Waiting game

Nothing new to report, really. Our agent went on vacation (so yes, she is fine after the wreck), and she said that while the seller didn't sign anything, the seller's agent thinks that it'll be just fine.

My other half's a bit more optimistic than I am, as I've mentioned before. He thinks there's a 95% chance we'll get the house. Now all we have to do is come up with the money to put down for this whole scheme. He has his portion covered, and I'm working on mine.

All we can do is wait and see.

Realignment

Our real estate agent got in a car wreck yesterday, I found out when I got home. She's apparently okay, which made me glad, but I hope she's still doing fine. I guess the seller's agent said that there was no problem with the new deal, which was good. However, the deal didn't get signed around because our agent couldn't check her email because she was busy dealing with the car wreck. Even though the indicators for that part of the process are good, we still don't have anything actually on paper.

The sticky parts will remain the insurance and the appraisal, since the insurance will probably rely a bit on the appraisal. We can insure the property, though. It'll just cost us almost twice as much as normal until we get the house fixed up and on par. Then we can get normal insurance. My spouse thinks that the new appraisal will go better than the last one, and so we'll see what the list is like. He thinks that there's a pretty good chance that the financing will go through.

If all goes well, we'll still close on the 19th.

Still trying

I guess the meeting with the lender yesterday was pretty interesting. When I went home and got to go over the numbers, it was very confusing, very convoluted, and it just might work. We still have yet to see a good faith estimate, but if it all works out, we shouldn't be paying any more per month than we would have with the first lender.

How it's probably going to work is we put an addendum into our purchase and sale agreement that the seller will put $15K+ into an escrow account. Our loan amount will bump up to cover that $15K+, and so the seller will immediately get their money back. So we get the house, with some conditions on it (basically a list of things to fix), and we don't get the money in the escrow account until the conditions are met (no receipts, etc. necessary, just a walk-through, visual inspection/appraisal thingey). In the meantime, we put about $15K down on our loan, which was the money we were going to use to fix up the house. Then we get a home equity loan for about $15K, do the work, and then we get our money back out of the escrow account, which we then use to pay off the home equity loan.

Um, yeah. Something like that.

It sounds like it will work. We signed the PSA addendum last night, so now today we have to wait and see if the seller will accept it. If he doesn't, then that's that, end of story, bye-bye house. We'll see how it goes. I'm not going to get my hopes up until we close and I actually have the keys to the house in my hand.

One more try

Yesterday did not turn out to be a great day. It really does seem that we're not going to get the house. It's funny - I, personally, now feel sort of stupid for getting all excited and starting up this blog. "Hey, everybody, read about what we're doing! Oh, wait, false alarm. Forget you ever read any of this!" That's what we get for putting all our eggs in one basket. It really did seem like we were good to go, though.

We're down, but not out. Our real estate agent was pretty surprised that the appraiser couldn't help the financing go through. We're wondering if he was actually from the lender, and they have specifics for the program that he had to adhere to. So, we're going to try again. My other half is driving to another town as I write this to meet a new lender face to face. We'll see what she has to offer us- she initially said she had found a program similar to the one we were going to take from our first broker. Our agent is trying to find another appraiser for us, too.

This way, if even after all this work, we aren't able to finance the house and have to withdraw our offer, we'll know that we did everything in our power and it just wasn't meant to be.

Not good

The only reason we decided to start this blog is because we felt fairly certain we'd get the house.

Oh, how quickly things can change.

The appraiser did his thing today. We got a call from the mortgage broker, saying that the house appraised for the value of the loan. No worries there. However, he wouldn't pass the house. It isn't habitable, apparently. This means there's the possibility of no house for us. It's a very real possibility.

We have two options. Option number one is to do all the things on the the appraiser's laundry list, like fixing the holes in the walls, painting, putting on gutters, getting the trash out of the yard, fix the baseboard heaters, and any number of other things. It's a rough list. And we can get a pretty long, detailed list from him. We can fix it ourselves before we own the house, but 1) the appraiser says that almost never flies, because people don't fix things up to snuff, and 2) there's the possibility that the seller could then yank the property out from underneath us.

Needless to say, we've put in a call to our real estate agent and intend to find out what we can do legally. Even if everything flies, there's still the issue of oh, say, actually having the money to do the repairs, not to mention the time to do them. We're still figuring out the ramifications of this option.

