Home Sweet - I Use to Own That

When I was in Florida earlier this month, I took a morning to drive into Orlando and revisited places from my past.  The city has changed a lot since I moved there in the summer of 1980 - we left there in the summer of 1995.  The population has more than doubled since we left 20 years ago.  Old familiar places, were sometimes no longer recognizable.  

I moved to Orlando to escape the town on the east coast, that my parents still live in.  The move was made possible by a job selling new homes for a small developer / builder.  Laurel Homes - long since gone they sold the building operation in 1987 - I moved onto another much larger builder that summer. 

While I worked for Laurel I built three homes, two I lived in, one was a rental.  The miniature Taco Bell above was my first house.  I built it in the late summer early fall of 1982.  Two bedrooms, one bath, one car garage.  As I recall I paid just over $40,000 for it, and picked up a bargain first time buyer interest rate of only 13.5%.  I sold it less than two years later and made about $10,000.  While I was there I built the rental, not included in these pictures, it became my ex's as part of a property settlement that bought the two of us freedom to enjoy the rest our lives.

The second house above was the last home I built for myself in Florida.  We built it in 71 days from building permits to move-in, in early March 1984.  It was a bit larger, 3 bedrooms, baths, 2 car garage.  It is on about 1/3rd of an acre.  As I recall it cost me just over $70,000 and interest rates were down to a bargain 11.5%.  It was in my half of the property split, I sold it in 1995 when J and I moved to Kentucky, as I recall made about $15,000 - over 11 years of a dead market. The first house had been as plain and simple as I could make it, the second one was much nicer.  I upgraded trim, windows, door handles, I reconfigured the kitchen and added cabinets (a job the cabinet shop messed up, shorting me 2 feet of cabinets and counter space - but I was in such a hurry to move in let it slide rather than wait two weeks for a remake.)  The brick on the planters was also the wrong color, it was suppose to be grey, and it was brown. The house hadn't been painted yet, so I changed the paint color to work with the brick rather than delay the house waiting for the brick to be changed.  In the long run I was glad I did that, the grey paint faded terribly.  I planted the tree out front, it was about an inch across and about 5 feet tall when I planted it.  

So there are my first two - no longer mine.  What homes have you owned in the past?