Navigating Home Ownership in Retirement

Navigating Home Ownership in Retirement

In this episode of 'Mature Adults with Donna and Mike,' the hosts discuss the challenges and joys of home ownership, especially in retirement. They share personal experiences of buying, maintaining, and selling homes, and emphasize the importance of choosing the right property to avoid becoming a 'slave' to your house. They also dive into the practicality of upgrades and the necessity of installing lightning rods in areas prone to thunderstorms. Tune in to gain valuable insights on making smart real estate decisions as you embrace the next chapter of your life.

00:00 Introduction to Mature Adults Podcast
01:01 The Beauty and Nightmare of Home Ownership
01:30 Challenges of Being a Landlord
06:35 Lightning Strikes and Home Maintenance
08:08 The Importance of Lightning Rods
21:52 Home Upgrades and Personal Preferences
25:10 Final Thoughts and Upcoming Episodes

Transcript

Home Ownership or Nightmare S1.#5

[00:00:07] Mike Roth: Welcome to Mature Adults with Donna and Mike, the podcast where wisdom meets curiosity and life's next chapter is celebrated. 

[00:00:17] Donna Hoover: Whether you're navigating retirement, pursuing new passions, or simply looking for a fresh perspective. This is a place to embrace the beauty of aging and discover all the opportunities that come with it.

[00:00:31] Mike Roth: Join us twice a month as we explore topics that matter to mature adults. From health and wellness to travel, finance, real estate, storytelling, and many more. Together, let's redefine what it means to thrive at this exciting stage of life.

This is Mike Roth and Donna Hoover on Mature Adults. This is, show number five, right, Donna? 

[00:00:57] Donna Hoover: Thanks for tuning in.

I hope everyone's enjoying what we're doing here. 

[00:01:01] Mike Roth: Today we're gonna be talking, about the beauty and nightmare of home ownership. 

[00:01:08] Donna Hoover: Okay, I'm ready. 

[00:01:10] Mike Roth: How many homes have you owned in your lifetime, Donna? 

[00:01:13] Donna Hoover: Well, I bought my first house late in life, in California.

Then we came here and this is actually only my second home that I've owned. 

[00:01:21] Mike Roth: Ah, okay. I'm on the sixth home right now. The first home I bought, when I was 21. 

[00:01:28] Donna Hoover: Wow. 

[00:01:28] Mike Roth: And I became a landlord. I bought a two family house in Brooklyn, New York, and I learned some things. It was a fairly new house in a very nice neighborhood, but I learned I hated being the landlord.

I hated having to deal with all the repairs having to collect the rent every month. 

[00:01:45] Donna Hoover: It's like being a babysitter to adults living on your property. 

[00:01:50] Mike Roth: Yeah. I didn't have any major problems, but I didn't like it, when I had to get a second tenant when the first guy moved out at the end of his one year lease.

I didn't like talking to all the people coming in. I didn't like having to rearrange my schedule so I could meet them. 

[00:02:06] Donna Hoover: Well, it's a big focus of your life because that's a very valuable thing that you own a home, obviously. So the focus of your life, you have the home you live in, and then you have that other one 

[00:02:17] Mike Roth: Family home, and it was an upstairs, downstairs kind of a deal.

There was always the question of parking in that neighborhood, which really drove me crazy after a while. So I gave up the idea of owning a two family home, being a landlord. I gave up the idea of living in New York City and I moved to Smithtown, New York where I bought a nice one family house.

Pretty new, and it was in a neighborhood that was the end of the world as far as Smithtown was concerned. I backed up on a forest. 

[00:02:49] Donna Hoover: That 

[00:02:49] Mike Roth: was the end of my landlording. 

[00:02:50] Donna Hoover: All right. 

[00:02:50] Mike Roth: I decided don't want to do it. Didn't like doing it, and I was physically on the property most of the time, so doing it remotely when we moved here.

Renting out the house we had in Cincinnati seemed to make absolutely no sense. 

