Day 57: Will we have a new home tomorrow?

Or rather, will we have a new home tonight at 9:00 pm? Oooo, so exciting! Or not. Yeah, really not at all. It's 4:30 here and we still don't know with 100% certainty that we will be home owners today. My deepest, darkest, cruelest wish is that we wouldn't get thrown in jail for hiring someone to whack the seller's knee caps off his body. I have a string of expletives I'd like to unleash right now, but this is a family blog, so I'll refrain.

To catch you up to speed, on Friday I get confirmation from our realtor that the escrow company will pay for movers. I get on the phone, the first place I call gives me a quote and is available on Tuesday, so I book them on the spot. We decide to use the gloomy afternoon to go to the movies. While at the movie theater watching "Up" with the whole family, I take Eloise out in to the lobby and got some phone calls made. Eloise didn't want to sit still in the theater, so I used the time wisely. Long story short, the escrow company wouldn't guarantee that they would pay for the moving expenses we would incur above and beyond the amount of money they were already going to refund us, which was our total escrow fees. I call our realtor, I call our mortgage broker, I get annoyed and vague answers of support (meaning, our mortgage broker was there to fight for us, but still no one could say with 100% certainty that we would recoup all of that money). When I got home that afternoon I found a MUCH cheaper company and hire them, instead, satisfied that if all we ever get out of the escrow company is a reimbursement of the expenses we paid them, it would at least cover the movers.

Saturday and Sunday we tried to pack and relax, didn't make a single call to the realtor or mortgage broker.

This morning I get up and call both right away, though. Our mortgage broker said the documents were where they needed to be, with the lender, and that they were looking all of them over. I finally get our realtor on the phone at 11:00 and this is what he tells me: the seller called escrow THIS MORNING to tell them to not let the deal close because he STILL wants to try and re-negotiate our realtors commission. BUT he must have changed his mind (or maybe the threat of the lawsuit he would absolutely lose changed his mind?) and he had just called escrow back 1/2 hour prior to say go ahead with it. Apparently there was a lot of yelling, swearing and lawsuit threatening (on the part of our realtor), pulling in brokers, just about all of the drama you could ever imagine. He said he was going to call me back with more info, but that was over five hours ago now.

Here is what I've learned:

Never ever EVER put yourself in a position where you HAVE to follow through with a deal you don't want to follow through with. I feel like I made two very, very, very poor decisions in this deal. One was that we gave notice on our apartment before we closed on the new house. Yes, it would have cost us at least another $1,000 to keep our apartment for another month, but we would have still have had a home if we backed out of our house deal. The other one was that I told Eloise's school that we decided not to enroll her for next year, and then I enrolled both of the girls in a great new school in the south end of West Seattle. Both of these things made me feel like we HAD to move. If we had still had the girl's school on the north end and hadn't given notice, I promise you that I would have walked away from this house. 100% for sure. Yes, it's a good house in a good neighborhood at a good price, but this seller has made our lives a living hell and we were simply stuck going along for the ride based on our poor choices. Our realtor teaches classes to first time home buyers (which is how I met him) and he told me we would forever be used as an example in his classes of the kinds sellers that are potentially out there. He said that maybe one 1 of 500 sales gets so messed up like this, so it's hard to warn (and scare) first time home buyers. I guess when you're that 1, you feel like you would have given anything to know that until the very absolute last day, the deal could still fall apart and you wouldn't have put all of your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

We could have just stayed in our apartment. The girls could start in the great schools we had them enrolled in, life would have gone on hunky dory.

So anyways, I'm hoping I come back in a little while and give my dear blog the good news that we are officially home owners, but until then, I certainly won't be holding my breath.