I have calmed down quite a bit from last Friday and am feeling much more positive about our house.
Last night and today we had contractors come over and look at our basement. The guys were both very, very nice and communicative, but each had different ideas on what we needed to do. No estimates, yet, so we look forward to getting those. Two more guys are coming tomorrow and one is scheduled for Friday, as well, though we may choose to hire someone before that appointment. I will feel pretty good having had four different people come to give us their ideas. If we are very, very lucky we can have the work started while we are away on vacation! Woo Hoo!
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
A New Start!
Well, we're here! All of our stuff is in our new place. I can't use the word "settled" because we are FAR from being settled.
Here's where we're at: I went to be practically having a panic attack last night. I wondered, is it too late to pull out? Oh wait, yeah, it is. The deal is done. We had done nothing but wait for this deal to go through and now I'm freaking out.
There is one giant problem with our new house. The two bedrooms are in the basement. We bought the house with a "finished" basement, but we knew it was a pretty half-assed job. What we didn't realize until we got in here was the extent of the damage from the cat pee. I ripped out the carpetting in one of the bedrooms last night and the pee is in the concrete and the wall. The floors looked like they were molding from holding in all of that moisture. I swear that the smell is worse now than it was before I even ripped the carpetting out.
So anyways, yeah, didn't sign up for this. Eloise and I are sleeping on the fold out couch and Matt and Iris are sleeping on two twin mattresses on the floor of the playroom. Thankfully, we're sleeping decently, but the playroom is practically unusable right now and the upper level of our house is filled with shit we have no where to put because we can't put it in the basement.
Added to that, the girls and I leave for vacation on Tuesday, so there will be three weeks of time we can't work on the house! I am straight up in panic mode.
We have some contractors coming to look at it on Sunday, so that will be good as far as just knowing the price of getting this all re-done. Maybe, if we're supremely lucky, they can start the work on the basement while we are on vacation?
Here's where we're at: I went to be practically having a panic attack last night. I wondered, is it too late to pull out? Oh wait, yeah, it is. The deal is done. We had done nothing but wait for this deal to go through and now I'm freaking out.
There is one giant problem with our new house. The two bedrooms are in the basement. We bought the house with a "finished" basement, but we knew it was a pretty half-assed job. What we didn't realize until we got in here was the extent of the damage from the cat pee. I ripped out the carpetting in one of the bedrooms last night and the pee is in the concrete and the wall. The floors looked like they were molding from holding in all of that moisture. I swear that the smell is worse now than it was before I even ripped the carpetting out.
So anyways, yeah, didn't sign up for this. Eloise and I are sleeping on the fold out couch and Matt and Iris are sleeping on two twin mattresses on the floor of the playroom. Thankfully, we're sleeping decently, but the playroom is practically unusable right now and the upper level of our house is filled with shit we have no where to put because we can't put it in the basement.
Added to that, the girls and I leave for vacation on Tuesday, so there will be three weeks of time we can't work on the house! I am straight up in panic mode.
We have some contractors coming to look at it on Sunday, so that will be good as far as just knowing the price of getting this all re-done. Maybe, if we're supremely lucky, they can start the work on the basement while we are on vacation?
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Day 58: We're Movin' In!
We finally got the call last night just after 5:00 that we are officially homeowners. Not surprisingly, the time previous to our realtor's call was shrouded in drama and lawyers. I was told at about 11:00 yesterday that the seller had called and told escrow to stop the deal, but then he had called back and said go ahead. Between that time and the time we were told we finally, finally!, got the house, lawyers were involved, brokers were in involved, it sounded pretty messy. ALL of it was because the a-hole we're buying this house from is a money-grubbing low-life. Rumor has it that he ended up taking a chunk of HIS realtor's commission (instead of ours). Certainly there is a special kind of karma that comes back around for guys like that.
