What a nightmarish episode in my life. I arrived in Orlando on May 20 with no idea where I was going to be staying or whether I would find a suitable home for the dogs. I knew I'd find something, since I had several leads in hand, but I hadn't seen any of them yet, and I wasn't sure what I was in for.
First house: Great area, but quite literally on the railroad tracks. Not near. On. No wonder they were willing to let us rent.
Second house: Cute but so very small I wasn't sure how we would all manage to fit in it. Wasn't going to rule it out completely, but it wasn't terribly realistic . . . and for the life of me I could not figure out why the owner would even be willing to consider three dogs in that small space.
Third house: Totally gorgeous and so far outside of the city that I was looking at about an hour commute. No fenced yard, but the landlord was willing to let us pay to fence it ourselves. Of all the houses I'd seen, this one was most realistic . . . but so very far away from . . . anything. Would probably be great if I weren't moving to Orlando to edit a paper that's all about the city. Tough to live an hour from downtown when that's what your work is all about. But still, I figured, if I had to, I'd take it.
Fourth house: The less said about this one the better. Frightening. Truly.
I finished looking and then found a hotel room at a La Quinta Inn somewhere just outside Orlando and cried.
The next morning I drove around and looked for "for rent" signs and called people. I got on Craigslist and called more people. No luck. I had a couple more appointments set up with a realtor over the weekend, and I was starting to think my only option was going to be to stay in Orlando alone for a few months til I got to know the city, then we could buy something when I felt like I had some working knowledge of where we'd like to be . . . but then suddenly "the" house turned up.
A realtor who took great pity on me (she was a saint, by the way, and if anyone in Orlando is looking for a realtor, let me know and I'll send you here info--she really was great), lined up a couple of "maybe" houses for me. We looked at a couple that were nice, but nothing special. Then we got to the last one on our list and . . . wow. It was perfect. Recently renovated. GREAT neighborhood. Spacious--three bedrooms, two baths. A fully fenced yard. Near a couple of parks and a lake and a little downtown area. Ten minutes from my office. The owners had two big dogs--a shar pei mix and a pit bull/hound mix. And they were willing to consider our boys if our references and their insurance checked out.
Which brings me to where I am at right now--laying on my air mattress in my new house, which I moved into last week. No dogs and no Rob yet, but we have a house! I'm still feeling kind of shell shocked about the whole experience of wondering if we'd ever find anything suitable for us at all . . . and by the shockingly anti-pit bull sentiment I'm encountering almost every day here. Even the people who like pit bulls seem hesitant to admit it.
But more on that later--it's too exhausting for me to think about right now. What's most important is that we have a home where the dogs are welcome--all of them, and no, I didn't lie about the breed and was not willing to do so to sneak into a home unnoticed--and hopefully by this time next year, we'll have sold our house in Baltimore and we'll be on our way to buying something down here in the Sunshine State.
Here's our new house.
And here's a photo of the gorgeous lake at the end of our street.