Option number two is to go with what's called a rehab loan. It's a loan for the amount of the future value of the house. We have to get our architectural drawings, permits, contractors, etc. lined up, and we get a loan for one year at a fixed percentage rate, interest only. We need 3% down. Then the bank's appraiser/inspector person checks up on us to make sure all the repairs go as necessary. I think after the year's over it converts to a 30-year fixed, which we've already determined we can't afford. This would be a lot of hassle and very expensive, since we use all our money for the down payment and don't have it for repairs.

I know it could be worse, since we actually do have a place to live right now, and a nice one at that, but I really had my heart set on this little house. I still really want it, and it's hard not to get frustrated and despair. However, we'll sit down tonight and talk about it, and hopefully we'll be able to talk to our agent. We just need to figure this out. We'll get through it, one way or another, and even if we don't get what we want, we'll certainly be wiser for it. That won't keep it from hurting.

And everyone who reads this will find out what happens next. ^_^

Insurance - not so fun

It's a given that we need to have some sort of homeowners insurance. It's required in order to have the loan - we all know this. What we didn't know, and certainly didn't expect, was to not be able to insure the rat hole. It seems that your run-of-the-mill homeowners insurance product doesn't cover situations like the rat hole's. You have to have a finished house, with modern plumbing and electrical. Durn new-fangled fancy-pants systems.

So, we were despairing for a while today. We didn't know where we could get insurance, and therefore we weren't sure if we'd be able to get a loan. Finally we were referred to a particular company, and they have a product that might meet our needs. It's not going to cost much more than a regular policy, but it's geared for fixer-upper properties like the rat hole. I think one of the increments was $50K for structure, $40K for belongings inside the house, liability, and a bunch of other things I can't remember for about $600 per year. Pretty reasonable. All we need to find out now is if the lender will accept that sort of insurance, and what coverage levels we need to have.

I can't help but feel that this is sort of a close shave. Then again, this entire experience has felt like one close shave after another. Now we're stuck waiting again for the appraisal, both to see if it's good enough that the lender will lend and to see if the insurer will insure. We should know by the end of the week. That's our new mantra - "end of the week, end of the week...."

The back room

This is a view of the back room. The carport and back yard are straight ahead, visible through the window. It's a dark little room. Maybe if we ever get enough money, we'll put in a skylight or something. There's a really cool vintage switch on the wall on the left- the kind with the brass plate and the two buttons for "on" and "off." We'll probably try to salvage that.

A note about the floors: It looks like the place used to have carpeting, with the exception of the kitchen, which is old, cruddy linoleum. Many of the rooms have been stripped down to the sub-flooring, with the exception of the main room and the hallway. Those have old, cruddy hardwood floors. We'll rip those floors out down the subfloor, too. The plan is to put down a few carpet remnants for our walking pleasure, and then eventually put down hardwood (linoleum tile in the kitchen, hexagonal porcelain tile in the bathrooms). Right now we're thinking about Weyerhaeuser's Lyptus engineered wood. So pretty, so durable, so sustainable.

The back room, in the meantime, has a lovely floor covering of ground-in newspaper, vinyl, and subfloor. The wood paneling throughout the main and back rooms is slated for immediate removal.

The main room

This picture shows me and the real estate agent in the main room. It gives you a sense of how low the ceilings are. My brother would get decapitated by the ceiling fan if he walked across the room, although he'd have to walk hunched over anyway, so maybe not. At any rate, we're not going to let that happen. The beam from the original roof line bisects the room, so we'll have to figure out what to do with that, since it's not likely we'll be able to raise it. The ceilings, however, might be false in the part of the room with the pellet stove. I guess they did that a lot in the 70's to improve heating and lower energy bills. Exploratory work is in order.

Financing ahoy!

This is the plat map for our lot. We own the driveway access, to that's good. It's such a nice piece of property.

So, we had a great meeting yesterday with our mortgage broker. She's a wonderful person, and made the tedious lending stuff pretty easy to understand and, well, far less tedious. We found out that our appraisal won't be until next week, but that the appraiser doesn't think there will be any problems. We might end up having to patch a couple of holes in the walls and install a sink in the main bathroom, but that's easy to do, and it's no big deal. It looks pretty much like a go, but that doesn't stop us from being a little nervous. We're very, very excited for the 19th, and we're already deciding what order we'll do things in.

Soon, soon...

So far, so good. We got our financing papers last night, signed them, and will take them down to the lender this afternoon. It works out very well, since I only have a half day at work (we're moving into a new office building). The new house's location will be great for my new commute, too. That's what I hope, at least.

