Back Again Part 3: Back with a Vengeance

Yes... again, I'm back to more regular blogging. For those of you who had been sending emails asking where I was, here it is.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Frequent readers will know we put an offer on a house a few months ago… a house we liked SO much, we put our old house on the market, by owner.

It sold in three weeks (I swear we didn’t make a pact with the devil)…

Things were going smoothly… we had a closing for the new house, we had a closing for the old house, and we had all our ducks in a row.

Then came the home inspection on the house we wanted to buy… and… well… let me just say this; son of a bitch.

The sale fell through when the home inspection revealed that there was close to $50,000 worth of needed repairs (who needs a foundation anyway?)

Knowing we hit the mother lode in selling our old house this quickly in THIS market, we decided to move forward on the sale of our house and build on the lot we bought last year.

So we started looking at housing options in between selling our old house and moving into the newly constructed house.

Many ideas were floated… stay with my in-laws (eep) until we decided upon renting a small apartment… we looked at half a dozen, and each one was worse than the next…

Until… manna from heaven…

We found an apartment in the new school district that The PB & The J would be attending, under $750 a month with all utilities included (I imagine those of you reading this on the Coasts are shaking your hands to the sky screaming… ya gotta love the Midwest).

We signed the lease, paid the security deposit and first months rent and were all set to move as soon as we closed on our house.

The contract we had our attorney draw up called for the closing to happen before June 15th.

The buyer, or more specifically, the buyer’s MOTHER, had other ideas.

Herein lies the rub…

When we started this endeavor and the buyer, more specifically the buyer’s mother, did everything.

She called to express her daughter’s interest in the house…

She called to express her daughter’s desire to see the house…
After seeing the house, she called to express her daughter’s desire to purchase the house…

She called to express her daughter’s wishes to sign the contract…

And she called to express her daughter’s agreement on a date to sign the contract…

So we signed the contract saying that they would be out of the house by June 16th… this was around April 26th.

Foolishly thinking that we were going to sell our house in a few weeks, we had a moving sale and unloaded The PB & The J’s playset (which they had outgrown anyway), our washer and dryer (over 10 years old and were on its last legs) and a few other large items we didn’t want to take with us…

The Monday after the sale we were told that we would be closing the next week, so we started vigorously packing.

The next week came, and we heard nothing from the buyer, nor had our attorney.

This is when things started going downhill fast…

Our attorney contacted the buyer and, when got no response from them, the buyer’s lender.

He was then told that there was a problem… the buyer was listed on her mother’s mortgage… and we couldn’t move forward until the mother re-financed and taken her daughter’s name off.

Problem is, the mother – who works for a title company so one would think she would know this would create havoc – decided to do some upgrades on her house at this time and had it cut up and messy.

Lovely…

Our attorney, being an attorney, started to push for a closing date… the mother started pushing for everyone to mind their own business.

Then… suddenly, weeks after the initial offer sheet was signed; a glimmer of light appeared.

The mother was having her home appraised and re-financed while taking her daughter’s name off the mortgage and the closing was slated for July 1st (2 weeks after the closing was contracted to occur). We lined up help to move us on June 28th…

Hallelujah, we were closing!

…

Not so fast there chuckles…

The Friday before the closing our attorney called us and said the lender was backing off of the closing because “they had concerns about her (the buyer’s) income.”

WHAT!!??

She was pre-approved… everything was falling into place… what the hell happened in that short amount of time??

Turns out nothing… the attorney was told that by the mother, who had decided things were moving too quickly for her and decided to slow things down a bit.

Long story short (to late)… we closed last Thursday…we (technically movers, thank GOD!) moved out Saturday… handed keys and possession over on Saturday night… and we are now, officially, apartment dwellers whilst they build our house… which is expected to start now the first part of September.

This is a long-winded way for me to say that my life is starting to level off now and I’ll have more time to write… including a blogging first on Kemp’s Blog.

Next week I join my Dad on a road trip… a road trip in his 2006 red corvette convertible to the Black Hills of South Dakota.

I plan on blogging the trip… so stay tuned.