The Old Colorado Inn

and we welcome all of you tonight I see a few new faces that we don't normally see I have a few things to speak to you about before I turn the meeting over to Steve so let me get right to it first of all I want to apologize to totally to our president of starting 90 years old because on October 28th Science Church October 28th from 1 to 4. Toby's birthday sorry happy birthday also in the month of October the museum uh in our bylaws has the to bring to you to set it up to make nominees for new board of directors but I am asking once again to let me introduce you to our

board of directors and unless someone has someone that they want to nominate I would love to keep them they are the hardest working most loyal I love these people they're great and they make the best forward so as soon as I bring them up and and let you see them they won't decide if anybody has somebody they would like to know Toby is our president he's been with us 25 years responsible for that museum being there today in my opinion okay I'm going to call these people up in alphabetical order I hope Linda Britton and if you take the time to listen you're going to hear a lot of Stewart local history names this is

Linda Sutton Brewton offered not here tell me your present Gloria Avery five Tony and Henry followed the last minute and she doesn't feel good Barb Kodak will you and John okay and every one of these people is absolutely Sensational they run the museum they clean they do anything that needs to be done so I would like to have a vote to see if we can keep our board on the same thing for it we'll do a yay for that and then a day if you have somebody you would like to nominate so all in favor say aye is alive thank you all hands thank you tonight we pack with us Steve Vitale is that correct

um I have already joette's here I asked her to nominate him put him on the list for preservation of stuff here next year because this man has made an incredible spot in Downtown Stuart that is so nice it makes us rival Saint Augustine going to tell us and you and you all we have to laugh with him because he came in I asked him back in May and he came to the museum yesterday at lunchtime and he was pretty stressed out he didn't have a program ready and so uh the girl here told him his Pro his computer would not possibly it might not work with their system so we went and got him a

I call them the USB port flash drive everybody calls them something different and he made it he didn't think he could but he did he said and he can use his children and that's good because I use mine all the time so I'm going to turn over to Steve and let him do her time for you on what he's done good evening first of all I'd like to thank Mary and the steward heritage museum for inviting me to speak here tonight to make this presentation the people that are sitting in this room and many others are the ones who leave the groundwork for historical preservation awareness of the importance of our historical identity and the

work that you all have done has made a project like this possible to somebody like me by laying the groundwork so I'd like to thank each and every one of you so I'm a local real estate attorney I've been practicing real estate law here in school for about 25 years and I'm 49 years old but white and seven children and I used to maybe asking how did I get involved Hotel so I'm kind of trying to give you the history of how that happened so I moved here to Florida about 25 years ago and I settled in Stuart about 23 years ago my first office was writing and it was a home building on the

second floor I had a small real estate practice and I still have my real estate practice well my dad is what I'll call a real estate Guru who he's a real estate investor he was a broker in New York for his entire life he knows everything about real estate so he's taught me a lot about it and about investing in real estate and he helped me get my feet wet and investing I remember the first time he came to steward he showed me the downtown which was about 20 24 years ago we drove down that town east and he said before he drove me through the town he said you're not going to believe this

town we were doing a golf course project that I was the attorney for um in Port St Lucie called knowledge right um and he was excited to show me the town in the area Jewel me through the town and he was so right and it was just beautiful town with the perfect combination of the charm and history and Boutique shops River so I fell in love with Stewart very early on and we got our feet wet with an investment in the post office okay and um I did a small renovation in there 17 18 years ago when we did the uh the floor return at the time we we did a lot on the inside

of the restaurant is we only on the boat with about three or four years and we sold it and then another building came about which is the second the home building which is on Haiti Circle so that building I purchased and ran as a commercial building with with commercial tennis a few years later another person who has done a lot for the history of downtown Stewart might break owned the building next door and he called me one day out of the blue and he had come down with terminal cancer he said Steve I own this building um I run it as apartments and some businesses in it and I want to sell it because of

my health and you have to build the next one so I thought I'd come to you so I talked to my dad about it and you know he went through the numbers and he thought it was good it was a good I got a loan purchased with the building from him and I operated it as apartments and there were some businesses on well then the building next door see anything happen um gym shoes and on the building next door and he wanted to sell so he came to me and again it had a good rental and I purchased that building took out a loan and also bit down his apartment well this was in 2007

so my timing wasn't too good if you remember that was the height of the market and then in 2008 the bottom was up well here I was I had all these children I had a successful real estate practice that supported me and all of a sudden I was doing because there is no real estate business I do real estate closings Tom you remember um Sandy's right Tom you remember 2008 right so I had to figure out okay what am I going to do well I discovered that these buildings originally were a hotel it was called the Coventry hotel and I started doing a little research into that and I started thinking about the prospect of

turning it back into a hotel and I was kind of afraid to do it because I didn't know anything about Hospitality business but I consulted with somebody in hospitality and I said you know what let me take the first building and take these six Apartments upstairs and renovate them and started doing it and it's like a small and I started doing that and it came it worked it actually worked really well um so when I started and in other rooms in the next building and then over the years different properties came available different residential homes I started purchasing and adding them into the portfolio marketing goes through the umbrella of the old Colorado Income rented

them as vacation rental homes and that's how it started and I'm still doing it now about eight this is our eighth season I think so that's the history of how I got into this and now I want to go through various properties if anybody has any questions feel free to raise your hand and ask Okay so what how do we get rid of this click on the X any equipment no it's not this is a screen yeah okay well I'm not married like that so this is an area that sand you throw a loaf was generous enough to provide to me and you can see the first building I was talking about is the Home

