Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The Waitin' Game

Last week was an assortment of randomness, like figuring out my birthday, changing my name and turning the water on. Everything has now been passed on to the Mortgage Insurance Company, who supposedly is the last step before settlement.

Rumor has it settlement will be this week, but that's not the first time I've heard that, so for now we will just wait and hope for the phone call that says settlement is tomorrow.

On happy news, our niece Emily was born yesterday!!! :-)

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Seriously!?!?!

And the games continue.

First was a call on Monday from the processing part of our mortgage company telling me that they had 3 birthdays listed for me! Seriously? A girl could only wish to celebrate her birthday 3 times :-) They had the 9th (real), the 19th (the current days date) and the 31st (Kevin's b-day). Then they processed to tell me that it was to social security office that was reporting the incorrect one and that I had to go down their and get it corrected.

Have you ever been to the S.S. Office? Yeah, me either. You ever been to the DMV? It's like that. You take a number and wait. No cell phones allowed. Real fun. Did I mention that I left work early because they close early? When I finally got through the lady was real sweet (yay!), but informed that all the info they had was correct. Good news, yes. Waste of my time, double yes.

Yesterday, I got a hold of my mortgage lady and she told me that their underwriter would be reviewing the appraiser report and then passing it on to the PMI company (yes, we're bad and not putting 20%). The last step! Woohoo! But, there's no way that we could close by the end of the week. Um, hello, tell them to pick up the slack and get it done by the end of the week! We've been waiting long enough.

Then this morning I have an email from my realtor saying that the appraiser's underwriter (the one that was on vacation through Friday and pushed us back) wants the water to be turned on before settlement! OMG! Seriously!?!?! You could have said so a little sooner. And what does it really matter? We're the ones who have to have it turned on, either before or after we settle. Have you ever had to have water turned on? Unlike any other utility service I've ever seen, they don't give you a range to be there. You have to sit there all day (9-4) and wait for them. So one of us has to sit in a hot, smoke smelling house all day and we can't do a thing to it, because it isn't ours yet.

This is starting to become a joke!

Friday, July 9, 2010

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...