[00:03:05] Donna Hoover: I've seen other people, like my mother for instance, she owned a home in Massachusetts. And lived in California that was ridiculous. The lady wanted, you know, if the light bulb needed to be changed on the porch.

That was somehow my mom's responsibility from California. So I watched firsthand how that was not a good idea. 

[00:03:26] Mike Roth: And then you wind up hiring a handyman at first, and then you wind up hiring contractors and then you wind up living the life of a property manager and paying for the property manager.

And then you're killing your profit margin on owning the second home. 

[00:03:42] Donna Hoover: Well, not to mention the fact that when you're not close enough to be keeping an eye on it, the damages that are possibly being incurred 

[00:03:51] Mike Roth: Yeah. Whether it's pet damage or weather related damage it's just very difficult to do things remotely.

and there's this hoax here that the realtors like to say, you know, when you move to The Villages, you're gonna buy two and a half homes or three homes in the time that you live here. And while there may be some truth to that I think it deserves some debunking.

[00:04:13] Donna Hoover: Yeah. So how many have you owned in The Villages? 

[00:04:16] Mike Roth: Well, I've been here seven years and I'm still in the first house. I bought a house in a neighborhood I wanted to live in. I bought a house that had enough land around me to make me happy the house is actually smaller than the house I had in Cincinnati, but it was brand new. The house in Cincinnati, which I kept for 25 years kind of owned me. I was the maintenance man. And after 25 years, a lot of things went wrong. A lot of things that the original builder didn't do.

Right. Who eventually went outta business and was actually sued outta business. 

[00:04:46] Donna Hoover: Oh boy. 

[00:04:47] Mike Roth: Not my house, but other houses. He built that mold in infiltration. our house had mold infiltration and we had to pay a contractor to come out and remediate it the ledger board where the back porch attached to the house was not constructed properly, so we had to have contractors come out and disconnect the porch, replace the ledger board and then put the whole thing back together again. I really hated that.

[00:05:13] Donna Hoover: That is not fun 

[00:05:14] Mike Roth: I, and then the windows started to leak So we had a window contract to come out and put new windows in the house, half of the house was brick and half of the house was painted wood. we were painting it every three or four years.

The maintenance never stopped. 

[00:05:28] Donna Hoover: Right. So you said, when I go to The Villages, I'm getting a brand new home, 

[00:05:31] Mike Roth: brand new home A and then B. I'm just not going to, get another property that was at the top of a hill and had a sloping backyard. 

[00:05:41] Donna Hoover: Oh. 

[00:05:42] Mike Roth: Which made the property less saleable, I discovered.

it was a monstrosity project and probably the absolute worst thing. I'm gonna forget about the drain that leaked on the roof for 10 years before I had a contract to find it. 

[00:05:54] Donna Hoover: Oh, no, you must've had 

[00:05:55] Mike Roth: six guys try to find the leak. 

[00:05:57] Donna Hoover: Oh, that's terrible.

[00:05:59] Mike Roth: One day I was up in the attic putting in a UHF antenna and it rained and all of a sudden I look up and this water coming through one of the vent seals. 

[00:06:09] Donna Hoover: Oh, and 

[00:06:10] Mike Roth: that was where the water was entering. And they eventually went to the first story kitchen that had no access to the roof because there was a floor in between.

I mean, it was crazy. But the absolute worst thing that happened was we finally decided we were gonna sell the house, and we put it up on the market three days after there was a tremendous thunder and lightning storm and the ground. Next to the house gets hit by lightning.

[00:06:38] Donna Hoover: What did that cause to happen? 

[00:06:40] Mike Roth: Well, the easy stuff to fix was, three blown up TVs blown up burglar alarm, blown up telephone control system for the house. When I brought the electrical contractor out, he said, your grounding rod is burnt to a crisp, I said, why don't you just replace it? He said, we gotta fix the rest of the wires in the house. First. He went through the house the house had just been listed and there was no electricity in the kitchen, so I was anxious to get the refrigerator back online. I had a large orange extension cord running across the living room to the back of the kitchen to plug in the refrigerator.