Building so let me get my room thing that is assembly circular to Home Building then this little Mexico to Mike Crainer 211 Colorado Avenue and then this is going on Mr chisholmone which is 201 Colorado Avenue so we'll also be talking about lift and guess the fishing lodge which was originally there and has been moved down on here now and now we'll be talking about the owl house right there we'll be talking about the cottage right here behind the hotel below we'll be talking about 18 Seminole Street which is now a wonderful Italian Bistro and we'll be talking about the Lion's house and we'll be talking about this property which uh of course which now

has the um that's where we relocated the flipping against the fishing lodge and this is the what is called the Barnes house which I call the blue house and then the last thing we'll be talking about I think it's right here is it didn't exist at that point in time it was 29 us theology which is I call it the carriage house to the lion assassin so those are the buildings and let's start with the first one which is the the phone building which is located at 7 through 11. Osceola Street so here's another area and there's the home building it really got a wonderful um architecture it's a it's an art tackle field there's

another building down the street with the dentist offices that's a similar architecture and it was built in 1941 I understood and I have some beautiful pictures that his son our Junior gave to me of them constructing the building but I loaned them to one of the tenants to put up with their unit and I could be back but Sandy was kind enough to provide me with a couple of these uh gems this is um the building back what do you think that is 1930s or 40s maybe 50s I don't know you could tell it's always born in 1969. I don't even know what these cars are that was Julie of the hunger's utterly show oh

yeah flowers and well this is okay okay so here's another one of the Home Building um this is from the 1970s and here is uh photo I took yesterday so when I bought the building it was a real estate office where the sushi restaurant is and there was egoism guitar vintage guitar closet maybe what monkeys is and it was another salon and then Sonic came and there's been some different businesses doing theater it was uh my favorite one was there was a gelato shop yeah some guy from Italy real nice guy who didn't know anything about business he comes to me says I want to rent this storm I had gelato I will have chandeliers

chandeliers Superior accommodation but he bring these chandeliers in from Murano from Venice but no I mean how many chandeliers do you have to pay himself a gelato and I eventually they couldn't pay the rent anymore so it started ordering with them give me as much gelato as you can take your home was incredible so that was a fun memory there but you know it's a wonderful building of us to own it and it's a lot of the reason and I have a wonderful it's got my hair cut today it's not a great salon and monkeys on thomasino's daughter a wonderful local family that's a whole lot more Downtown Stuart it's a it's an upscale Boutique

okay so let's go to the next photo um okay so this is another one that Sandy could not only be with which it's showing the two buildings uh which now constitute uh the old Colorado so the first building on the left hand side was constructed by coventry's family in 1914. and then they constructed the adjacent building in 1917 and they were called this country Apartments but I think they read the whole thing as a hotel and you see the wonderful volunteers there in the front and okay so next we have another great photo of the show on the front of the two buildings and this is a photo with I assume say it correctly come

on is that eat it as I eat it Coventry or Alice yeah oh okay okay and now you know this was the first brick building in the Tennessee one other thing about these buildings is they're all constructive they wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the stadium I mean the stuff is Rock Solid um this the the guts of this entire building is made of Dade County Line all the floors and ceilings are made of the county Pond that wreck all right over the years have been many layers on Stockholm has been put over that but these buildings are Rock Solid I put a new roof on the Tejon building about two years ago and

I was worried when they were you know there was a lot of water damage coming and when they ripped the whole roof off I was worried that it was going to be moving you must have brought in the woods 80 years old I went up there on the ladder and it was like ran into the wood it's a whole trust system and under the flat pieces of the Bay County behind it they were a pristine so all the buildings are made of that material and that's why they're still here has I'm sorry most you know this right the termites can get into it but it's very difficult for them to get into it they still

can't get anything they have to you still have to attend these buildings I found about every nine years we've got to touch these moments from my experience 9 to 10 years 10 years okay now we're going to this is a view from the porch um at the old Colorado and I'd like to show this you can see it hasn't changed in a hundred years a year I mean there's the Animal House it has not changed at all there's the owl house there is the ancillary ale house building which is now the orthodontist building um so I just love that photo okay next we have this is a a wonderful old advertisement that shows hotels from

Warren County back in the day and you can see us the country hotel right there and you 'll go Priceless so it used to cost you one dollar a sec or you could have had a total wheat you could have stayed for five bucks then chisholm's barbecue I don't think that was here on premises but I'd love to see the prices of 35 cents isn't that great so I like to tell people you know I get a chore but every guests that comes to the hotel here to myself or my sister Debbie or my wife actually give a whole tour and one of the great things we love to do is showing these wonderful photos

that um that Sandy Carlo is so kind to want to share with me we have them all framed in the hallways but this one I like itself of course they always ask me so it's going to be a book right it's a great price so Mike my come back to that is um yeah it's going to be one dollar in in another 97 years we're having the 200 year anniversary you come back but also I like to tell people that account like this is a rough math I'm not the smartest but if it went from a dollar to about two hundred dollars in about 100 years so if you do that math it's a degree

of inflation is the same that means it's going to be about forty thousand dollars a night in the future so it's all the nutrients here you come back then send me forty thousand bucks in one night you're only paying 200 okay this you may have seen hanging in the museum um and this is the Old King the old Skeleton King isn't that great you know back when they made things that lasted a long time well here's Mikey we still want to go old school so uh we have the key and and it works well okay next slide okay this is an Old Post block well I can't remember whether it was Alice was that Allison

Barry called me when they said Stephen there's a there's a an old postmark of the Coventry Hotel on eBay you've got a bin so how was your business okay so I told my sister Aaliyah who was married to uh Michael Corelli who's a local doctor eye doctor here and she bid on it not for me as a president I forgot that there's a back a backside of it so that I didn't I didn't copy but um there's a there's a group of characters that didn't come out so clear here and we can see these guys and I went to Illinois and um I like to think of these guys as like monsters that were down

here back in the day because there was a lot of strange stuff going on back in um but thank you very much Alice for um to the far right the very person Larry oh really far far right wow interesting it's interesting okay now I'm going to show you um okay so this is this is an old love letter that was written on the original Hotel letterhead and after I started operating the hotel somebody pulling out of the blue and they said father stayed there back in the day and we found this after they my parents passed away in a chest would you like it I believe it so he sent it over and it's a

four-page love letter and you can see at the top he wrote um dearest honey girly this was back in 1929 and it's got this old-fashioned language that uses the words like by Dolly and I mean it's just it's wonderful and at the top you can see Frank Coventry around the hotel John Coventry his dad and then you can see they were bragging about the fishing hunting boating and bailing and all modern conveniences including this is listing hot and cold hot and cold running water isn't that great okay so okay let's talk about the commentary so I don't know the exact history if I make a mistake you guys correct me but my understanding is that

