Family giving up dream house for simple life
Plucked from among 39 million entries to win HGTV's million-dollar dream house sweepstakes in 2005, the family of Don and Shelly Cruz now have a new dream.
"Please, if anyone is out there, please buy this house so I can come back to Illinois," Don Cruz pleads by phone from his 6,000-square-foot luxury home in Texas, where he spends his days alone "putzing around, cleaning and fishing off the deck" within view of one of the home's flat-screen TVs.
His wife, Shelly, and the couple's 12-year-old son, Donald, already have moved back to their old 708-square foot, two-bedroom house on Deerpath Road in Batavia Township.
"Our whole house would fit in the great room of this house," Don Cruz says from his dream home on Lake Tyler.
It's taxes, not Texas, that are driving the Cruzes back to Illinois.
Injured and given a modest disability settlement from a fall after 21 hard years as a carpet installer, Don Cruz, 42, is a stay-at-home dad. Shelly Cruz, 39, who went back to school to become an accountant, has returned to her old job as an administrative assistant at InCon Processing LLC in Batavia.
They won an SUV (but they still drive their old Saturn because it uses less gas), and they spent some of their additional $250,000 cash award on a pontoon boat, a go-cart, scuba lessons and a five-figure donation to charity. But the Cruzes simply can't afford to live the dream life.
"Lots of taxes," Don Cruz says, noting the family had to take out a loan to pay off the $672,000 tax bill on their winnings. Local ordinances about land use scuttled their plans to make money by renting out the lakefront guest cottage or the master bedroom suite, or by turning the home into a bed-and-breakfast.
Originally asking $5.5 million for the mansion, the Cruzes lowered the asking price this week on their Web site, doncruz.net, to less than $2 million.
"If we sell the house at $1,850,000, we break even," says Don Cruz. That is the price only if someone buys it without a real estate agent.
Even if they had the money to stay in a house with a 30-foot fireplace and a home theater, the family has other reasons to return to their old lifestyle in Batavia.
"I kind of like the small house because everybody has to stay in the same room," Don Cruz says. "In the big house, everyone was in different rooms."
The Cruzes have helped raise more than a dozen foster children in Illinois. They couldn't do that in Texas, where they owe the IRS money and are selling their house.
"They told us, 'You can't be a foster parent because you are not stable,' " Don Cruz says.
Then there are the family connections back in Illinois.
"My wife really misses her mom," Cruz says. "Her and her mom are more like sisters; they are super close."
That closeness became even more important when Shelly was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
"They took a golf ball-size mass out of her brain," Don Cruz says, calling it a "gift from God" that everything is fine now.
Likewise, Cruz's father is recovering from prostate cancer.
"For Christmas this year, I gave him the pontoon boat, and then he gave us the news he had cancer," Cruz says.
Family is very important to the Cruzes.
"It was a blessing, winning this house. Don't get me wrong," Cruz says. But he'll be happy to get back his old life.
"We've got a smaller house, but all of our family and friends are there, so that makes up for it," Cruz says. "As soon as we get settled, we can do foster care again."
He has good memories of his two years in the dream home, and a souvenir on its way.
"I have a little dinky, black-and-white TV with no cable," Cruz says of his home in Batavia. "We're bringing back one flat screen from the dream home to Illinois."