And he is, well, Mr. Roth the wires inside the wall are burnt and we have to bring out our guy with a tester to test every wire in your house. 

[00:07:24] Donna Hoover: That's not what you want to hear. 

[00:07:26] Mike Roth: No, I didn't want to hear that. And that guy's scheduled for the next four weeks. So the earliest day we could give you is a month away.

They probably did. 10 or $20,000 worth of electrical work in the house to replace every burnt wire in the house. 

[00:07:40] Donna Hoover: Now, was there any insurance coverage for this 

[00:07:43] Mike Roth: Yeah, there was some insurance coverage for it but it still was not a lot of fun. we couldn't sell the house.

We had to stop the listing because no one would wanna buy a house where you have a refrigerator on an extension cord across the living room, 10% of the ceilings weren't installed anymore. because the wires were burnt. 

[00:08:02] Donna Hoover: let me ask you a question. Did you learn anything about lightning rods and if they are a good idea or not?

[00:08:08] Mike Roth: Well when I got down here to The Villages. we finally had the house fixed and we had a 10 year electrical warranty to give the new buyer. One of the first things I did was put lightning rods on this house as there's a lot of lightning in central Florida here.

And actually I did see one house burn from lightning here in The Villages. 

[00:08:27] Donna Hoover: Not that long ago. There was one maybe a month ago. 

[00:08:30] Mike Roth: A month ago. But this one was probably four or five years ago, we were over at the Bacall Recreation Center, and we looked out the back windows from the big ruin.

we saw lightning had come down and the fire started and the fire engines came. at that point I had already installed lightning rods. I picked the company that was the most recommended, had the right certifications, and the guy seemed to know what he was doing. He put five or six lightning rods on the house it's worked well for us. We haven't been hit by lightning. 

[00:09:00] Donna Hoover: if I understand correctly, lightning rods do not attract lightning, but if lightning is coming in your direction and it's gonna hit your house anyway, then it'll go through the lightning rods, which will, that's the theory of operation.

Yeah. 

[00:09:14] Mike Roth: Okay. the house is, you know, just about 2000 square feet. And so there's. Two separate grounding systems. One on the left side of the house and one on the right side I was used to the soil in Cincinnati, which most of the year was rock hard clay. the guy says, I'm gonna put in these eight foot grounding rods.

And I think I said, well, prob not gonna be able to do it He says, no problem. he takes this, big cover and knocks it into the ground, no problem. And at one place it still, it slowed down and says, good we've hit some clay. So that, that, that is your grounding point. 

[00:09:50] Donna Hoover: Wow. So this was all a part of the lightning rod installation?

Yes. Okay. And was this fairly affordable? 

[00:09:56] Mike Roth: I think it was less than two grand. several of my neighbors asked me what I thought of it, and I said, well, I feel my house is relatively lightning safe now since I've been bitten once, I would rather you didn't put 'em on your house because the lightning's gotta have someplace to go.

[00:10:11] Donna Hoover: I'm sure they love that. 

[00:10:12] Mike Roth: No, but I recommended the guy who put my lightning rods on and a couple of people on the street have lightning rods. if you look very carefully at all of the buildings in the town squares, there are lightning rods on those buildings. 

[00:10:24] Donna Hoover: So someone believes in them 

[00:10:26] Mike Roth: I happen to believe in them too. I think that if you have enough lightning rods on every peak of your building or your home you're going to avoid the terrible cause of the lightning finding its own path to ground. Which is what happened in my house in Cincinnati, the wiring was burnt out in the basement where there was no ceiling in the unfinished part 

Those were easy to repair where the ceilings were finished. It was a bear to repair. 

[00:10:54] Donna Hoover: So when the lightning hit in your original house, did it okay, well, let me backtrack. The lightning hit your house here Would they have to replace everything like lightning rods and grounding and all that, or 

[00:11:06] Mike Roth: Probably not.

