Day 21: Terror.

We did the inspection today. It was truly eye-opening.

Let me tell you, all I heard was "blah blah is not up to code, blah blah needs to be fixed, this blah blah blah siding is a total hack-job" and on and on, ad nauseum. My brain was so full of information about what was wrong with the house that I could hardly hear when we were told that the electrical was in excellent shape, that the plumbing looked great and that the roof was pretty much solid. So all of things are huge. HUGE! Those are all of the things that you absolutely don't want to have wrong. I wasn't prepared for, however, all of the little nit-picky things that were.

My biggest concern is the basement "bedrooms". Clearly having bedrooms in the basement is not super-ideal, but you know, we don't mind that much since all we do is sleep in them. We had some big ideas on re-configuring some walls down there to have it all work exactly like we wanted. Little did we know that when we looked more closely at the bedrooms they weren't code-compliant. Neither had a source of egress (a way--besides the bedroom door-- to get out of the room should there be a fire). Um, yeah. So technically we only have a one bedroom house.

There were plenty of other things too. Well, a big thing is the half-assed job that they did on the siding. They pretty much stopped putting the wood shingles on about 7/8 of the way down and then chose a random mix of ways to deal with the exposed house on the bottom. Affixing plastic to it, hammering up some plywood, leaving it bare, all delightful options! We were told that the sellers were already planning on fixing it, though.

I got a little terrified with being faced with the realization that there is so much work involved in home buying--especially in our price range, I would think. Alot of work and, lets face the facts, not much money. I would be more than happy to do all the work in the world on this house (or any house!) but money is just going to be so tight for us.

Of course, we haven't sent our notice of disapproval to the sellers. We'll see how much they are willing to fix, though clearly it won't be every little thing that we found that needed to be. Of even more concern is, will we even be able to get an FHA loan for this house? Lots of what-ifs. Here I was under the very-mistaken impression that all of the questions would be answered with the inspection, but it only opened a whole host of new ones.

Anyways, the last word from our agent and inspector today was that it is a good house. When asked what he would measure it on a scaled of 1 to 10 the inspector said "7".

I also should add that while I came out of the inspection shell-shocked, Matt came out of it very excited. He thought the news on the house was very positive, considering all of the big stuff was golden.

Oops, one more add as a mention for Abby is that we talked to our agent and the inspector about getting a scope of the sewer lines and will likely be getting that done. Our agent said that isn't something he ever really sees buyers want to do but that if this process of getting one goes well he will likely start recommending them to other buyers! So yay Abby for the recommendation!