Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s House (former)

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a third-generation stock car racer who won the Daytona 500 in 2004 and 2014. Fans voted him NASCAR’s most popular driver 15 years running before he left full-time Cup racing after 2017.

The brokers who sold the house dated it to 1863, the middle of the Civil War. Monroe County’s 2018 tax roll gives 1923 as its build year, a 60-year gap that neither source explains.

The Miami Herald dates Dale’s purchase to 2009. Orlando Weekly says 2008, which squares with WLRN’s report in May 2017 that he and his wife, Amy, had owned the house for almost 9 years.

A gate in the second-floor balcony rail opened over a backyard pool about 14 feet deep. Broker Bob Cardenas said that jump sold Dale on the house: “When he saw that he said ‘I’ll buy it.’”

Dale redid the kitchen as a pirate ship’s galley, with rope-covered columns and a ship’s wheel at the end of the bar. The brokers also pointed buyers to a hatch door for watching people in the parlor.

The house Dale and Amy rebuilt for DIY Network in 2018 was not this one. WLRN reported it was the circa-1885 house next door, which the city’s Historic Architectural Review Commission cleared unanimously in May 2017.

Dale put the house on the market in early 2020, and news of a deal broke in February 2021. The buyers were first-time homeowners who told the broker they would not change a thing.