Tonight we'll finally know for sure that everything has gone okay, and we'll actually be homeowners! Crazy.

Our offer was accepted!

We are SO excited. We just heard that our offer was accepted by the seller! We were so nervous all last night. I can't believe we potentially own property!! We love the little house so much. Now all that's left to do is wait and see what the appraiser says. If our financing goes through, we're good to go! I can't believe it. It's amazing, scary, and exciting all at once. Wonderful.

I so hope the appraisal goes well, or if there are issues, we can fix them and still get the loan.

If it all happens as we'd like it to, we close on November 19th.

How to buy a house in four days

Okay, so technically we don't have the house yet.

We just spent about two and a half hours with the inspector and agent, going over the house, looking at everything, and discussing what needed to be done. The good news: aside from the aesthetic things that are pretty obvious, like, oh, putting in floors, walls, and the like, not a whole lot needs to be done. We need to have our electrical fixed before we do anything else. You can track the progression of the house by the era of the different fuseboxes/breakers. Pretty crazy. There're also some plumbing issues we need to take care of as soon as we can, too. Only a couple of spots on the roof were iffy, and we need gutters, and a pipe needs a new flash footing put in, but it should last another five years. The foundation was cracked in one spot, but it can be easily repaired.

The bad news? We have to wait to hear if our offer was accepted. We have already heard that the selling agent liked the offer, and we might find out as soon as tonight. I really hope we do- I'd sleep a lot better. I just want to KNOW. I also want the house even more, having seen it three times now. Very exciting. Very scary to be signing ourselves away like that. We heard back from our lender today, too. Seems she's able to work out a new deal for us. Our monthly mortgage payment could be about two to three hundred dollars less a month than we thought it would be, if the house appraises for the amount of the loan. Considering the piece of land it's on, it should. We'll see, though, won't we?

We did find out quite a bit out about the house, aside from the crazy fuse box situation. Seems that one of the main beams in the attic is a log. An actual log. Peeled, and with canvas still stuck to it. How very rustic. I'm okay, though, with having a tree above us. I'm at home among peeled logs. We also found out that there's a stump underneath the pantry/utility room. A tree stump. Some sort of hardwood, I guess. We should remove it. I wonder if it's a relative of the log in the attic. It's definitely not related to the car jack in the crawl space that's holding up the floor joists in the laundry room.

Other than that, there's just some weird stuff buried out in the backyard. The ground's irregularly lumpy, and not settling-of-the-earth kind of lumpy. Not to mention the gigantic light pole. We need to clear out one of the crawl spaces (there are two, due to a later addition onto the house), and we need to find out where the septic drainfield is. All very reasonable projects. We'll find out about the septic soon, as the owner's required by law to get it pumped.

Bonuses: the current owner is putting up a fence between the front lot and our lot, so we don't have to do any labor there. Also, they'll probably have to give us underground electric and a new water supply, since the feeds to what I hope will soon be our house go directly through the front lot. We may have them hook us up to the sewer, since it's possible our septic drainfield is in the front lot. So we'll see. Might work out very well, in the end.

Now all that's left to do is hope that our offer wins, the appraisal goes through, and we get the house. Hope, hope. Hard to believe that we only discovered the house on Friday, and four days later, technically, we put in an offer, maybe even bought the thing. And all of it exactly three years after we basically moved in with one another. I have no complaints.

Setting Out

This is an interesting undertaking. Today we begin our first blog as we attempt to purchase our first home. The blog is far less daunting, obviously. We're going to try to record our progress as we take the little home from a rat hole, so named not because it's infested with rats but because it looks like a packrat's nest, to a habitable, comfortable home.

Of course, we have to actually GET the home first. We have an inspection today at 2pm, and if we like what we hear, we're all set to put in an offer. There's another offer already in, but chances are ours will be the winner. We can only hope.

There's always the chance that we will fail, though, and if that happens, there will be many tears. Housing's so expensive around here that this is really our only chance to get into a home period, rat hole or not. We'll see.

A bit of background about the property: the rat hole is currently about 1,030 square feet sitting on a 12,500 square-foot lot. The lot has plenty of nice big trees on it and tons of room for kids, dogs, woodshops, dojos, etc. We would also have the option to subdivide the lot in 5 years and sell it. There are just so many opportunties wrapped up in this thing.

I'm nervous and excited all at the same time. I anticipate and fear 2pm.