October 6, 2005
The Quest to Buy a House is chugging along nicely. I keep expecting it to derail any minute, but so far we have been hurdling every obstacle. And mixing every metaphor.
Anyway, today was the inspection. Keith and I, and our real estate agent, and two inspectors, both of whom were named Dave, started bright and early at 9:00 this morning. Dave and Dave seemed to be pretty competent, although of course we have nobody to compare them to. They checked the attic, the foundation, the appliances, the flooring, the garage doors, the weatherstripping, the driveway...and probably about a few hundred other things I wasn't even aware of. Keith and I tagged along after them and got quite the education on how to weatherstrip a door, what the appropriate gradation of slope is away from your home, and why not to use wood railroad ties as landscaping features abutting your house. Among other things.
They found a bunch of crap wrong with the house, as expected. Mostly it was minor, like the doors needing to be weatherstripped and the wood railroad ties needing to be moved further away from the house. The deck is also in very iffy condition, there's a "reverse grade" on both sides of the house, meaning that water tends to run towards the foundation instead of away -- this would be bad, in case you are wondering -- and the tension needs to be reset on the automatic garage door openers so that they don't kill any small animals or children.
...Okay, shortly after I wrote the previous couple of paragraphs, Keith's mom called, and I gave her the Reader's Digest version of same, and that was like five days ago and I am just now getting back to finishing this entry.
Anyway, we requested that a bunch of the problems the inspectors found be fixed by the seller, who has asked us to give him until Oct. 20 to respond, because he is a truck driver and is on the road until then, and needs some time to get estimates and so forth. We said, okay.
The biggest obstacle right now is getting the loan approved. We decided to go through Keith's credit union, because they have the best interest rates, but they also don't have any local branches, so we have to handle everything over the phone. This is kind of a pain, particularly as our loan officer doesn't seem to be very responsive to phone calls. I left her a voice mail yesterday asking her to please fax an "opinion letter" to our real estate agent, and to call us if she had any questions about it. No call was forthcoming, so I assumed the document had been faxed, but then today our agent said she hadn't got anything. Great. So today I called again. First I got a busy signal for about 10 minutes. Then I got through, and the receptionist put me through to our loan officer's voicemail, except it just rang and rang and never picked up. So I called back and the receptionist took a written message to have her call us back. That was an hour ago; still no call back, but there's another hour and a half until the close of business for their office, so we'll see.
The whole thing is a little frustrating, to say the least. And nerve-wracking. I'm scared that late phone bills, or dings on our credit report, or one of a million other little things, is going to torpedo our application.
And now Stazi is up from her nap, so that's that for this entry. It's kind of an illustration of how things have been going around here lately, that it took me five days to get around to finishing this entry in the first place and now it's still basically unfinished but I give up, this is what you get.
Posted at October 6, 2005 8:42 PM
Posted by: Lana at October 13, 2005 4:55 PM
Because they can lead to a carpenter ant or termite infestation of your home.
Posted by: Jan at October 13, 2005 5:23 PM
Ah. Good to know.
Posted by: Lana at October 21, 2005 2:36 PM
Why can't the wooden railway ties be next to the house? Our place came with a couple next to it.