kids, where student desks have been replaced by kitchen tables and computer screens our connection to teachers, classmates, extended family and friends.
Homes have become the workplace for many. A good Wi-Fi connection and a private space for a conference call are now essential. If you didn’t have a home office prior, likely there’s a space in your home you’ve reorganized to create one.
Home has taken the place of restaurants, become where we celebrate birthdays, holidays and where lifelong memories are being made. They’ve become our movie theaters, happy hours and recreation areas. With dining and coffee tables filled with puzzles, board games and crafts like never before.
Our kitchens are now filled with the scent of fresh new recipes, daily family meals and weekend brunches. Backyards and living rooms transformed into private gyms. Pets thrilled by the abundance of company and attention.
Purchasing a home has always been one of the most important purchases a person will make in their lifetime. A concept that feels more evident now than ever, because it’s likely we’ll never look at what we need in a home the same.
We build homes for families at every stage of life, including mutligenerational households where parents raise kids with the parents that raised them. Families are closer than ever, but everyone needs their space – which is why the Next Gen® – The Home Within A Home® design provides the ideal layout. The suite could be a home office, place for the kids to play, classroom or a home for our extended families.
Home, now more than ever, is becoming reimagined and redefined. We’re here to answer all your new home questions. With 26 active communities located from Olympia to Marysville, we have homes for every type of family available. Visit www.lennar.com/seattle to take virtual tours and discover new homes for sale across the greater Puget Sound.
As demand for golf course communities declines in some areas, real estate developers are replacing golf with other amenities and attractions to welcome new home buyers. Learn more in this recent article from The Wall Street Journal by Cecilie Rohwedder, featuring Lennar’s Minnetonka Country Club community and homeowners Dan and Nikki Witowski.
Jim and Wanda Dill had lived in a golf-course community in Naples, Fla., for 14 years when they decided to move nearby to a different master-planned community, where the main draw is water.
Their current home, Naples Reserve, is built around a 125-acre lake and woos home buyers with waterfront living, boating, fishing and a tiki bar. The $500,000, three-bedroom house the Dills bought in 2015 overlooks the lake and a nature preserve. From there, they go kayaking, bike on lakeside paths and take their Goldendoodle, Chelsea, to the dog park.
“I play golf. I love golf, but we were ready for something different,” says Mr. Dill, 69 years old and a retired corporate attorney. With his wife, 66, a CPA, he divides his time between the 2,100-square-foot house in Naples and a summer home on Lake Geneva, Wis., near his native Chicago area.
Real-estate developers have long lured home buyers with houses along the rolling greens of golf courses, and some still do. But as golf slips in popularity, many are replacing golf with attractions such as lakes and farms, biking and hiking trails, trendy amenities like microbreweries, food-truck courts, and lifestyle directors who plan mixology classes and pickleball leagues.
Naples Reserve, a 688-acre, $70 million project, was originally zoned as a golf community when iStar, a New York-based real-estate investment, financing and development firm, changed course. The company took the land in 2012 as collateral on a defaulted loan but concluded that Naples—an affluent city on Florida’s gulf coast with a population of 22,000 that grows in the winter months—had enough golf courses, according to Heather Thompson, marketing director at Naples Reserve.
Instead, their research showed many home buyers preferred water and a casual, community-geared lifestyle over the formal, exclusive feel of a golf- or country-club setting. In 2015, the first residents moved in.
For all the complications with redevelopment—from zoning restrictions to pushback from existing homeowners—demand for land is strong and the new communities can be more profitable than maintaining golf operations.
“Sometimes, the dirt is worth more than the grass,” says Joe Beditz, president and chief executive of the National Golf Foundation.
In Palm Springs, Calif., Bruce Juenger and Jim Whitmoyer from Aliso Viejo are the first buyers in a new gated community, Miralon, which is turning an abandoned golf course into an olive grove with 1,150 homes. Former golf-cart paths will be walking trails and water hazards have been converted to decorative lakes at the development, which also has citrus trees and community gardens.
After research on sustainable agriculture and potential buyers, the developer, Boston-based Freehold Communities, settled on the target group’s interest in sustainability, food and a healthy outdoor lifestyle. “The Coachella Valley is chock-full of golf courses,” says Brad Shuckhart, president of the company’s California division. “We saw this as an opportunity to do something different.”
Freehold Communities studied annual water consumption and suitability for the desert habitat before deciding on 7,000 olive and citrus trees. The company commissioned a technical study from a water-engineering firm that showed the trees would use about 23% less water than the existing golf course.
Mr. Whitmoyer, 56, and Mr. Juenger, 68, bought a three-bedroom, 2,800-square-foot house with a modernist design and a view of olive trees for $730,000.
Mr. Juenger, a sales manager at a real-estate financial-services firm, is planning to use the community kitchen and gardens. His husband, Mr. Whitmoyer, an instructor with the Automobile Club of Southern California, says they also are looking forward to taking their 13-year-old bichon-poodle mix, Elton, to the three dog parks.
The developer of Lennar at Minnetonka Country Club, Miami-based Lennar Corp., has redeveloped golf courses in other states, including California, Florida and Colorado. In 2018, it started selling homes on the 118-acre plot near Lake Minnetonka. For Lennar, the site was an opportunity to build new houses in an established community near Minneapolis, with stores, restaurants and good schools but aging housing stock.
“While there are typically many intricate entitlement and development issues that need to be carefully resolved, old golf courses create great new home communities,” said chief executive officer Rick Beckwitt in an email.
Read the full article from The Wall Street Journal.
