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Neighborhood Profile: Autumn Oaks, Hudson

 
A view of the Careys’ three-quarter-acre lot lies beyond the pool. Autumn Oaks’ half-acre minimum lot size allows for plenty of room.
A view of the Careys’ three-quarter-acre lot lies beyond the pool. Autumn Oaks’ half-acre minimum lot size allows for plenty of room.
Published Dec. 15, 2016

HUDSON

The luxurious pool home nestled on a large, wooded lot in the Autumn Oaks subdivision on the Pasco-Hernando border started off as a log cabin.

Well, kind of.

When Dan Carey, a retired postal worker, decided to downsize after his children were grown, he wanted to build a log cabin.

He had been drawn by an ad that offered just the kind of home he wanted for $69,900. Perfect, he thought, until he realized that was the price of just the cabin kit. Add in the cost of a place to put the cabin, as well as some necessary modern conveniences — like electricity and plumbing — and the cost rose to about $229,000, which was relatively expensive in 2001.

So, Carey gave up on the idea, but not before taking notes and making sketches of everything he had liked about the log cabin. He took those notes and sketches along with photos and ideas of other interior features he had seen and liked to a builder — and, voila, he had his customized home.

It has a spa tub in the bedroom, columns separating rooms, a leaded-glass front door and an architectural feature above the kitchen island on which plants sit and from which lights hang. All from Carey's pile of notes.

And, like the log cabin, it has a large loft, accessed by stairs in the living room. Built to be a man cave with manly furniture and a pool table, it's now a "woman cave" where his artistically talented wife of four years, Barbara, uses the pool table — covered with a plastic tarp, of course — as a work area. She paints and sews and does all sorts of crafts up there.

When Carey was looking for a lot on which to build his not-a-log-cabin home, he chose one in Autumn Oaks, a housing development not far from where he had been living that he often drove past. He liked the mature trees and the spaciousness of the 260-home neighborhood, where minimum lot sizes are half an acre.

It's located off County Line Road between the Suncoast Parkway and U.S. 19, about 45 miles from Tampa. But the couple doesn't mind the distance. It's an easy hop onto the highway to get to Tampa or St. Petersburg and close to U.S. 19's retail and entertainment strip.

"We like the peace and quiet," Carey said. "We didn't want to live in the rat race where you have to wait a half hour to get a seat in a restaurant."

But, perhaps, most important to the retired couple, it's a place where they feel safe. Where neighbors all know each other. Where pristine homes sit on impeccable lots. Where residents volunteer to visit new residents with welcome-wagon goodies and others pitch in to landscape or spruce up common areas.

"People who come into Autumn Oaks look and see how nice it is. Whoever moves in improves their house," Carey said.

The website of the homeowners' association — on which Dan Carey serves as treasurer — offers this glimpse of the community: "Our shared values are our respect for privacy while maintaining nature's beauty."

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Not a bad description for the location of a would-be log cabin.

Contact Patti Ewald at pagewald@hotmail.com.