Frank at Coventry somehow got some people say he was kidnapped to do this but he drove the getaway car on the night that John Ashley was shot on that thing Steward bank so the Stuart bank which I'm sure you'll know is now the mining borrowing right that was wrong two times and the second time was this huge Heist and that night uh somehow they got Frank to drive the car and was a big shootout known actually um but so he wasn't really part of the Astro game but he did drive the getaway car well we had some articles that you have sand here and Alex also made into rum running this is Frank country so

they would take the wrong from the doxier you know we're coming from the Bahamas and they bring it to the railroad here to go up North and I suddenly made the money and Frank also this was an article about how he died so I apparently in a local pool hall and got shot and killed and my understanding is that was over a love interest so it was real wild west stuff you know but if you think about it it wasn't what was here about it you know it was almost kind of like a wild west back in the back here oh and also he was his father gave him a funeral right in the hotel

that's where they were Christian scientists and they worshiped down the street there was a Christian Scientist church I think and he gave the funeral service was right in the hotel it's of course when I tell people that they want to know if there's any ghosts okay so now this is current day and um yeah the bill has got a wonderful College to it my mom Marion was here did a wonderful painting out in front of this that made it into local longer that's from helping people succeed she's in it each year so it's a great it's a great Charity she didn't create anything of this and another talented local artist what is her name um

the muralist not him no Lee I'm sorry Brenda Lee she had all the local murals very talented all the local flowers well she was the one who uh I went to hearts foreign okay so you'll notice that um there when I bought the building this mic for Amazon Mike Ray had built it I think he did it might create built this board she always here but this course did not exist it used to exist a long time but it must have been knocked down in a hurricane and then this little uh Sun back did not exist so I I added this portion I added this summer I think it really helps the architecture the only

thing we didn't realize I went to drama party at all architect to do this personal plan for me and we didn't realize it we didn't realize that um apparently the stairs here but this these two units are much higher the open the doorway so he said we have to lift it up so you can we're going to have to lift it up three feet this side and I said no no the whole thing along the section so we ended up doing it the same and we um I just built stair three stairs going down from each of those doors down to the porch in this building but I did have to raise this as a

step up to this and the reason is when you go over a sidewalk you have to have to get the approval from the city of store for the easement you have to have at least 10 feet so rather than having to go in front of the commission and all that out probably just okay let's step it up will be attention okay so uh this is our low level which um Richard Baron did for us he's a local um designer and this is the old science I want to just tell you a little bit about the meeting so Alice and Sandy and Mary will matter why it's changed the name of this yeah it's the commentary

Hotel and I thought to myself from the marketing perspective it's it just didn't sound like someone or what I thought somebody gonna go you know you know stay in a boutique hotel with Coventry Hotel so Mike Brady used to call the building but this is actually an original sign wherever the building was here he called it the Colorado when he ran in his apartment so I had every summer I like to go out to North Carolina to take my kids to beat the heat and we go you know and rent the house up there so sometimes we go to Cashiers this place called um Lake a landfill it's the highest Lake on the on the

East Coast east of the Mississippi the beautiful if you're going to have a town called Highlands which is really high up in the mountains and they have an Indiana they used to walk through all the time called again so I was like I placed all AdWords they're like the way they use that name old so I said let's call it old Colorado now that's how I came up I think there's another nice shot at the front so this is the porch that I added and people love hanging out up here and it's wonderful um so that there there's a great Breeze you can see the river you can see the whole town from up there

it's really got a key Westing field and also kind of the New Orleans deal tool something this is a photo of my family this is about six years ago because this little guy right here is a youngest but he's he's just turned six so he's about six years ago but they don't help out once in a while not too often but a lot of times come on everybody's coming down to a clean they'll do laundry you don't want to get real busy I have a whole staff but sometimes you know you have like a um convention and every single room is leaving that morning and you got to turn they come over and help my

wife makes fruit salad and actually each night for breakfast this guy Christopher just started college but he painted a lot of the insides of the building so it's definitely a team oh that's right Christopher painted the um the uh not the chicken they chicken The Roosters the roosters and the murals around around Fort Collins right there's a talented ours he's learned learned from my mom he was taught him a lot this is the old mailbox just nice little historical Sasha anything that was like historical and funky and cool I try to keep it up like that this these like the old trance and the old Auto Body each of the room side of this now

you'll notice that the um there's some wall pain where there's an implosion in it that's the old transmission that you would use as air conditioning back before there was an air conditioner that says well the fire marshal asked me to close them all in for final purposes there needs to be a fire wall so I said okay we'll close it in but I want to still be able to see through the glass on the side it's in a fantastic um they also made me put in um sprinklers on the boat we were lucky that the way they used to build these buildings they have two foot crawl space in between each floor in fact you

know you can go up there you can crawl around and they were able to put the sprinklers but I do have to say well I I only live in one building my grade and I have to give a lot of credit to it to other people who came before me like Mike gray did a lot of the heavy lifting with this this first building he did the initial renovation Plumbing Electric I did a lot of the Cosmetic things like you know sanding the floors down and staining them you know read the the bathroom as we do in the kitchens the decorating but a lot of this heavy nothing migrated and Mike gray owns a whole

bunch of houses here in the Downtown Silver vicinity that he's renovated even his wife Marie over the years they've really done a lot in the story okay this is the hallway it's downstairs and the upstairs hallway above the main main building and there's little Sandy's where you float is that train this is the interior so you can see the old deep cabin client floor I added the ceiling in this one to just give it that extra charm and this is our Palmer Suite downstairs which is our handicap accessible when we did have to have one handicap and accessories in the main Hotel and this is the original Dade County client sealer okay this is the

sample Street I believe lobby of the original Hotel building and it has a fireplace that still works and people use it in during those cold days in February and March each room has a kitchen and a bathroom some of them are one bedroom some of them are Studios some of them are two bedrooms they're all totally different and each one is different from the other this is our Key West Suite which has two green beds this is our Caribbean Suite which is a nice Island feel to it the only reason I trip to this picture is the glass I have a lot of rooms that I contracted Stewart stained glass to make um hand handmade

