Archive for December, 2007
Praising God!
The structural inspection was very interesting. There are 2 long walls and 2 short walls in the basement. The one long wall has bowed in about 3". It appears to have been fixed. I say "appears" because when the engineer tried to get the records on the repair from the county, there were none. So whoever fixed it did not pull a permit. So there is no way to tell who fixed it, when they fixed it, or if they fixed it properly. The other long wall has bowed in about 2". It has not been fixed. It needs to be fixed. To the tune of about $10-20K.
This came as a total shock to the sellers. We are still not sure just how they came to own the house, but from what we can see on the property history, they didn't actually buy it outright and get a warranty deed on it. (So there is even some question as to whether they have the title and the ability to be selling the property in the first place!) But apparently they did not get a home inspection whenever they ended up with the property. (BIG, BIG MISTAKE!!!)
They were trying to get US to pay for the structural inspection report. My dad said to the sellers' agent, "You need to make sure your clients are aware that if we walk away from this, they'll need that report for someone else. They'll need to disclose the structural problems to the next buyer who comes along. They'll need that report. They are the ones who need to pay for it." (The sellers had written "don't know" under everything on the seller's disclosure, since they have never lived in the home and have it as an investment property.)
So we withdrew our offer this morning and have requested our earnest money back.
When the sellers' agent received it, she called my dad and asked if we would be willing to split the cost of the repairs. When he told me, I said, "Is she insane???????"
But! While Dad, the sellers' agent, and I were in the basement, the agent for House #3 called. Apparently that deal is falling apart again, after the current buyer found out about the Homeowners' Association dues and some MAJOR balking on the buyer's part. The agent is going to be talking with the bank on Monday to let them know it's over.
So we looked at it today.
It is GREAT!!! There was some water damage in the ceiling of the basement bedroom, due to a mess up when they took out the refrigerator. It is "as is" since it's a foreclosure, but it seems to be something we can fix. Of course we will be getting it inspected. 
But the house is huge and seems to be perfect for us. So I guess we'll see!It seems to change everyday!
Still homeless
Short update:
House #2 came back on the market while we were waiting on house #3. So we offered, they countered, we accepted.
We arrived in Colorado on Christmas Day.
Today was the home inspection. All was well until the inspector got to the basement. He found lots of cracks in the walls. One wall has even been bolted somehow to fix it. A window has broken from the pressure. Sigh. So we requested a structural inspection, which should happen tomorrow. We've put the delivery of our goods on hold (should have happened this coming Monday). If all goes well and the inspector certifies that it's OK, then we'll go ahead and take it. If not....BIG SIGH.
Meanwhile, here we are in a hotel. We're gonna start looking at rentals tomorrow morning, I think.
Apparently we are moving to Pottersville
House #1 that we looked at was in the process of being foreclosed on, and it had been approved for a short sale. We knew that it would take a little longer than an individually-owned home to get a response to an offer. Well, we never did hear anything, and a week later we were told that ***IF*** they would respond to us at all, it would be a few more days even. ***IF*** And then we found out that the bank has decided to not take less than $23,000 more than our offer, PERIOD. Even if it takes them 2 years to sell the house, they said.Our 3rd choice house (and actually it's our first choice, but we made an offer on it 3rd) is lender-owned totally. It is currently in an on again/off again contract with someone with horrible credit. His financing keeps falling through, and the owning bank gives him some other hoop to jump through in order to keep the deal going. The last time his financing fell through, the selling agent started taking back-up offers since he's not confident that this deal is actually going to make it to closing. That is where OUR offer is, as a back-up to this other one that may or may not be under contract.
You'd think that the owner bank would be jumping at the chance to have a "sure thing" offer, right? They haven't actually SEEN our offer, since they are still in a "sort of" contract with this other guy, but their agent has told them in no uncertain terms that they should let that one go (since his financing keeps falling through anyway) since he's got a great offer (ours) waiting. But no. For some reason they are still waffling on whether they want to continue the deal with this other guy.
There are 32,000 houses on the market in that city. Of that 32,000, 13,000, over a third, are lender-owned. And from what I have been told, this type of behavior is typical of the owning banks. It is not unusual for a house listing to say things like, "Please allow up to 7 days for a response to an offer." So say someone wants to buy a house, and they make an offer on one. They would not hear ANYTHING for a full 7 days!
I have no idea why the banks aren't trying to unload these homes as soon as possible. They are only costing the banks money. So first the banks loaned money to people who couldn't afford the houses in the first place. And now that the people couldn't make the payments, the banks foreclosed on them (of course). But now that the banks own them, they won't let go of them easily. People with money, with the means to buy a house, CAN'T. There are tons of houses available. But it's next to impossible to buy one!