So we're moving today! Got to bed close to 1:00 and was up at 5:30-- not by choice, mind you. My alarm was already set for the ungodly hour of 7:15. My brain just started racing, I'm still coughing and my nose was plugged, so I figured why lay there and torture myself? I got up and took the dog out to pee on the grass out front in my pajamas for the LAST time. Lots of lasts happening in this home over the past 24 hours! I made the girls take a bath last night, since we don't (currently) have a tub at our new house. Hopefully a backyard kiddie pool will suffice for them through the summer while we figure out how to do the basement remodel and get them a beloved bathtub.
I'm also wondering if I want to keep doing this blog-- turn it in to the trials and tribulations of first-time homeowners. We'll see.
So we're moving today! Got to bed close to 1:00 and was up at 5:30-- not by choice, mind you. My alarm was already set for the ungodly hour of 7:15. My brain just started racing, I'm still coughing and my nose was plugged, so I figured why lay there and torture myself? I got up and took the dog out to pee on the grass out front in my pajamas for the LAST time. Lots of lasts happening in this home over the past 24 hours! I made the girls take a bath last night, since we don't (currently) have a tub at our new house. Hopefully a backyard kiddie pool will suffice for them through the summer while we figure out how to do the basement remodel and get them a beloved bathtub.
I'm also wondering if I want to keep doing this blog-- turn it in to the trials and tribulations of first-time homeowners. We'll see.
Monday, June 22, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Day 54: I couldn't even make this shit up if I tried
I am so ready to run screaming for the hills. Seriously people, this is an effing soap opera script, except, it's my life.
Where did I leave off? Oh yes. So the sellers, who were under contract, were threatening to terminate the contract if we didn't close by Thursday the 18th (hello, that's today). Well, it turned out that he was just trying to ruffle our feathers and wanted to make sure everything was going to go through on time. We got it worked out and did indeed light fires under everyone on our team to make the closing on the 18th. We got through last weekend packing and planning on this. Things were looking okay. We decided to do the final walk-through on Tuesday the 16th and had that all set with everyone.
So, Monday the 15th rolls around and we get a call from our realtor saying that we can't do the walk-through on the 16th because the sellers haven't finished the work. Hmmm. We re-schedule it for Wednesday the 17th. No biggie.
Here's where it gets interesting (as if it wasn't already). We had been planning all along to close on the 18th. We had scheduled Matt to get off of work and had double-checked that I didn't need to be at the closing that day. The 18th, which is today, is Iris's 5th birthday and also her last day at school, which I was going to be helping out at. I told our agent I could not be at the closing that day and he double-checked for me and said I didn't need to be. So Wednesday morning rolls around. I wake up to an email from our mortgage broker saying that we need to meet that day to sign the papers, blah blah blah. Just as I was processing this, the phone starts ringing and soon I come to find out that that very day both Matt and I needed to be at the escrow office to sign these papers. Um, well, it was a little tricky because we were NEVER told that we needed to do a damn thing on Wednesday. Matt had brought our only car to work so that he could bring it to the shop to have the brakes looked at. I was planning on bringing Iris to school on the bus. So somehow we needed to get cashiers checks for our downpayment and get to escrow under these circumstances. My dear friend jumped in and helped out on my end and Matt got the car back on his end and came home and got the girls and I just to drive back over to the east side to sign papers. Apparently I did need to be there after all. Oh joy!
We get the papers signed, get the cashier's checks to escrow, shake hands all around and pat everyone on the back for kicking ass and getting this deal closed on time. All that needed to be done now was the escrow company was overnighting the papers to our lender in CA and when they got there they would give us the recording numbers and we would officially be homeowners.
Later on Wednesday night we get to the walk-through. By this point in the day Matt and I are so bone tired we're just running on fumes. But we get to the walk-through and meet our agent, the seller's agent and our inspector there. Did I already mention that the seller's agent had called ours and told him that all of the work still hadn't been done even though we moved the walk-through back a day? So the seller's agent gets his seller on the phone, and Matt talked to him on speaker phone, got his word that the work would be done (with many witnesses there to hear it) and we sigh, get on our way for the night, knowing that we would wake up on Thursday mere hours away from this process being over. Oh my, how wrong we were.