It would have to be tested. Okay. You know, lightning is a very strong force. One of the first things that happened when I moved into The Villages , into this house we were trying to plug something in in the lanai, and all the outlets were dead in the lanai. I went out to the circuit breaker box and all the circuits were not tripped.

And I started opening up the other outlets in the I discovered one where you plug something in was completely black. 

[00:11:35] Donna Hoover: Oh. 

[00:11:36] Mike Roth: I called the warranty department 'cause it was under warranty and they sent out the electrician. I asked the electrician what happened here?

he says, oh, there's obviously a lightning strike in your area. 

[00:11:44] Donna Hoover: Hmm. 

[00:11:45] Mike Roth: Because it was, the outside outlets of the house. And I said, oh, okay. So that was the first thing that said to me here in this area, you really should have lightning rods. You know not everyone will if you have the highest house in your neighborhood, you definitely should.

If you have some of these houses with very peaked roofs you should, but. It's up to you. you can take your chance. 

[00:12:06] Donna Hoover: I have neighbors whose homes have been hit by lightning 

[00:12:09] Mike Roth: Here in The Villages. 

[00:12:10] Donna Hoover: Yes. the woman who lives a couple streets over from me, was our keyboard player in the band I was in, and her house was hit by lightning.

[00:12:18] Mike Roth: We had a house here in Osceola Hills that was hit by lightning probably five years ago, and about half of the house was burnt. It didn't have lightning rods. Now lightning rods are no guarantee that you're actually gonna survive a direct hit, but it changes the odds dramatically in your favor.

They're putting in cables. Copper wires that are about the size of my finger. Each wire's got a diameter of about a half inch, so they can carry a lot of current away. And they're grounded in two places. So I think that it's a safe bet. Is it a hundred percent no, but lightning rods really make a difference. And my luck, if I ever tried to sell this house as soon as I had it listed, we'd get hit by lightning. 

[00:13:03] Donna Hoover: Hopefully not say 

[00:13:04] Mike Roth: Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

That's definitely not true. 

[00:13:09] Donna Hoover: Think that is true. 

[00:13:10] Mike Roth: we had a lightning storm here last week and I guess we were driving home. And there was a double hit of lightning in front of us. Someone in the neighborhood told me it hit the ground as opposed to a house or a tree, but it was like two bolts of lightning almost right next to one another.

it does happen 

[00:13:27] Donna Hoover: and those storms are very violent. Like there was just one this past weekend we were driving home from an event and it's quite frightening, you know? 

[00:13:38] Mike Roth: yeah. it's a real phenomenon. But afterwards, when we got home, I go outside, take a look, and there's a full rainbow.

You could see one end and the other. I was looking for the pot of gold. I couldn't find it. It wasn't on my property, but it was a good prudent investment. To put lightning rods in. that's more important to me than converting my lenar into living space.

[00:14:01] Donna Hoover: Mm-hmm. 

[00:14:01] Mike Roth: I would have the problem of figuring out what to do with the space. it can't be part of the living room. 

[00:14:06] Donna Hoover: Right. 

[00:14:07] Mike Roth: Becomes its own space. Well, we haven't figured out what to do. But we started the segment talking about needing to buy three homes in The Villages. Yes. And I understand why people say that. It's just not necessarily true. The first degree of error is with people. I had friends here that lived across the street named Dave and Sue. They overbought their house. 

[00:14:31] Donna Hoover: Meaning?

[00:14:32] Mike Roth: They bought a house in The Villages without a pool, but it had a two and a half car garage.

Should have been three, but it had five bedrooms. 

[00:14:42] Donna Hoover: Wow. 

[00:14:42] Mike Roth: He figured his kids and grandkids were gonna come and visit all the time. While it did happen occasionally, it didn't seem to justify the cost. I've had relatives visit me here. The one spare bedroom has been enough, 

[00:14:56] Donna Hoover: Right?

[00:14:57] Mike Roth: And the attitude I have is if all three of my children would want to come at the same time with all seven grandkids. There's a couple of hotels in the area that they could stay at, that I could pay for. 

[00:15:07] Donna Hoover: There's Airbnb, there are hotels, right. many choices. 