stained glass windows because it was a lot of openings from where the air conditioner used to flow just on one wall mounted AC unit well initially you can see I have a split system which I which are great right there and so the bedrooms on the other side of this stained glass that has another split system so this didn't need to be open so I closed it in and then we call this the Aloha Suite so I said hey do me a a cool uh Hawaiian seed volcanoes and beaches and he did a great job okay this is one of our studio screens this is actually our smallest room but each way you can see

it each one has a couch and a place to sit and the kitchen this one we call the flag of suite and then the flag I'm messing better than the flowers some of them are private balconies that you can see you can see you get a nice shot of the river down the street and then you can see some indications you know we put granted in we did open fixtures and put a nice backsplash um some of the some of the cabinet should be having made to match some of the historical Cabinetry like this one right here all this kind of issue with me about a very talented local Carpenter that he matched the exact

look of the historic Cabinetry and some of the other ones okay so that those are the main Hotel buildings and then behind the orange Hotel building is the cottage and I don't know the history of this and I think I'm guessing maybe with 1930s or 1940s and it was constructed it's a wood frame pot which is too bad if this could do is our headphones Italian in the bank it's very nice for the dogs don't want and this is located at a Forest Seminole Street which is the first building at the hotel on Sentinel Street okay that's just the sign of the building it's got great highlights of this color just makes you feel like

they're on the islands and then sign up to the prospect opposey field I love the old though Cabinetry there for the uh the cottage and cute little stuff they said the original the account look forward to by end of the client ceiling there's a burden of the cottage okay then the next building we're at is the uh 18 Seminole Street Okay so this building was built in the 19th team winanson or else I think 1920s this was built in the 1920s it was original originally free and then one of the owners might create actually simultaneous thing and he closed the concrete block not a little bit and there was a restaurant that came in called

Catwoman activity and then Jerry's locked the mail at the restaurant here on here and Jerry ran a nice operation for a while with the needed to retire and now it's 18 teams together and his family running a great place excellent food great Seafood tomorrow if you go here great eggplant homemade tiramisu and asked for the homemade lemon salad was a complimentary here we go afterwards and that's a little room okay come on and that's what it looks like now I added the the padding on the front the trellis and has that outdoor seating now when you use the same color scheme as the other buildings the time all together okay so now we are up

to the next property over on Seminole Street is the under Science House well this is a photo level that it used to look like for Dr Conley a prior owner did his major renovations so this house was the oldest house of Stewart it was built in 1891 and it was actually moved on to the property from another location now that was Ernie Lions is out yes Ernie Alliance uh moved in here maybe 40 years after his original development he stayed here until his death in 1990. John's account Oh Lady Gaga so this house has an incredible history to it it was built in 1891 this is the plot that's on the wall so they had

the first school service here in 1891. and in 1892 they had the first wedding of Stewart in 1892 they had Stewart's first church service in 1897 Stewart's first baby was born he writes in John's family Mary knows our history Jones and then 1897 wait 1937 I think that is the eighth to 1990 when he died it was the home of artist lines who as you all know was the local editor of the newspaper and he was an author and he wrote several books in the home that you can buy at the super Heritage Museum they're wonderful I read um take it one and a half I think that's nice each chapter is about three or

four pages and they're totally unrelated to the other chapters and all about the local environment well he was a preservationist um the conservation lawyer he writes a lot about the his backyard and all the nature in the backyard and the river he was talking about the river problems that we're having now back in 1940. he was he was almost a The Profit with regard to it okay so the house was restored by Dr Tom Conley who who purchased it probably I'm guessing about 20 years ago maybe and his family lived in the home and tragically he died last year he was a very talented and eccentric enough I used to go into his office and

he would be violent it was very talented he loved to snowboarded he loved to um when Sharif and apparently he couldn't see because he was a skin doctor he knew the dangers of the sun exposure and he had a hat on and a story out here he couldn't see too well maybe that led to him colliding with the boat I think that he passed away but he was the one who wanted to talk probably was a lot of help from people in this room to make this one of the literary landmarks of Florida so this is the part friends and libraries in USA are Miss lions and what was that dedicated oh in the 90s

well there's I think there's 14 of them I think the most famous is is Tennessee Williams is near this the um saying um but here here they are and this is the this is the little brochure that shows all of the houses and all the different authors in Florida that have their homes designated as literary landmarks so we're really lucky to have this here I've got another story to build a piece of Florida literary history here's a throwing up a little irony with his without her mouth that was tight right here and here's what it looks like now so Ernie Lyons did the expansion this was the original portion of the home again okay and

he expanded here which had a kitchen and maybe a den or something and then Dr Khan would totally changed it around too that was a scope oh yeah on the left was this one I'm sure yeah okay this is the background it was really it's a great piece of property and it goes all the way from from Seminole Street all the way down to Osceola Street and Dr Conway is the one who did that he brought several lots that were Jesus each other that he bought a building that was on Osceola Street and then there was an alley in between some of them where the power pulls up but the city owned this alley never

mind making it making it one entire parcel and it's beautiful it's got this gorgeous backyard I tried to put this nice gospel before style awareness in the back in the back people like you know you're on vacation like you're like sorry our St Augustine Grassroots as it that's that's swing set was for Dr Thomas these kids in my country because it's a great sort of stuff okay next we have there's this one I said there's another angle of the house so doctor Conley put this pool in and this is about probably where that alley is right here that you abandoned and this is a great pool it's got a golden heat Dimension which means it's

approximately 60 to 65 feet you can do laps in it and it's got this spot that'll flows over into the pool um so this pool we don't let guests in the hotel use this pool only in these vacation rental because otherwise we'll be too crowded and it makes it more exclusive to the people who work in the beginning this is the building that Tom Conley bought um probably shortly after he bought the Lion's house that's located on 29 Osceola Street it was an old accountant's office I believe and he turned it into like a carriage household it's beautiful I'll show you some pictures of the inside so you can see it's got the original 1890

d-95 in the floor with the floor is incredible and all of these homes before he's in front of me Dr Connolly took out a lot of the walls you can see this was a this was he opened it up this was a separate room and he built a big bathroom back here um can really get these kind of hit just like to get kudos a migrate on this property I have to keep a shout out to Dr Tom Conley Douglas assault because he really did a lot and he was the type of guy who did not know getting one anything these windows here he put in these are all Anderson Windows hurricane impact and those

