So Agent Murphy spent the day with a babysitter yesterday and had a grand time. (She has a boy about a year older than he.) I actually did get a lot of work done, mostly in the basement. That’s good, but what’s bad is that it’s depressing to look around and see how much still needs to be done even after that. And I’m exhausted.
It was good to be away from the Agent for a day. I actually started to miss him a bit.
So Princess Buyer still won’t deign to give us her list of repairs. Our agent has told her agent that they need to get us their amendment as soon as possible when they have all the information they’re waiting on — no 8:00 p.m. on Monday, the day her extended due diligence period ends. And we’ve told our agent that if they request another extension or anything else, we won’t agree to it until we have their repair amendment in hand. It seems pretty obvious to us at this point that Princess Buyer can’t actually afford to buy the house and is trying to see how deep our pockets are for making repairs for her. We’re trying to make it clear that they’re not very deep, and if that will kill the deal we’d rather know that now rather than later so we can go back to showing the house and maybe find a real buyer. (I guess we’d go back to showing the house, though I really dread the thought. Of course, I dread the thought of staying here, too.)
I’m waiting until tomorrow to call our agent for an update on the bridge loan contingency on the house we’re trying to buy. If it looks like it’s going to take anywhere near the full 15-day period to get that resolved, we need to go ahead and push the closing date out now.
I hate all this and it’s making me miserable.
One bright spot in all the mess of late is that the blueberry-pecan biscotti we made over the weekend came out really well. Better than we expected. It’s nice to be able to do some baking now that we’re not showing the house (though I fear we’ll be back to that soon).
It sure feels like it.
Princess Buyer (and her aunty, the other agent) needs to extend her due diligence period because she’s not sure the underwriting on her loan (where they officially say sewer doesn’t have to be connected) will be done in time, and without knowing that for sure, she’s still not sure “what to ask for” as far as repairs. She wanted to extend it through next Wednesday (it’s supposed to end this Thursday). Our agent called this morning and seemed to think that was reasonable and we should just agree. I pitched a fit and pointed out we’d already given them a longer due diligence period (14 days) than the 10 we’d wanted. I told her we’d give them through Monday (to which they agreed). And then I told her to get some numbers from them. They’ve been sitting with the inspection report and the plumber’s estimate on connecting to the sewer for over a week. Certainly they should be able to give us at this point: IF sewer connection, THEN we want xxxxx. IF NOT sewer connection, then we want yyyyy. It sure is coming across to us that they plan to ask for a lot, and if that’s the case, we can’t do this deal and we’d rather know that sooner than later.
Still no word from the sellers of the house we’re trying to buy that they’ve made any progress on their bridge loan contingency. Which may well mean we’ll have to push the closing date because we can’t even order an appraisal until after that is removed. It feels like we’re the ones having to be flexible on both ends of this deal, and it feels like we’re going to get screwed. And I want to know who the hell is representing our interests in all of this. Because right now it feels like our realtors are doing a piss poor job. We were really impressed with the activity they got on our house and were looking forward to recommending them to some folks; but now I’m not so sure about that.
And I’ve been in a truly foul mood about all of this all day. It doesn’t help that Agent Murphy is being his usual annoying self and he had a fruitless speech therapy session (he went in short on napping because of the time of the appointment that was available; fortunately we now have a schedule set for September that doesn’t interfere with his normal nap schedule) which once again has me wondering if there’s any point to all the money we’re spending on this therapy.
Meanwhile I’m exhausted and sore from working in the basement all weekend trying to get us ready to move. And I have another day of it planned tomorrow since our moving company delivered packing materials today. At least that gives me a reason to ship the Agent off to a babysitter for the day. But it will really suck if it turns out this deal falls through and we end up just taking the house off the market and living here, cramped and unhappy, until we die or pay off the mortgage, whichever comes first.
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…
I went to Wal-Mart as usual this afternoon for the weekly grocery shopping, but with Mr. Tldz on vacation today I didn’t have to go with toddler in tow.
The woman in front of me at checkout was buying some wine with her groceries. I heard the cashier ask her, “May I see you ID ma’am?” I looked up and had to practically bite my tongue to keep from laughing, as the customer had to be pushing 80. Obviously Wal-Mart has a policy of carding absolutely everyone who buys alcohol. Probably a good idea for them, since 1) many of their employees don’t have the smarts to reasonably exercise judgement and 2) that steers them clear of any possible complaints of discrimination or anything like that. But still, it was funny.
Mr. Tldz took the day off today for a mini summer vacation. We went up and toured the Mayfield Dairy milk production plant in Braselton. Had some ice cream (made at the Tennessee plant) and went out to lunch. It worked out nicely that we naturally had somewhere to be to avoid the inspection.
Agent Murphy dug into his black cherry ice cream with gusto. We bought him a “drip stick” gizmo to hold an ice cream cone and catch some of the drips; so next time we have ice cream he’ll have to try it from a cone. Maybe it would force him to use his tongue more, which would be a good thing from the speech therapy perspective.
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!