[00:15:11] Mike Roth: Those will all be cheaper than me buying a house bigger than the one I have to live in.

True. And maintain. 

[00:15:17] Donna Hoover: I find that living here, we've been here a year and a half, and we definitely have more visitors come here than we ever had in our previous home in California. 

[00:15:28] Mike Roth: Well, we had. More visitors in Cincinnati than we had here. 

[00:15:32] Donna Hoover: Really? 

[00:15:32] Mike Roth: Mm-hmm. 

[00:15:33] Donna Hoover: Well, they don't all come at the same time.

[00:15:35] Mike Roth: That's another situation. But my grandkids are older, so it doesn't make as much sense. people overbuy on a house, they buy one that's too big, then they downsize to a smaller house, maybe a two or three bedroom. then they say, that's too big and too much to clean.

So they go to A villa home or like our friend Debbie, who's a dog lover. She wanted to get a new villa home that had a fully fenced so her doggies could roam free out there. 

[00:16:03] Donna Hoover: I'm not sure that's a good idea. 

[00:16:05] Mike Roth: What's wrong with that? 

[00:16:06] Donna Hoover: Birds of prey.

[00:16:08] Mike Roth: she has big dogs like the size of Labradors. 

[00:16:11] Donna Hoover: Those dogs can be attacked on their head and if a bird gets a hold of their head and then tries to fly off, I don't wanna describe what would then happen, but that was one of the reasons that they say.

Particularly in this area, not to leave your dogs unattended outside. Hmm. Aside from the heat, of course. Well, if it's a little dog, that's alligator food. 

Well, yeah. the bird can just pick those right up and take them away we actually had a friend in California that had an eagle come, or perhaps not an eagle, it might have been a pterodactyl..

A pterodactyl. Came and took their cat. 

[00:16:49] Mike Roth: Took the cat. 

[00:16:49] Donna Hoover: Mm-hmm. 

[00:16:50] Mike Roth: You would've figured a cat wouldn't be a. Very nicely. Calm animal in that scenario, 

[00:16:55] Donna Hoover: But once the bird of prey has a hold of you, what are you going to do as a cat? 

[00:16:59] Mike Roth: You take out your 45 and you plug them. 

[00:17:01] Donna Hoover: I know you have options, but that might not work. 

[00:17:04] Mike Roth: No, most cats don't have a concealed carry license. they don't need conceal carry here. the training would be very difficult.

[00:17:12] Donna Hoover: You have to start 'em young. 

[00:17:13] Mike Roth: Okay. So people have downsized from the oversized McMansion to the premier home with two or three bedrooms to a two bedroom or maybe a two and a half bedroom villa. And then they decide, they'd like to live in a place that has accommodations for seniors.

A place like Freedom Point where it's apartment living. they have meals served and they have maid service once a week. 

[00:17:43] Donna Hoover: They've entered into a different phase of life. I can say that for us, we bought our house. We saw it on video, but we did not view it in person.

we bought it from California. when I got here, the one big thing that I didn't like and still don't like, is that we don't have a backyard. it feels very. Claustrophobic to me. if I were to leave that house, that would be the reason. There's really nothing else about it that I can't work with.

But you can't really fix that one. 

[00:18:15] Mike Roth: No, that's hard. That's why I bought a house that was in a cul-de-sac. I'm on the pipe part of the cul-de-sac, so the front of the house is narrow. The back of the house is wide. I could put a pool on each side of the house if I really wanted to. But then again, a pool in a place that's got over 110 swimming pools didn't make much sense.

[00:18:34] Donna Hoover: Right. The only thing would be the privacy issue. But other than that, yeah. There are pools, everywhere. 

[00:18:40] Mike Roth: I just don't like to swim in the nude, so I guess privacy's not really an issue. I can wear a bathing suit. 

[00:18:45] Donna Hoover: All right. Well that is good to know. I'm gonna mark this down. 