are the most expensive Windows you can get and he had you know he took the top of the time to get it all back in perfectly matches used to be walls yeah you did a great job really good work so this is another angle from this big dining table there and I put this little kitchenette in here because I rent this house separately subdivided into two units you can run one side this side I call the serenity Suite which is a one bedroom suite there's huge living room and pull out sleepers over here and then I put this little kitchenette in if somebody wants to you know have a good coffee we bring pots and

out to breakfast in the mornings thank you by the way if I don't want too long somebody let me know I don't know how I'm doing all the time great so this is probably one of my favorite rooms in the whole complex and this I turn this into the master bedroom of the Lion's house which this is on the other side that I call the Grand Suite which is a two bedroom suite um but it has the beautiful cathedral ceiling it's a huge room and it has a working fireplace there's the fireplace another great room Gourmet Kitchen all around and all top of the line appliances beautiful queen canopy bed here and Dr Conley actually

had a local artist paint this for his daughter and these Stars lightly below my dog so I decided to keep it because it's I couldn't paint over that and I just tell people how much longer yeah this is the third round okay so this is the front of what I'll call the Carriage House which is 20 manasiela Street and there's a little private sitting area that overlooks the pool beautiful ultimate room wood flooring here and a nice big table nice for vacation king bed beautiful California Closet beautiful bathroom with a walk-in shower and that's the end of the line test so I'm trying to go in and geographical so the next thing I'll do if

you walk past the Lion's house the next thing you'll see is um where the Clinton gas fishing lodge Now lies but it used to be over two doors down from The Boathouse okay and this is what it used to look like and this building was built in 1914. and it was The Architects actually the contractor was Sam Matthews and he was he's very well known locally it's a great work and this house this house the became it was many different it was a family home at one point they did the slashes magazine out of this house is that right yeah and a rock party became what they called the Clifton gas and fishing rods where

people would come and stay it was almost like a little lodging a hotel not a hotel but um launching and the gentleman named Ralph Evan who apparently stayed in this home at one point in time one was a perfect guest official launch and while he was staying here over that period of time we started recording Francis Lane for the famous movie star so I took the liberty of honoring them with naming the Suites in the house after the ground floor I call the Evinrude Suite the second floor of the house I call the Langford Suite so this kind of shows you this is a little bit of an area like you can see I don't

think it's this is probably where the house is right around here where it originally sat and this is how we moved it along the river here this property and then brought it up here to I think this lot I think it's the slot right here that's what that's what so you'll see this is a nice area you can see the Home Building here and what we started with so we're not going to build in the original Hotel actually this is the original Hotel building civil one and then they built a Coventry Apartments here to London the local College we talked about 18 seminal Italian Bistro the Lion's house and then this is where the Clinton

gets the fishing lodge has been moved to so I just wanted to show you some of these photos about moving the houses what just tell you a story about this seat when I found out that they were going to be doing a development here I approached the developer and asked him if I could I happen to have that big a lot in between the alliance house and another house that I owned that was just sitting there not being used so I'm thinking well what are you going to do with this incredible house and then he was a real Gem and I offered to move it at my cost and I offered five hundred dollars and

I said you know what you can't work this house down it's you just get those and we work together to do that and I didn't really understand how the process would work so I hired a company called the brownie company doing this forever real American success story they've been moving homes for over 100 years fourth generation and how they do it is they bring the first date they dig under the house and they get the steel beams that they put under uh the trust us and luckily we had good strong trusses with the state county department and here's some more photos of how they do that I can see under the house so it was

sitting it was originally sitting on this Foundation here so they get these steel beams underneath and then they use a hydraulic system and we were able to use to move the Torches also in addition to the main home this is the hydraulic system so what they do is they put this little Contraption underneath several of those steel beams and then they pull the library and starts lifting it up and then after they start lifting it up this is I took a video I wanted to feel like I was The Wizard of Oz with this move move like a house but you can see this I just pulled a lever and it starts pulling it up

um the Hydraulics at the moment to lift it so this will just take a second so what they do after that is then they put all these pieces of wood underneath those beams to hold it up and they get it up really high and then they take the rest of the dirt out and then I was trying to figure out how am I going to move this thing over the just gonna wrap my wrap my head around it's such a simple solution they take these big steel platforms like if you've never been in the city and they're doing road work and they open up the road to fix a silver enough time to fix it

so they just throw these huge big rectangular steel platforms now they clear the land a little bit and they lay all these steel platforms then the hydraulic system has wheels on the bottom and I just wheel well they had to construct a hard part about this was they had to construct a bridge over the Riverwalk and then bring it over that bridge down onto the barge so we wanted to save the fireplace but it wasn't it wasn't going to work because talk about the day can I find that stuff was great it's so solid the house didn't shift at all that nothing fell off but when he tried to shore off this fireplace on the

outside because of the water gets old it was just going to collapse so I said take it out and I'll just put the big fireplace in and that's the photo of a guy taking all the brick out there so there's a little pieces of wood that I was telling you about that they stack up now it's up real hard I'm going to bring the bulldozer in then they bring the um these here's one of the steel platforms and then these um this these are the wheels that are connected to this hydraulic system and they actually have a remote control the guy just presses a button and moves the house along really amazing I mean it's

expensive to move a house like this but when I see what they did in the amount of equipment that they had the cost of this equipment I think I got a good deal on it okay so there's a photo of the house all lifted up before uh bringing it down to the barge here's a photo of me and my dad I like this one because you know um my dad has been my mentor and my father and I love my Mom very much and my dad here and I have to you know give them a lot of credit for all of this because I learned a lot of this from them you know I watched

my dad renovate hundreds of homes in New York where I would work on a lot of them with them we do everything with stores we bring in team painters a lot of historic homes like this that's how I kind of got it in my blog and my parents have called me a lot financially it's not easy to do this financially and back on the 2008 times came around boy it wasn't easy I had taken out these loans my parents refinance these properties which I wanted to be would it not have been anything to do this without my mom's got all her payments hanging in most of these songs and my dad has a great eye