This morning, Thursday the 18th, it's our daughter's 5th birthday. We wake up happy, excited about the big day! It was the girls' last day of school, as well. I had volunteered to be there to help and was thoroughly enjoying myself-- until my cell rings and it's our realtor. I answer it and he asks me if I'm sitting down. The escrow company had sent our documents to the wrong lender's office . There was nothing that could be done to make the deal close today. It would have to close on Monday (because Friday is some bizarre state holiday). I couldn't really talk, I let Matt know to call our realtor and I tried to get back to the task of school fun.
Later, I talk to our realtor and get some information about the escrow company saying they will pay for any costs we've incurred because of this screw-up. I debate all of this with our realtor for a few minutes before I tell him I will talk to Matt and get back to him. Matt calls him and tells me that they worked it all out, we will still be able to move on Saturday, but that we will be renters until closing, with the escrow company paying our rent. Okay, that's fine. Not the absolute best, but still fine.
Later tonight we all sit down to our daughter's birthday dinner. My cell rings, it's our realtor. He asks me to put him on speaker phone, which I do. We get the news that the seller went to the escrow company to sign the documents and realized that he didn't want to pay our realtor as much commission from the sale as he was entitled to get and so he called him and left a message saying as much. Apparently the seller's agent then called and left our realtor a message saying that if our realtor didn't take a cut in his commission, that the seller wouldn't allow us to move in on Saturday (a little tit for tat, no?). Having this info on his voicemail, our realtor gets his broker and the seller's broker involved. Lots of words ensue, but the bottom line is, the seller won't let us move in early-- and he's being such an asshole, we don't even want to anyways. We don't want to be in the house until it's rightfully ours.
So now what? We were planning on moving on Saturday the 20th, we had a crew of fantastic friends all set to help, and now there is no house to move in to. Well, we decided that what we wanted from the escrow company was to have them pay for movers to move our stuff on Tuesday the 23rd. Now we just have to find someone to do it for us.
This has all been an insane nightmare. Tonight I really wanted to walk away from this deal but Matt talked me off of the ledge. We're dealing with a money-hungry seller who owns these properties as investments. Money is his absolute bottom line, no matter who he is stepping on in his quest to get it. It's still a good house for us, despite this awful insane seller. I am so glad that I have him here to help temper my emotions, because if I was buying this house without him, I would have walked a long time ago.
I am sure this is no where near the end of this drama. It can't be, we've gotten this far in to this level of insanity, let's go a little further!
Matt and I have both been asked if we're excited to move, excited to be homeowners. We both respond the same way-- with a shrug and an "eh". I mean, we are, but won't be jumping up and down until the deal is done. Right now, I'm not sure that will ever happen.
Where did I leave off? Oh yes. So the sellers, who were under contract, were threatening to terminate the contract if we didn't close by Thursday the 18th (hello, that's today). Well, it turned out that he was just trying to ruffle our feathers and wanted to make sure everything was going to go through on time. We got it worked out and did indeed light fires under everyone on our team to make the closing on the 18th. We got through last weekend packing and planning on this. Things were looking okay. We decided to do the final walk-through on Tuesday the 16th and had that all set with everyone.
So, Monday the 15th rolls around and we get a call from our realtor saying that we can't do the walk-through on the 16th because the sellers haven't finished the work. Hmmm. We re-schedule it for Wednesday the 17th. No biggie.
