Work Days at Our Fishing Camp near Everglades City, Florida

We had planned to stay at Disney World 6 days but we decide to leave DW early to return to our 'fishing camp' near Everglades City to finish the kitchen. So we're back at Monument Lake Campground at Big Cypress National Preserve with my parents. The other volunteer camp hosts have left to return to their home in Maine so we get permission to park in the camp host spot beside my parents--electricity! Yea! Only the campground volunteers have electric at Monument Lake.

We work from around 9:30 am to 6 pm each day and by Friday afternoon we finally have the kitchen, living room and hallway finished. The bathroom and bedrooms are still disasters but at least we have half the inside finished and we rebuilt the dock in January. Hopefully we'll finish the remainder of the inside next winter.

I should have taken photos before we started renovating so that we could see how much better the inside looks, but I didn't. The kitchen isn't anything fancy but it's a big improvement to what was there. People suggested that we just junk the mobile home and replace it with a new one, but Plantation Island is right next to Everglades National Park and there are a ton of regulations for building etc. to the point that it's cost prohibitive to replace an old mobile home with a new one. We used 'recycled' material wherever we could: meaning our new kitchen has secondhand/pre-owned cabinets, sink, formica counter, and appliances. The sub-flooring and flooring are new material. The flooring looks like wood but is actually vinyl planking.

Here is the dock we repaired/rebuilt in January:

People keep asking us what we plan to do with the property. We don't know. The original plan was to clean and fix it up and sell it, but the Florida real estate market is horrible so we won't be able to sell it any time in the near future. Jere seems to be getting attached to the property and is trying to convince me to keep the property as a winter retreat. So who knows what we'll do???