for myself I was talking to somebody earlier he's he's an antique buff and he he picks out a lot of the pieces he's helped with a lot of the placement of things a lot of the Furnishings a lot of operations so it's really been a team effort for my whole family have he ever had a house move like that no that was why I was real proud of this one because you know we've done you know I practice real estate laws and and I did a lot of his work over the over the years um and we did a lot of stuff you know a lot of golf courses a lot of residential developments a

lot of these historic Renovations that I was telling you about in New York who had never done this was something we have never done so we're real proud to capture this moment with him here and here it's here's the the ramp that I was telling you about they had what they did was they brought these concrete they just started dumping big huge pieces of concrete down here and then they started waning more carefully at the top and then they put the steel platform over the bridge and there it is with the barge boy we have great weather for the uh February it was it was it was a perfect time to do those great photos

here's a shot of me standing in the back of the bar just looking back that way it was a huge barge that's the a lot with Vegas because they had to start building oh yeah that's right that's right so what happened with this is I didn't think this was going to happen um you know I I was like how am I going to do this so I was like oh you're a real estate attorney you can figure it out so I said okay let me have a contract to buy a house without the land well I've never done that so I kind of just created one but I just created my own contract about moving

a house buying a house without the land and I knew it wouldn't be a deal middle of sale because it's not real property it's it's like almost like a mobile home or just as you were buying these are he's a child of sale so I I signed the contract with the developer for five hundred dollars and it had this certain window of time that I had to do it by well the problem then became that um the the project down the street where they're doing River House is going to be called I had to get an easement from the owner of that property to bring the house back up and then across the street so

without that easement I couldn't do it and I was at first I was having problems getting that easement um and eventually um he cooperated and and helped out and signing engagement and I didn't think it was going to happen at one point but also because my next closing came I had to structure the contract in such a way that I wanted them to kind of feel the developer I wanted to get this deal but I didn't want him to feel like it slave to me you know you know actually buy the property um and he had to get out of it so I structured an out clause for him if he could get out for

any reason whatsoever so I was kind of on pins and needles the whole time because the closing was supposed to happen I prepped all the land I had the on the property we were moving the home so I spent a lot of money doing that and all of a sudden all the clothes is going to be delayed another month um and then and I had the other property owner telling me well we want to start soon so you know we're not giving it past this day and so I just made it by a couple of days it really all the stars were lined up for it to happen and here's a side view of it

and you can see where the chimney was taken out okay so next we can now they're loading it down to the box you can see it kind of you literally won't control in his hand there that's Jamison brownie bright guy let me tell you something you got to be a lot smarter to do this than to practice real estate you got to be super smart to do this really smart and that'll turn on the garage that's me in my life with the big house in the background there she got not a tugboat that looks like your friends no no there's a tugboat there somewhere yeah oh yeah but there's somewhere this is um some of

my staff at the hotel that I wanted to get some photos with him watch in the background and then this is it coming to The Landing point so then what they do is then they after they bring it down they they put ropes will change and they attached to them to the house and they pull it back actually I'm sorry that's the bar actually hold it they have to get the barge right up to the edge so they had to pull the barge back with this with three bulldozers that would pull them in real real hard digging up that ground a lot so this is the property where I had to get the easement without

building the river house about and that is to do the same thing they put the beams in it have to build a great big bridge this time though unfortunately okay this is the brownie family we have fourth generation family real talented people the amazing thing is is really only these three guys that are doing that whole thing moving this whole house was really these three gentlemen they they are in charge you know every facet of that operation uh guest at the hotels of this one morning it's happened to me not a great photo that was probably the morning before they took it off the March how long was the whole problem boy um maybe like

just a couple of months and thinking oh yeah well no actually that then red doing the the work on the new property probably then took another two months out and putting the brake work in building staircases we had to reconnect the plumbing we connect the electric irrigation get everything working that took a couple of months to know okay so then you have to pay FPL um you have to pay FPL and Comcast and a t each a lot of money I think this process could cost me maybe 25 to 30 000 just to take these lines down for two hours but again it was the kind of thing I was like what what I could

be that much did I come out here early in the morning and it originally had so many cars and everything it's a big thing you know it's dangerous so I guess I can understand that's not taking the Blind Side you can see they took the lines down there because the house was gonna you know cloak those lines with it being up on this and then they brought it across the street and then we had the latest footage um around the perimeter of the New Foundation and that's done pouring the concrete and then what they do is after they pour all that concrete they ladies do um concrete block them I don't know what you call

them peers there we go Piers concrete block Fierce and in the house that may lower it down with the hydraulic system with those beams right to the side and it rests right on those and then we just had closed in the um you know the bottom there it is up a little bit higher I had to do some work to most of the trusses were in really good shape but while we had enough people think you know what let's go in and redo some of these and get a really rock solid underneath it so I said let's keep it up a little bit higher um if we ever need to do more work in the

future though okay so next one we've got the biggest problem with this process was getting FPL to reconnect the power it was like dealing with Comcast maybe Australia didn't really help me help me so I had to have the staircase built right here because we had to take all the staircases off and this had to be in a different location and now this is how you access the top level and then I I had this fence somewhere along I had to cut a hole in it and I just had to put a gate on so that the gas stating his house can have their own access to the pool okay now we've got some interior

photos so well one other person that I need to give a shout out to is Diane the bottles who lived in this house for it's been 15 years well she's like one of the most well-known renowned decorators in the area she did a lot of Wayne Isaiah stuff and she lived here for 15 years and put a lot of these real extra decorator touches she also opened it up a lot so this house right here behind this van is uh you can see a patch in the ceiling because there used to be a fireplace that came right down here this was a separate room from this she took the fireplace out opened this whole thing

up and it really is a spectacular brand room now that's the other side that piece right there and probably came from my parents one of their great views on their teeth collection we have a lot of great antiques who are throughout all the properties you can see what I did with the fireplace just made it really easy to put a big fireplace in and flood it foreign great condition it's got three kitchens this house is a little here's one of them queen bed there was another kitchenette on the side hopeful not sleeping sofa there this is the downstairs porch and you can see the backyard of the Lion's house next door and pull over there

