Monday, May 18, 2009

Day 23: Notice of Disapproval

Okay, I've calmed down a bit. Talked to all of the people who have good insight in to the situation about the work that needs to be done on the house and got to chat with our realtor today, too.

It sounds like the bottom line on the house is that for being close to 100 years old, it's in pretty decent shape. It could have been a whole lot worse and the good news is that none of the major stuff is wrong.

BUT there still is a laundry list of stuff that needs to be done! (by the way, where did the term laundry list come from?). We are submitting our notice of disapproval and have given them a good chunk of the work to do. There were a few things we kept out ourselves that were either fairly small, not that important, or stuff that is important enough for us to be done correctly that we don't want the seller to half-ass it together just to call it good.

However, after all of this, even if the seller fixes every single thing on our list, we'll have an entire basement that can't be slept in until we do some work on it. We will have to put egress windows in both of the rooms for starters, but the bigger issue is wanting to re-model the basement. If we do it before we move our stuff down there we have the benefit of having an empty space to deal with. Of course, we need money for that, which we don't have. Now we are questioning the sensibility of getting a loan to start these home improvements right away. On one hand, I am like "what the hell, ANOTHER loan?!?!" but then on the other hand I am like "it IS to make the bedrooms livable. It's not like we're going to spend the money to put in a marble tile throughout the house or something". So, Matt and I will have to hash that out.

But before any of that, there's the matter of waiting to hear what the seller says about doing this work. Some of it will simply have to be done in order for the seller to sell us the house (ie for us to get our FHA loan). For instance, they have to put gutters on it. If they don't, we won't get the loan and we are forced to walk away from the deal. It will be interesting to see how motivated the seller is because this is an investment property for him. Would he really basically back out at this point by not doing the work just to go through this all with another buyer? I'm not sure. I would like to think not!

We did want to get a sewer inspection scheduled but alas, we can't get it done before we have to give our notice of disapproval on the property to the sellers. We still can do the sewer inspection, but can't include it in the things we want them to fix or that we can walk away from the contract over. Of course our wiley realtor might find another way out of the deal, but for me, the bottom line is, do we do the inspection and live with the results, whatever they are, or do we save the money and not do the inspection and live with it not knowing what the problems are?

1 comment:

  1. Hi Sybil-
    To contribute my new knowledge of seattle sewers.. I would say, just ask around about the sewers in the particular area of W Seattle. Our block has been falling like dominos for the past year and half.. One house every couple of months. It makes sense because, all the houses were built around the same time, so all the sewers were put in at the same time, so they would all "wear out" fail at the same time. The sewer guy I talked to said our area and Capitol Hill have the worst sewers in the city. No mention of West Seattle! So that is good... so I would say, if it doesn't seem to be a problem in the area, not to worry about it.

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