[00:18:48] Mike Roth: the other day, my wife and I wanted to take a swim for exercise, and we went to our adult pool in the neighborhood There was a third person there, a lady sitting in the shade reading a book, and she never put her foot in the water. so we got in the pool and swam laps.

No problem. I've gone there and There are walkers in the pool. they're a hazard. I solved that by wearing a snorkel and a diver's mask every time I swim I can see clearly when the pool needs to be cleaned. the adult pools are better because the heating system is all done by electricity.

As opposed to other means in the family pools. 

[00:19:26] Donna Hoover: Yes. You don't want to get in those. 

[00:19:28] Mike Roth: I think I've been in one once since I've been here in The Villages. 

[00:19:32] Donna Hoover: It's nice we have that option to be in a pool just for adults. 

[00:19:36] Mike Roth: Right, right.

here in The Villages we have the equivalent of an HOA. There are community districts with restrictions of what you can do, and you can't put lawn ornaments out in our district. You can't put a window air conditioner out that hangs outside your window. At night, it pays only to cool the master bedroom As opposed to the rest of the house. we have a unit that sits on the inside and, blows the air out through the open window. And I honestly can say that the experiment that I've done this year versus last year indicates that it's not much.

More energy efficient to have that kind of setup. we tried it for a couple of years and 

[00:20:18] Donna Hoover: you didn't notice a cost difference in that. 

[00:20:20] Mike Roth: I'm gonna tell you, maybe it was as much as $20 in a big month because you have to in the morning. Cool. The house down, which got up maybe to 80, you gotta pull it down to 74.

[00:20:31] Donna Hoover: And that's gonna take a bit of energy 

[00:20:34] Mike Roth: and 

[00:20:34] Donna Hoover: and time. 

[00:20:35] Mike Roth: Okay. And having the compressor inside the house means that in the master bedroom, I have to put up with the sound of the compressor, which I didn't like. So I don't think that was a necessary change.

So, the real answer is to buy everything you want. the way you want it when you buy the house. 

[00:20:52] Donna Hoover: I wish I would've talked to you before. No, I mean, our house is wonderful, but again, you have a great location now. Yes, we have a great location and we're on the corner, so we have a big side lot.

Acquiescing to moving into this home. I knew it didn't have a huge yard, but I didn't realize how tight it was until I got here. But I said, alright, how about if we build on the side a bird cage and then I'll have a place to go outside? 'cause right now there's nowhere to go outside.

[00:21:18] Mike Roth: Did you build the bird cage? 

[00:21:19] Donna Hoover: But that is on the list of things to do. 

[00:21:21] Mike Roth: that was one of. a recommendation that someone else gave me that we put the bird cage skit back into the improv routine. 

[00:21:28] Donna Hoover: Yeah. 

[00:21:29] Mike Roth: Okay. And we do, I 

[00:21:30] Donna Hoover: I don't know. 

[00:21:31] Mike Roth: John Case. And Margaret Barton did it originally. 

[00:21:34] Donna Hoover: Is that when he was trying to sell a bird cage to her? 

[00:21:38] Mike Roth: I don't wanna give away the whole skit, but it involves Margaret as a homeowner trying to purchase A bird cage. And a very interesting but realistic skit.

That was very funny. So what else are we gonna talk about in home ownership? 

[00:21:52] Donna Hoover: How about upgrades? 

[00:21:53] Mike Roth: Upgrades. What are the kinds of upgrades people do? Flooring. 

[00:21:57] Donna Hoover: Mm-hmm. 

[00:21:58] Mike Roth: Are they, gonna change out all their carpets for wood. 

[00:22:02] Donna Hoover: Yes. And also you had mentioned earlier about in closing a lanai, perhaps.

Mm-hmm. if it's all screened in to, develop that into where you've got windows and now it's a part of your home you have to look at heating and. air conditioning now as well. Mm-hmm. 

[00:22:18] Mike Roth: I kinda like the soft carpet floors, you know, 'cause you drop a glass, you're probably not gonna break the glass.