Here's where it gets interesting (as if it wasn't already). We had been planning all along to close on the 18th. We had scheduled Matt to get off of work and had double-checked that I didn't need to be at the closing that day. The 18th, which is today, is Iris's 5th birthday and also her last day at school, which I was going to be helping out at. I told our agent I could not be at the closing that day and he double-checked for me and said I didn't need to be. So Wednesday morning rolls around. I wake up to an email from our mortgage broker saying that we need to meet that day to sign the papers, blah blah blah. Just as I was processing this, the phone starts ringing and soon I come to find out that that very day both Matt and I needed to be at the escrow office to sign these papers. Um, well, it was a little tricky because we were NEVER told that we needed to do a damn thing on Wednesday. Matt had brought our only car to work so that he could bring it to the shop to have the brakes looked at. I was planning on bringing Iris to school on the bus. So somehow we needed to get cashiers checks for our downpayment and get to escrow under these circumstances. My dear friend jumped in and helped out on my end and Matt got the car back on his end and came home and got the girls and I just to drive back over to the east side to sign papers. Apparently I did need to be there after all. Oh joy!
We get the papers signed, get the cashier's checks to escrow, shake hands all around and pat everyone on the back for kicking ass and getting this deal closed on time. All that needed to be done now was the escrow company was overnighting the papers to our lender in CA and when they got there they would give us the recording numbers and we would officially be homeowners.
Later on Wednesday night we get to the walk-through. By this point in the day Matt and I are so bone tired we're just running on fumes. But we get to the walk-through and meet our agent, the seller's agent and our inspector there. Did I already mention that the seller's agent had called ours and told him that all of the work still hadn't been done even though we moved the walk-through back a day? So the seller's agent gets his seller on the phone, and Matt talked to him on speaker phone, got his word that the work would be done (with many witnesses there to hear it) and we sigh, get on our way for the night, knowing that we would wake up on Thursday mere hours away from this process being over. Oh my, how wrong we were.
This morning, Thursday the 18th, it's our daughter's 5th birthday. We wake up happy, excited about the big day! It was the girls' last day of school, as well. I had volunteered to be there to help and was thoroughly enjoying myself-- until my cell rings and it's our realtor. I answer it and he asks me if I'm sitting down. The escrow company had sent our documents to the wrong lender's office . There was nothing that could be done to make the deal close today. It would have to close on Monday (because Friday is some bizarre state holiday). I couldn't really talk, I let Matt know to call our realtor and I tried to get back to the task of school fun.
Later, I talk to our realtor and get some information about the escrow company saying they will pay for any costs we've incurred because of this screw-up. I debate all of this with our realtor for a few minutes before I tell him I will talk to Matt and get back to him. Matt calls him and tells me that they worked it all out, we will still be able to move on Saturday, but that we will be renters until closing, with the escrow company paying our rent. Okay, that's fine. Not the absolute best, but still fine.
Later tonight we all sit down to our daughter's birthday dinner. My cell rings, it's our realtor. He asks me to put him on speaker phone, which I do. We get the news that the seller went to the escrow company to sign the documents and realized that he didn't want to pay our realtor as much commission from the sale as he was entitled to get and so he called him and left a message saying as much. Apparently the seller's agent then called and left our realtor a message saying that if our realtor didn't take a cut in his commission, that the seller wouldn't allow us to move in on Saturday (a little tit for tat, no?). Having this info on his voicemail, our realtor gets his broker and the seller's broker involved. Lots of words ensue, but the bottom line is, the seller won't let us move in early-- and he's being such an asshole, we don't even want to anyways. We don't want to be in the house until it's rightfully ours.
So now what? We were planning on moving on Saturday the 20th, we had a crew of fantastic friends all set to help, and now there is no house to move in to. Well, we decided that what we wanted from the escrow company was to have them pay for movers to move our stuff on Tuesday the 23rd. Now we just have to find someone to do it for us.
This has all been an insane nightmare. Tonight I really wanted to walk away from this deal but Matt talked me off of the ledge. We're dealing with a money-hungry seller who owns these properties as investments. Money is his absolute bottom line, no matter who he is stepping on in his quest to get it. It's still a good house for us, despite this awful insane seller. I am so glad that I have him here to help temper my emotions, because if I was buying this house without him, I would have walked a long time ago.
