More Games

Not the fun kind of games. Nope. The real estate games.

The guess-what!-We-got-the-approval-of-sale-letter-so-let's-get-the-work-done-and-set-up-settlement-in-a-week-and-a-half games. Feeling the euphoric state of being in a house and doing work on it. The feeling of having a set settlement date, time and place. The joy of sharing with family and friends that after months of waiting and games, it's finally come to an end. Only to be followed by I-don't-care-how-much-of-an-effort-you-made-to-get-the-necessary-work-done-I'm-not-making-any-effort-to-make-sure-you-keep-your-settlement-date-you-might-as-well-plan-on-settling-at-the-end-of-August-because-I-just-don't-care-and-you-can't-do-anything-about-it.

See, after the crazy housing bubble and bursting of said bubble, the process in buying a house became much more difficult. One of the big changes is the assignment of an appraiser. There is a "pool" of appraisers that the mortgage company gets put on a list and they just cycle around. The idea is that they don't anyone to be bias and pass something that shouldn't be passed. Which I totally understand. Like totally. But of course we had to get stuck with one who is extreme. It's good because we know what we are getting, but bad because he won't bend at all.

The house we are purchasing used to have a fireplace. Keywords: USED TO. The owner thought that a wood stove would be much more efficient (which is true), hence decided to rip out the beautiful fireplace and the walls surrounding it. They didn't install the wood stove properly and that had to be removed, leaving a nice open wall and a chimney hanging in the middle of the room. Understandably, that needed to be taken care of. Obviously the seller wanted nothing to do with the place, so we had to wait (FOREVER) to receive proper documentation of the pending sale so we could go in and do the work. We received the letter late in the day Tuesday and by Wednesday afternoon (yes, the HOTTEST day of the year) Kevin, his dad and I were in the house dealing with this mess. Lovely, isn't it? We were told that the chimney needed to be removed and the wall patched up. 6 hours later they finished. I left before they finished since I'm not a teacher and dont' have summers off.

Not to shabby, huh? Well the appraiser didn't like it. He said that everything needed to be spackled and painted! It had to be "move-in ready". Um, hello! We're the ones moving in, it works for us! He didn't care that we had to run electric to install an outlet on that wall and a ceiling fan in the living room so we would be removing some of the pieces any ways. Nope he wanted things his way. And too top it off he said "his guy" was going on vacation so we would have to wait a week. Hello! You're the one that never specified what needed to be done. "Putting a wall up" is pretty broad. Because last I check this is a wall.


Whatever. Kevin busted his butt to get it spackled last night and went up there again at like 6:30 this morning to paint. He called our realtor, and after trying every possible way to get ahold of the appraiser, our realtor finally got ahold of someone in the office and discovered that the appraise is on vacation already. Grrr!

So it looks like things won't even get started until AFTER our scheduled settlement date. Guess I might as well pay July's rent in full because at this rate we'll be lucky to be settled before school starts again...

To be continued...