[00:22:25] Donna Hoover: Right. If 

[00:22:26] Mike Roth: I drop the glass on the tile in the kitchen, there's a hundred percent chance that glass is gonna break. 

[00:22:32] Donna Hoover: Well, I learned something early on in my kitchen. Of course, there's no carpet in there, but I had Corning wear type plates. And I don't think in my lifetime I've ever, broken one because they just don't break.

I was getting something out of the cabinet and they were on top of a little shelf when I pulled one, it made the whole shelf tilt as it wasn't nailed down or anything. So as I pulled on it, at least six plates came out all at the same time. And hit the floor. And every one of 'em broke and it was just a cacophony of, glass breaking and shards of glass going all over the floor and in all directions. 

[00:23:15] Mike Roth: That's the hardest way to buy a whole new set of dishes.

[00:23:18] Donna Hoover: Right. it was incredible. And I had to do a lot of work, run and get the cats, away. So they didn't come and step on it and then spend a lot of time picking up the pieces, literally. Mm-hmm. 

[00:23:31] Mike Roth: You can always go to plasticware. 

[00:23:32] Donna Hoover: Yeah. things definitely break if you drop them here. 

[00:23:35] Mike Roth: I've broken glasses, you know, and a month later, still find. Pieces that we didn't manage to pick up. 

[00:23:41] Donna Hoover: Absolutely. 

[00:23:42] Mike Roth: But you know, I'm not gonna change out carpets. if I change out the carpets, I'm not gonna change it out for a wooden floor. I'm gonna change it out for a new carpet floor.

[00:23:52] Donna Hoover: Oh, well some people don't like carpet. In an environment where it's so hot. They want the coolness of tile or something like that. that's one of the reasons people do that 

[00:24:01] Mike Roth: Buy a house that's equipped that way. 

[00:24:02] Donna Hoover: Exactly. and for me, because I have two cats, I don't want carpet.

Pets kind of make you not want carpet. 

[00:24:09] Mike Roth: Yeah. we had a miniature hun, and when he was unhappy about being left alone, 

[00:24:15] Donna Hoover: He made it known. 

[00:24:16] Mike Roth: Yes. he marked his territory. 

[00:24:18] Donna Hoover: That's never good. 

[00:24:19] Mike Roth: He was definitely of the type of pet that had separation anxiety, he couldn't go any place that my wife wasn't.

[00:24:27] Donna Hoover: Mm-hmm. 

[00:24:28] Mike Roth: I mean that dog really. Had separation anxiety. He was a good dog, but 

[00:24:33] Donna Hoover: That creates problems. 

[00:24:34] Mike Roth: Well, we would put him in a cage in the basement, you know, where he was, a cement floor and, you know, he'd pee outside the cage on purpose and if we were gone for three hours, he'd bark for three hours in the cage.

I'd videotaped him to find out what was happening. Oh my goodness when we come home, the dog would be hoarse. owning a home in The Villages, buy the right one in the first place and solve yourself a problem. Put lightning rods on. 

[00:24:59] Donna Hoover: Yes. 

[00:25:00] Mike Roth: Especially if you need the top of the hill in your development and just have time.

[00:25:04] Donna Hoover: There's a lot to enjoy about the houses here. 

[00:25:06] Mike Roth: But don't be a slave to the house. 

[00:25:08] Donna Hoover: I think that's good advice. 

[00:25:10] Mike Roth: You know, there may be times when it's time to unload With that note, we'll wrap up. Thanks Donna, for being with me today. 

[00:25:16] Donna Hoover: Thank you.

[00:25:17] Mike Roth: in two weeks people will be able to hear our next episode where we're gonna be talking about restaurants. 

[00:25:24] Donna Hoover: thanks for tuning in. 

[00:25:25] Mike Roth: Look for the restaurant show in two weeks, Monday morning at nine o'clock.

[00:25:30] Donna Hoover: Thank you for tuning in. You've been listening to Mature Adults with Donna and Mike. We release a new episode the first and third Monday of every month. If you have suggestions for future topics, email us at Mike donna281@gmail.com. ​