I am sure this is no where near the end of this drama. It can't be, we've gotten this far in to this level of insanity, let's go a little further!
Matt and I have both been asked if we're excited to move, excited to be homeowners. We both respond the same way-- with a shrug and an "eh". I mean, we are, but won't be jumping up and down until the deal is done. Right now, I'm not sure that will ever happen.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Day 47 part 2: Shit.
I got an extremely disconcerting call from our agent tonight. He called to tell me that the seller's agent told him that our closing date, June 19th, is a state holiday and therefor we can't close on that date because the title and escrow office aren't open. We were totally baffled, what the hell holiday is June 19th? Turns out it's Juneteenth, aka Emancipation Day, the day the commemorates the abolition of slavery. 31 states celebrate this holiday, including Washington. Okay. So what are the sellers trying to do? The said that if we don't close a day early, on the 18th, that the contract we have will be terminated and the house will go back on the market.
So there's a few problems here. The first being that everything about closing now lies in the hands of our mortgage broker. He's a freaking rock star and has worked his butt off for over a year for us so that we could buy this house. He was working very hard to close on the 19th, and it turns out he does believe he can get us closed on the 18th without problem.
Here's the rub, though. According to the contract that we signed-- which, ironically, the sellers changed to make our original closing date offer of June 16th to instead be the 19th--if the closing date falls on a holiday, then we legally have until the next business day to close. Whew, right? It's good for us, but clearly the seller's agent is trying to be very, very shady and break the contract to pull his shit. Our agent is amazing, though, and nothing gets past him. He is pulling his broker and the seller's agent's broker in to it, to put the smack down on the seller's agent. Truth be told, the seller's agent has been a little shady since day one. So by law, we do have until that following Monday, but we are hoping beyond hope that our mortgage broker can make this happen on the 18th because we are lined up to move on the 20th!
The main thing we're worried about at this point is, if these sellers are trying to get out of the contract, what else will they pull at this point? We were scheduled to close on the 19th, which is a week from tomorrow. If we close a day earlier, that's a week from today. That is like NO time. No time for these people to be pulling all of this shit on us. It's ridiculous.
Sure, we can sue them if they break the contract, but still, what happens in the meantime? I don't want to sue anybody, I just want our house on the day we agreed to buy it.
Needless to say, Matt and I have stress levels a gajillion times higher than they already were. We are pissed and scared and stressed. We want this to be over and for us to have this house without incident.
The other rub is that they want to close on Iris's birthday, which is also the big celebration day/last day of preschool. UGH. We did NOT want to close on that day, but it's probably all we can do at this point.
So there's a few problems here. The first being that everything about closing now lies in the hands of our mortgage broker. He's a freaking rock star and has worked his butt off for over a year for us so that we could buy this house. He was working very hard to close on the 19th, and it turns out he does believe he can get us closed on the 18th without problem.
Here's the rub, though. According to the contract that we signed-- which, ironically, the sellers changed to make our original closing date offer of June 16th to instead be the 19th--if the closing date falls on a holiday, then we legally have until the next business day to close. Whew, right? It's good for us, but clearly the seller's agent is trying to be very, very shady and break the contract to pull his shit. Our agent is amazing, though, and nothing gets past him. He is pulling his broker and the seller's agent's broker in to it, to put the smack down on the seller's agent. Truth be told, the seller's agent has been a little shady since day one. So by law, we do have until that following Monday, but we are hoping beyond hope that our mortgage broker can make this happen on the 18th because we are lined up to move on the 20th!
The main thing we're worried about at this point is, if these sellers are trying to get out of the contract, what else will they pull at this point? We were scheduled to close on the 19th, which is a week from tomorrow. If we close a day earlier, that's a week from today. That is like NO time. No time for these people to be pulling all of this shit on us. It's ridiculous.
Sure, we can sue them if they break the contract, but still, what happens in the meantime? I don't want to sue anybody, I just want our house on the day we agreed to buy it.
