After all the angst, after all the stress, after the sleepless nights and the sweaty palms, the deal was finally sealed today when the second mortgagor just rolled over and disgorged the documents. (more…)

After not too subtle pressure from my realtor, my mortgage broker took a more aggressive stance with my second mortgage company, which has been blowing us off for days with “it’s with an underwriter right now,” but yet which never seems to be completed. She sent a staff member over to the company yesterday, and today vamped up the heat by sending over her manager to see WHAT the hold up was. (more…)

Did you ever start out kinda-sorta wanting something or someone, but not really experiencing it, or not really letting yourself like him or her because you thought it just wasn’t possible? And then, maybe you get a little closert, find out that he/she/it really click for you, and somehow you made the transition between idle window-shopping to finding out that some way, somehow, your vibrations were meshing, your karma’s colliding and all of a sudden, it’s made a place for itself in you?

I don’t wanna feel that way about my house yet. it’s not mine, and things are falling behind schedule, and I don;t want to bachi it even more by making plans about it, or driving by and visiting it again, or picking out the paint for the hallway. Not yet.

I was on needles and pins last week as I waited for my mortgages to be approved (wow! someone wants to give me a mortgage!). One of them was approved by the end of the week, but the other was still …. hanging. No word over the weekend, no word on Monday, no word all day - and we were supposed to have signed today.

Oops. (more…)

All day long on Thursday I waited for the phone to ring. Oh, it rang, all right, but never the person I most wanted to hear from: my mortgage broker. (more…)

Every day a fresh challenge, but not the one I dread. I have to act as though this sale is going to go through, I just have to … the house needs too much work, and i can’t be caught short at closing without a plumber, a drywall guy, and electrician waiting to speed into action. I can’t just - to avoid bachi - ignore issues of paint, rugs, sanding the pinted wood floor - until closing, with no idea of color, style, type, price range. (more…)

What am I, nuts?

Gotta renovate - pretty extensively! Gotta paint, promised the kids some furniture (matresses up off the floor, for one), then gotta pack , gotta shove all the stuff into the new house, gotta spend days and weekends and nights unpacking and picking apart our lives and putting them back together–

I AM nuts!

I’ve left out a lot of the interim tremors - the good news/bad news of the home inspection, the termite inspection (bottom line: needs to be tented), and the wait for the appraisal. I suddenly woke up early this morning, however, and realized that if all goes according to schedule, I would be signing and taking possession in about two weeks.

Am I ready? Nope! (more…)

This is nuts. My lease was terminated in my old house because the landlord wanted to cash in to this frenzied market. The house was sold at a too-high price, considering its 52 year old condition. I saw an ad in the Sunday paper recently - 3 and a half month after it was sold - and saw it advertised at a staggeringly high price. I checked the city and county permit records, and found that the new owners had put $45,000 worth of improvements into the home - but were selling it for an incredible *$230,000* MORE than the price of the home plus the improvements! (more…)