okay then upstairs this is a beautiful brand room that Diana bomb must have kind of opened this up and put all her touches on I mean it's got all this incredible antique Cabinetry here island table you probably don't be doing all this stuff here off here but again it's got you know all of these houses are so beautiful okay next we have this is just the other side and you can see um you can see uh we've got a nice view of downtown um so actually this building right here this is kind of funny I I actually constructed this building with my followers the esplanon club and it was a developer who was going to

build to pull this out and he got kind of similar to Mike grave situation when he called us one day after he started the whole project it was the whole concrete structure had been built it came down with brain cancer and he wanted something to take over the project rule I wish looking back on it this guy when it was 2007 moments when we walked the property and put a lot of money into it and felt that I was a beautiful property lost my mind but now I have the best deal from from this building really clearly there this is the master bedroom and then so Diane did locked in a lot of this stuff

all this all these little decorator touches the wallpaper this was all here you know downstairs you know wallpaper and the bathrooms matches with tiles hand-painted walls it's really spectacular that's I thought about it but they came back top porch view of the pool back there you can see from a porch okay so that is the Clifton Gaston fishing lodge so we are now over to the next house which is I call this the blue house but this is 38 Seminole Street and it it was originally I think the Barnes house and I've built in 1915. so this from from the clippings that I have this was a series of Roebuck house but it was put

together in a different property and then they actually moved it to this lot like I'm in the Clifton house I'm not sure when they moved it but the woodwork inside of it is incredible and when they build these houses these these kit houses they wrap the woods and newspapers so I have a few sections when I you know picked up the back of it and I can see the newspaper article stuck to the to the to the wood to this one you can see they were talking about selling oil shares with one penny back in the early 1900s so that was kind of cool I actually kept some of these I keep them off to

show it to people when I give them a tournament and here's what the house looks like now so I did a major renovation to this house so uh there was no way of conditioning to put air conditioning on the beach luckily they all have these crawl spaces underneath so be able to put all the duck World underneath and this house had the most incredible big California floors are just sanded them down and they look absolutely incredible it's got a great private backyard there's an above ground jacuzzi and as you can just walk next door and use the pool next door this has a vehicle porch see even in the front even in the porch the

the floor is Christine 100 years later and it's got a lot of these great little touches like this indeed I guess it got a big original door it's got the bevel glass there and all those are the original windows but done what do they pull those things on the side that have things that go on the side really what is it a big old way to hang in there yeah yeah they just don't work on all these diagnosis I had to repair some of them but they still work and then this house has paneling and ceilings that are really far surpassed some of the other ones so it's really really intricate detailed work here fireplace

doesn't work because one of the prior owners covered the ceiling so the story on this one was again somebody pulled me out of the blue it was a broker there's a house down the street that's for sale and um I went in and looked at it and I knew this house was in general this house has two bedrooms downstairs and there's a large Peter Pan style Loft upstairs did all those nice tiles work real stolen Granite Supply and wine with all their real estate market with you along here's the kitchen there's another Runway now you see yourself I'm not great opinions right here but that's awesome and they're all over these drivers and then this

is the upstairs which is a Peter Pan style so I'm going to type my ghost story I'm gonna get my ghost story this right here is one of those old-fashioned lights where you push one button and the other one comes outer end okay so after I redid this whole house I came up there with my son Christopher and we were hanging paintings and when we were all done oh I gotta step back the house the lady who sold me in the house told me that it was apparently ghost in the house and the ghost will let you know he's around you know in a friendly way so I was like okay so and she even

had a name for the ghost so I was up to a president Christopher and we're done hanging on the paintings just okay let's turn the lights on so go push that money push into the light the light comes off we go downstairs and we turn the other lights off downstairs we leave the house we're about to get into the car and I look back and the lights were on upstairs to the windows and and I know I've seen him turn the light off so I said that's the friendly ghosts we went home told my family we were all talking about the Friendly Ghost for a couple of weeks I come back into the house two

weeks later and I was right here to the right is a switch I flipped the switch it happens to work the lights upstairs that's how those stories get started it was online okay and where are we now there's also look back I had to add this bathroom all too because there was no bathroom so we had it in a Southern shower in the bathroom down with the people upstairs yeah okay okay so now we are up to the owl house um okay so this house I actually don't own this house I have a a lease on it and I have an option to purchase it and I what I wanted to do was figure out

how can I make this work and so I said let me see if I can how I do with renting it um one thing I learned in doing historic preservation is you have to have the economic wherewithal to do the project not only the initial renovation the whole work and money that goes into that but the ongoing maintenance is is a lot and so you have to be creative I could not have done any of this stuff if I didn't have the business of the hotel government I would have never been able to do it so the hotel works it works economically but can I make all of these vacation rental houses work that's something

I'm I'm working on now I'm trying to make it work but I may have to do something more creative with this where it's a combination um lodging and something else what that is I'm not sure yet but I'm not writing it enough now um that it's like well I gotta do it I've got to buy it right now so I'm I've got some time on it I'm gonna really want to make it happen because it's an incredible property this was built in 1904 and it was designed by a ship captain and I guess it was inspired by the ship soon when you design roof inverted like this and apparently that was to withstand hurricane winds

it happens to be a very windy spot when I'm here on those windy days in like February you could hear what you're inside the house you hear the white shadow and out of business so I don't know if another one like this in Florida so anyway it was built in 1904 and Charlie Porter was the original owner no see that's why we have the gurus here over there Flats okay and they sold the port yeah next we've got um did I just want to uh this one you can see in there you know you all know what this is but there it is right there this one also shows you you can get a nice

shot of the typical telephone links here so 1904 was built and this is what it looks like now um and of course this was an easy one to make the owl house now could you call that anything else right but this house is so unique it's still Charming it's almost the weight's not inside it's almost like a mountain house with this incredible paneling um but here here on the shores of the St Lucie it's incredible beautiful wraparound porch in the front sorry about that delays here look at that view not incredible and see all that beautiful paneling there that's throughout the entire inside of the house even the ceilings and the closets and it's very