Needless to say, Matt and I have stress levels a gajillion times higher than they already were. We are pissed and scared and stressed. We want this to be over and for us to have this house without incident.
The other rub is that they want to close on Iris's birthday, which is also the big celebration day/last day of preschool. UGH. We did NOT want to close on that day, but it's probably all we can do at this point.
Day 47: Yay for Mortgages!
We finally got word yesterday that our loan is totally approved. So, YAY! Also I a providing the lender about eighty billion more pieces of information, like bank statements from my deceased grandmother's second uncle. Or at least, that's what it feels like. I can't even believe the amount of paperwork involved in this process! At least it's for a good cause. It will all be done soon!
Our realtor called today to let us know we can schedule our final walk-through on the house, which will probably happen next week Thursday. Our inspector will come with us to make sure that the work was done that they said was going to be done. It's going to be so neat to see the house for the first time with all of the renter's stuff out of it and ready for us to move in!
Other than that, not much else is happening on the home front. Packing all of our junk has taken up alot of our time. I'm not looking forward to cleaning our apartment out after we move-- I'd rather spend the time focusing on our new home!-- but it has to be done. I'll just have to buckle down and do it in a day and get it over with.
Our realtor called today to let us know we can schedule our final walk-through on the house, which will probably happen next week Thursday. Our inspector will come with us to make sure that the work was done that they said was going to be done. It's going to be so neat to see the house for the first time with all of the renter's stuff out of it and ready for us to move in!
Other than that, not much else is happening on the home front. Packing all of our junk has taken up alot of our time. I'm not looking forward to cleaning our apartment out after we move-- I'd rather spend the time focusing on our new home!-- but it has to be done. I'll just have to buckle down and do it in a day and get it over with.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Day 37: paperwork and packing
Having never bought a house before, I have nothing to compare it to, but OH MY GOD is there alot of stupid paperwork to do for our loan!
For instance, for our down payment. The money essentially came from three different bank accounts. From our joint checking, joint savings and my personal savings. For whatever reason, our mortgage broker is having me gift the down payment to MY HUSBAND. I have to fill out an insane amount of paperwork to do this. I have had to print off, scan and email many, many pages of bank statements. To (mostly) GIFT MONEY FROM OUR JOINT ACCOUNT TO MY OWN HUSBAND. It's insane. But we're jumping through these stupid hoops because that's what we have to do in order to buy this house. But please, FHA people, this is STUPID and is wasting your time, our broker's time and MY time!
We've also started packing. It's going to take more days than we have left in order to complete this chore! Not only do we have to do a ton of packing, but we have to do a million little things to get this apartment back together so that we might possibly get something back from our security deposit. It's already annoying, but it's just part of the process. There is a light at the end of the tunnel!
Today I was going to visit a friend who lives near where our new house is, so I decided to swing by and see how everything was looking at our place. I was excited to a couple of guys out there hard at work fixing what I can only guess was the siding.
For instance, for our down payment. The money essentially came from three different bank accounts. From our joint checking, joint savings and my personal savings. For whatever reason, our mortgage broker is having me gift the down payment to MY HUSBAND. I have to fill out an insane amount of paperwork to do this. I have had to print off, scan and email many, many pages of bank statements. To (mostly) GIFT MONEY FROM OUR JOINT ACCOUNT TO MY OWN HUSBAND. It's insane. But we're jumping through these stupid hoops because that's what we have to do in order to buy this house. But please, FHA people, this is STUPID and is wasting your time, our broker's time and MY time!
We've also started packing. It's going to take more days than we have left in order to complete this chore! Not only do we have to do a ton of packing, but we have to do a million little things to get this apartment back together so that we might possibly get something back from our security deposit. It's already annoying, but it's just part of the process. There is a light at the end of the tunnel!
Today I was going to visit a friend who lives near where our new house is, so I decided to swing by and see how everything was looking at our place. I was excited to a couple of guys out there hard at work fixing what I can only guess was the siding.
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