my souvenir was a house

Orlando was a shocking amount of fun and I can't recommend taking an 18 month old to a theme park enough. It seriously blew his mind. While there we let Truman pick out a couple of souvenirs and he selected a stuffed Hedwig and Fawkes that he loves so much it's ridiculous. My souvenir was a bit bigger and wouldn't fit in my carry on; it was a house.

Let's take a couple of steps back.

If you follow along with my twitter feed you know that our apartment complex has been plagued with many 2am fire evacuations starting on Halloween night. Some were pranks, some were drunks burning food on their stoves, and two were actual fires. As if the late night fire evacuations weren't enough, we were experiencing them during the day as well thanks to on going construction. This was, to say the least, not a good situation for anyone in our family and finally I was given a note from my OB saying my pregnancy is too high risk to continue to live here. As soon as the note was turned into our leasing office I started the hunt for a new place to live.

Our original plan was to rent again but this time a house. We were willing to spend a good amount so I assumed we would have no trouble locating something in one of our top areas. Turns out I was wrong and everything I was finding was over $4500 per month. In a huge pregnancy induced crying jag I sobbed to jparks that we could get a mortgage for less than that a month. I was already working with an agent to locate a rental so with access to the MLS database, jparks decided to look up houses for sale to see if I was right. Turns out I was.

We left for Universal on Sunday and the Friday before that we met our agent at pretty much the only house that interested us. It was in one of my top locations and was brand new construction which was jparks' main requirement. It didn't take long for us to know that we wanted to make an offer but we hadn't been pre-approved for any amount and we were heading out of town before we could get pre-approved.

At this point I was extremely excited to be staying at a hotel with a business center because from there we were able to print all the paperwork needed to make an offer, accept the counter offer, and then submit all the contract paperwork. So there you have it, in less than seven days we had gone from apartment dwelling renters to people with a house pending. It seems like we've made the decision to become permanent Texans for awhile.


I also got a souvenir Butterbeer tankard because there was no way I was leaving The Wizarding World of Harry Potter empty handed.