Aurora Borealis

We finally got a copy of the inspection report on this place.  Some silly stuff in there.  We’re still waiting to see what amendment to the contract our little girl buyer comes up with.  If she expects everything in the inspection report to be addressed, this deal is in trouble.

She had her appraisal done today.  That was pretty quick, and the guy said we should rest assured that we shouldn’t have any problem on the valuation.

We’ve reached an agreement on the house we want to buy.  We’re paying a bit more than I’d hoped, but the sellers took a bridge loan against the house to buy their house in Denver, and they didn’t have a lot of room to move down on their price.  Our due diligence period (10 days) begins when they get the bridge loan contingency removed from the contract.  They have through Sept. 3 to do that or let us know that they can’t.  So we’re scheduled to close on both transactions on Sept. 14, but I don’t know if that will really happen.

Should have an estimate from a second moving company sometime today.  I’m looking around and wondering how in the world I’m going to get all this packing done.  We have too much crap! But I’ve started a little bit, and began the process of washing all our throw rugs for packing…  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  Okay, here we go.

My stress level is way high.  Rest easy.  Yeah, right.

We submitted our offer on the house we want today.  Now we wait for the counter…

And we wait to hear what the home inspection report on this house says.

I don’t like waiting.  But at least this is waiting with an end in sight, unlike what we were doing before.  Hopefully everything will fall into place and the closings will happen Sept. 14 as scheduled…

As of last night, we have a contract on our house!  The folks are very interested — as in they had a home inspector and a plumber out today.  (The due diligence period runs through the 27th.)  The plumber is to put a number on what it will cost to connect to the public sewer system.  Our realtor talked to an FHA appraiser who said that if the cost to connect is more than 3% of the loan value, they deem it “cost prohibitive” and don’t require connection.  From what we’d been told when we inquired about possibly connecting ourselves, the cost would be far more than 3% of the loan.  So hopefully that will all work out to be a moot point.  They just need to get the FHA appraisal scheduled to make that all official.

I think this will work!  The buyer really likes the house.  All along I’ve been saying that we needed to find me 10 years ago.  And I think we did.  The buyer is a young woman, and she looked at the house with her parents.  Her mom was very excited about the house.  The daughter wants to be in this area – her church is near here, she works downtown so that will be a pretty decent commute for her…

Tonight we meet our realtor at the house we want to buy to take one more look at it.  (And I want a showing with this agent to show up on the lock box so the listing agent doesn’t necessarily know that we’re the people who expressed interest in the house several months ago through our first agent.)  Hopefully we’ll have a contract in the works on that house this weekend or Monday.

It looks like we may have a contract on our house very soon!

This morning I attended my first IHM pro-life committee meeting as simply a member rather than the leader.  That was a nice change of pace.  I wish Uncle R. luck in his new role.  I’m glad Fr. S. agreed appoint him the new leader.

This afternoon Uncle R. came by and picked up the multiple boxes of pro-life stuff from me — the things I inherited from my predecessor and the stuff I accumulated during my tenure.  (Step one in readying the basement for our hoped-for move, I guess.)

Now if only we could make our move and have a fresh beginning somewhere…  There’s still potential life in the offer we got, but more time is needed to bring it to conclusion.  We’ll see where things go.

It is not my strong suit.  But I’m going to need it.  It appears that the negotiation of the offer on our house may stretch into next week.  Ugh.

The good news is that the buyer is still interested.  The issue is that our house is on a septic system, not connected to the public sewer.  Apparently FHA requires for their financing that public sewer be connected if it is “available.” Well, there is a sewer tap on the street in front of the house.  But to connect to it, we’d have to come up through the basement (up a hill).  We were told in the past that it would be quite costly.  We didn’t even realize until about a year ago that we were on a septic system.  The tax record for the house says it’s on public sewer, and the septic system was not disclosed to me when I bought the house.  Then we had a seepage issue.  (No wonder, as it had been at least 9 years since it was pumped!)  So at the time we briefly investigated going ahead and connecting to the sewer system, and we heard from several folks that it would be a large and expensive undertaking.  We had the tank pumped and it was given a clean bill of health.  In fact we were told our drainage field appears to be in nearly pristine condition.

Now FHA may require the connection in order to make a loan to this buyer.  Apparently the buyer doesn’t mind at all the idea of being on septic.  (Hey, at least I was honest enough to disclose so he gets that choice and knows what he’s getting, unlike when I bought the house.) But “We’re the government, and we know what’s good for you.”  So our agent and his are working on getting contractors out to look and get a good price estimate on what it would really take.  Then the issue, I guess, is given whatever that number is, does FHA still deem a sewer tap to be available and require a connection, and if so, can we make the numbers work for us and for him to make this deal go?

In the meantime, we had another showing yesterday afternoon. Let’s hope we get a sale out of this somewhere!

We got an offer on the house Saturday night.  We countered yesterday and are awaiting the response.  Our agent has been told they’re coming back to us with a counter, but this buyer is using FHA financing and it looks like there may be a snag with the parameters FHA requires for the house.  Waiting to see if that can be resolved and then what their next offer is.  It would be great if this works.  Buyer is propsing a closing date of August 31.

I’m hoping we have a nice weekend.  Started off lovely this morning, with steel cut oatmeal and blueberry scones.  Yum!  And there’s supposed to be another showing in an hour or so.  Have to finish picking up in a bit.

Had a good weekend last weekend.  I’ll get to that separately. But Tuesday, following our blueberry picking on Monday, I had a migraine that just wouldn’t quit.  Unfortunately, that meant we had to miss Agent Murphy’s speech therapy appointment for the week.  And then I was just feeling really down in the dumps pretty much the rest of the week. I hate when I get like that.  Hopefully I can shake it off this weekend.

So it looks like a couple of the recent showings have generated some interest. One guy likes the house but is apparently still looking at others.  Another has requested the seller’s disclosure. Oh please, oh please, oh please let something come of this!

Meanwhile, looking forward to a fun long weekend.  Mr. Tldz is taking vacation on Monday so we can go blueberry picking.

We had one this morning.  So in the almost 2 weeks with the new realtor, we’ve had 3 plus two that were supposed to happen but didn’t.  Let’s hope this picks up.  Really would like to sell.  Of course, looking around at all our — stuff — makes me shudder at the thought of the actual moving process.  Ugh.  But we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.  Would like that to be our big worry.

Had another showing on short notice – making two on Thursday.  Hooray!  Now let’s get an offer!