unique because when you in the closet you can see that inverted roof once they can get on so it's interesting to say and you can see those great kind of cathedral ceiling here and the architect was very talented he um it was great how we kept this open so you can see and then I think this may be some of the original glasses it's all metal and you can look into the ceiling the master bedroom after that create working fireplace here beautiful dining room then great working prediction and this is another one of my favorite rooms um coming up not this one um this one right here isn't that great it's hard though it's really

beautiful streets it's beautiful except I don't know where that came from and my kids always say take the picture of the scary thingy now so when we did the historic tour I don't know was he American somebody left a present that I have in place which is um our painting is there now I put this one in the closet yeah thank you very much there's another angle and so remember a little historical tidbit about this property is it was used as a birthing center in the 1980s fact uh whoever was involved with that cold maybe so much yeah that's right and I have to call him um she cuts I think she had some I

don't know what it was some information or something I've been so busy to get back to what I'm going to and so that was in the 1980s I believe hundreds of babies were born in the home well nice thing about that is I've been on the board of directors for Mary shelter for the past I actually had to step down because you can't stay on more than nine years but I've been involved in for about 10 years so um we're going to be having a Christmas tour where there's going to be a different decorator will decorate each house with a different theme for Christmas I think it's going to be around December 8th and 9th

and then people come by and take them and go look at the Christmas decorations at the different houses and every shelter so in line with what they did here we're trying to continue that now we're calling it make room at the end so there was no room at the end for the holy family but there's going to be room for them at the old Colorado wind or at least enough for the for the mothers out of Mary shopping this December this is the downstairs bedroom isn't that great that um there's so many wonderful uh architectural features in this house just the ceiling and the small bedrooms is so strong and beautiful and there's two and

a half bathrooms a half bath downstairs and this house is the only one that didn't have to really redo you know usually you know we got to put nice Stone there we got to make it nice for the gas sometimes when you have a house like this that you know I when I go to the I was talking about this one week a year and we'll have a house you know you know kind of rustic like this and you know this is a linoleum floor I think but and you know this is just nothing great with this kind of but to me this is like I wouldn't change that because hold me so I just

got there and there's the the second bedroom upstairs and there's that funky uh sailing line inside of the bathroom okay and now just a shot of the outside there's a nice little shed there that I just found the floor a little playroom for the kitties on family stay and that's the inside of it that gives a shot of the uh beautiful and geothermal property okay and now I have to put this one about the ladies Mary and Alice and Sandy yeah I just wanted to give a shout out to them until really helping me so much and enlightening me about the history of this area and helping me to bring the love of our history

too we're all against it to come to stay here at these properties so thank you thank you very much and that is the end of the spreadsheet anybody asking a question if I can answer the question how did you sacrifice all these many homes for rent or released I did not realize we did for a long time I did not realize a down Seminole in these houses sure here's how I do it I have you know they have TripAdvisor okay so I have the hotel on a TripAdvisor and I also showed a different vacation rental units through our website which you can access to TripAdvisor so we're really fortunate that on all the hotels in

the area on TripAdvisor we have the best reviews we're listed as the number one in Stuart and then we have um nowadays it's all done by computer you know I do do some printing I'm going to have an ad in the Stuart and the Student News you may have seen this month but it's you really get the business from the computer now online search engine so there's Expedia where she really can't do the houses to Expedia but the hotel rooms you can and we have a great rate on what people they just there's something about this downtown um you know it's it's pedestrian friendly it's historic it's Charming friendly great people and people just love

it they love come stay here for a couple days of experience in this town so we're getting really good reviews if you go on Expedia who are listed like if you search Expedia on all the hotels and I think the entire trading post it shows the old model round one is the top of the hotel that's just based upon the reviews I'll show those hotels that are better but probably different purposes it's just like the town they like the historic chocolate it's almost like staying in your own little uh apartment so you know it's not a cookie cutter so they like and some of those songs yeah so the home yeah some of the homes

you have to rent the whole home but some of them like the Lion's house for example you can rent the whole Lion's house it's a three-bedroom house uh and it's too full of sleep or something because you can stick with 10 people you know families coming all the time or you can rent anime because it's self-definite subdivided duplex but those we do through like um but there's other intentions like vacation rentals like they can get a lot of bookings vacation rental houses through a company like that verbum but then there's Airbnb I haven't really stay away from that because it's difficult people want to you know you know talk about the price and a lot

of the price and you can't finalize it Beyonce go back and forth a hundred times yeah but you know sometimes sometimes we're doing great right now it's it's slow for some reason in October September was pretty good it slowed down a lot it's been October which is surprising but the last October but you know what thinking of it from the nuts and bolts of economic perspective I'm telling myself that well last last year I had to deal with two downwinds in September with that hurricane and then probably spending about twenty five thousand dollars to fix things that you know the insurance doesn't you have an deductible so you know they call them the onage Como

offenses come down all that stuff you got to pay for it so I'll take the slow October how many students so I haven't said there's about 20 two units altogether all together with the whole with the hotel rooms and Suites and the houses it's about 22 all together you know a little bit 57 years ago to go down the hallway last place on the left which one yeah really does he got any good stories and they haven't been up in the walls yeah you got a question yeah what are you doing if anything's going to happen yes so what I did was this building here I started this entire building pulled the windows are already

gave them back all these windows the doors aren't yet in fact I kept the old what did they call this moment but eventually I'll probably increase that came in fact so then I started doing Williams expense one room cost me 4500 windows and so I did one down here and I did one up here then last year I did this Aloha sweet energy the back of this building and I'm going to keep doing different ones and I don't want to go to the houses but you know you have to budget over time so um I eventually want to get to the point where it's all hardly getting impact because right now this building can have

this mesh stop okay right here um this building here I I bought this it's Dave County proof mesh hurricane fabric but putting it up I'm not handy and I can't even put a hurricane it's difficult to put a hurricane shot to figure it out get it in and jam it I probably spent uh ten thousand dollars just hiring people to put up that stuff and I bought about three thousand dollars worth of wood lots of time because everybody said it was the big one yeah so I mean we put all that up and then you have to take it down and I stored the wood I gotta get it I gotta get a long-term planet

Ary game you know even that you've got category five you know these things have been here for 100 years well thank you so much really a pleasure to be here