Are we done?

Can't answer that one, because I don't know. The seller had until 5:00 MT to respond to our new offer and yet once again we have heard nothing. Makes me want to call her up and demand to know what her problem is. Hey, if she can call me at 7:00 in the morning (knowing full well she's not supposed to contact us) and make my kid late for school I should be able to return the favor. We have spent so much time and so much money on this house purchase only to end up with a very real possibility of getting nothing out of the deal. It's breaking my heart, and driving me insane with stress having our lives up in the air and at the whim of this crazy woman.

And waiting.....

Alright, I know I haven't written in forever. It's hard to get the motivation up sometimes when I don't even know if anyone is reading these posts, but writing often makes me feel better so here I am back at the keyboard. The house. Wow, that could make for one monster post. I'll try and keep it brief. We had begun working out the details about who would pay for what when it comes to house repairs, when I got a call from our loan agent. Our new closing date (Nov 13th) was quickly approaching, so he had our appraiser start the paperwork for the house and had received some bad news. It cost us $75 to find out that the house is unappraisable. There are no comparable homes in the area, average house size is 1200-1500 sq ft and this one is 8000, so he has no way of figuring out what a house like this would normally sell for in that area. If he can't figure out what it would sell for, he can't assure the bank that they aren't providing a mortgage that is worth more than the house and without that assurance the bank won't provide a loan. So not only will OUR credit union not provide a mortgage for this home, NO lender will provide a mortgage for this house. That means we are now without a loan and this woman is up a creek. When we first found out that this may be a problem, John and I started brain storming and decided to request owner financing. This woman doesn't have to sell and can take all the time in the world (if you ignore the fact that she's 80 and could be on the final countdown), so it won't matter to her if it takes us 15 yrs to finish purchasing the house. Which is what we offered. We offered a $5000 down payment and 15yr loan at 3% interest. Oh, and no repairs done to the house. We offered to do them all. She expressed interest and asked for the weekend to think it over, which we were happy to agree to. I'm sure we'll have to go back and agree to a bigger down payment, but she has agreed to wait until our house here sells so we are prepared for that. We won't agree to much more, if any, when it comes to interest since we are offering to do all the repairs but we'll have to see how that goes. So that's where we're at. If she accepts, that means Billings is it for us. We may not ever be able to sell the house, so we better settle in and enjoy it.

Still waiting.

The addendum. I realized I mentioned it in my last post, but didn't explain. We received our inspection report back on Mon and, as we expected, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed. A few of those things, including the roof, are items the VA will insist be repaired before they will approve our mortgage. So, we submitted an addendum asking for that the VA necessary items be repaired (just those items that a licensed contractor needs to repair; anything a do-it-yourselfer can do we'll do ourselves. With this womans track record of shall we say "inventive" work, we don't want her doing anything herself) and asked that our closing date be extended to allow for the repairs. We haven't heard back yet and she has until Tue to reply. According to our realtor they are getting estimates, but I came home from church today to find a message from the seller stating that she would call back later. There was no explanation for her call and she didn't even identify herself (thank goodness for caller i.d.). I have no clue what that was about. Oh well, back to the waiting game.

Good news!

We had two showings of the house here in MN on Wed and from all accounts it went well. I also talked to our realtor and he said he's expecting to get an offer from a couple that saw the house last week. Their realtor mentioned the state of the carpet might be a problem, but I had already told Scott (our realtor) that we were changing it so he was able to tell them and voila! we have a viable couple. It does mean we will not be willing to consider much by the way of closing costs, etc since we've done so much to the house, but I have some ideas worked out and it shouldn't be a problem. Hopefully by Mon-Tue of next week we'll have an offer. I don't know if we'll take it, if I remember correctly this couple has a house to sell too and we can't afford to wait around for a few months for them to do so, but the fact that there is interest in the house is awesome. If they get pre-approved to buy the house even if they don't sell theirs first and the offer is reasonable, we'll accept. So, still the waiting game, but it looks like the end is in sight. Now if only our seller would contact us with info about our addendum!

I finished!

Our paperwork is done; yep, you heard me right. I said, "Our paperwork is DONE." I mailed the last few documents today and I should have a break from paperwork for the next few weeks. We still have details to work out, such as changing our interest rate and the amount of points we'll pay (none) since this house hasn't sold yet. But overall, we should be pretty good. I'm worried about the sellers reaction to the repairs she's being asked to do and the closing costs she's being asked to pay (closing costs I was assured we had already asked for, but apparently not) but all I can do now is wait. I hate waiting.

Ok, not quite time to move.

We got the results of our home inspection for the new place today and it wasn't very pretty. Fortunately for us, most of the things on it are repairs that the VA will insist be done before the purchase of the house. Meaning, the seller has to pay for them. Which includes the roof, something we had wanted to replace anyway! It also means our closing date has been moved back to Nov 13, which gives me a good bit more time to finish this paperwork. I'll get it all done this week, hopefully tomorrow, and then spend the next three weeks packing things the way I really want them.

Almost time to move.

October 30th is coming up fast and I'm just not ready. We don't have an offer on the house, so we have to redo our mortgage to take that into consideration, which means my loan agent is not thrilled with me. Doing this amount of paperwork in 2 wks is a hassle for everyone. On the other hand, as of October 30th, everything will be worth it. There are a lot of ugly paint colors in the house at the moment, but we can easily fix paint so I thought I would post a few pictures of the house so everyone can get an idea of what it's like. The first is a picture of the horrifyingly ugly pink Pepto-Bismal master bedroom and the second photo is of the gym located on the first level of the third basement.