So yup, I feel like we are moving to Pottersville. The banks own all the homes, and apparently we have to GROVEL at their feet in order to even get them to look at our offers.
Super quick move update
Still no house in Colorado.
HOPEFULLY we'll hear something tomorrow????????We signed the papers on our house here yesterday. The "sign man" came by to remove the For Sale sign today.
The movers came today to start packing. They are scheduled to pack today, tomorrow, and Thursday. They are well over half done...I'm not sure just what they will do Thursday LOL! They packed up our cooking utensils, so I guess the fun has begun with eating out for every meal.
They will load the truck on Friday, and then we will leave town Saturday.Tomorrow is the kids' last night of AWANA. They are sad about having to leave, but we will look for a new AWANA club for them to join once we get there! Sunday was our last day at church, which was very bittersweet. Our pastor had our family come forward before the service so they could pray for us. We will miss them dearly!!!
Water everywhere but none to drink
You know how when there is a flood in an area, there is water all over the place, but it's not drinkable? That is how dh and I feel right now.
Last week we went to Colorado to look for a house to buy. There are houses EVERYWHERE there, and we had quite a good short list. We looked at 18 houses in the first 3 days. Then we chose our top 5 and looked at them again. We then chose our top 2.
#1 house was great. It was large enough for what we need. It was only 11 miles from dh's new office. But the price was a bit high, based on this formula I'd come up with to calculate the maximum price we could afford based on how many miles away from dh's office it was. (Yes, I realize I am a total nerd. What can I say?
) It was a foreclosure home that had been approved for a short sale. So we wrote up an offer saying this is the MAX we can pay and let them know that we have a #2 that we'd be placing an offer on. We sort of low-balled them, but hey, we were going to give it a shot. We submitted the offer Friday morning and gave them till Monday at noon to accept it.Monday apparently was the day the bank took over the home. They hadn't even looked at it due to all the bureaucratic red tape, so we said sorry and submitted our offer to house #2. House #2 had been on the market for almost a year (average days on the market there is 6 months). It was BEAUTIFUL, but it was 26 miles from dh's office, which wasn't all that great. The price was very good though. So my dad (our Realtor) called the agent to let her know an offer was on the way. She informed him that it had gone under contract THAT morning.
So we gave the bank with House #1 more time and said you have till 6 pm Tues. At the end of Tues. they said they were very close to making a decision and they'd have something for us first thing Wed. They didn't. In fact, they said that ***IF*** they gave us an answer at all, it wouldn't be for a few more days yet. We said to forget it.
Oh yeah. Have I mentioned that we sign our closing documents on this house on this coming up Monday, the 17th? The movers arrive Tues. to start packing, and we are pulling out of town Sat. the 22nd. We don't exactly have time to sit around waiting for something that MIGHT happen, especially if there is a good chance that it isn't going to happen.
So. While we'd been waiting to hear any news, I looked on the internet to see if anything new had come on the market. I was thinking about suggesting to dh that since we'd spent so much time with Dad and he knew what we were looking for, possibly if we found something that we liked, he could go check it out, and if he thought it'd work and took lots of pictures, we could place an offer for it. But I didn't think dh would go for it. But then he came and suggested that idea to ME!
There had been this one house that was on our short list before we went to CO. But it went off the market before we got there. But then a few days ago it came back on! The pictures looked GREAT. So we had Dad go over to check it out. He took tons of pictures. Still looked great - even better, in fact. He said it looked great. He found out the reason it was back on the market was because even though it had been under contract, the buyer's financing fell through. Apparently the buyer is a high credit risk and could only get what is called a "hard lender," whatever that is. The house is bank-owned, and they were not comfortable with his financing, so they set some additional conditions. That is when the house went back on the market.
So we submitted a full-price offer on it first thing this morning. But. Is it REALLY back on the market??? Apparently they aren't able to consider our offer until the first deal falls through. My dad isn't quite sure, and I CERTAINLY am not sure, just why the house is still showing up as active even though they are saying that it's still under contract.
So here we are, 8 days from turning possession of our home over to our buyers, and we don't have a home lined up in Colorado. We have excellent credit. We have a prequalification letter from our lender. We finally have the income to purchase the kind of house that we need at this time in our lives. We finally have the opportunity to not "make do." There are TONS of homes for sale there. But we can't seem to buy one to save our lives!!!
A lot of it is because of the lender-owned situation there. It is not uncommon to see in a listing, "Please allow up to 7 days for a response to an offer."
Supposedly the bank who owns the home we are interested in responds within 48 hours. That is very short for this type of situation. Both my Realtor here and the Realtors my dad has been talking with have said, "Well, when we have a time crunch situation, we won't even show foreclosure homes since they take longer." But where we are going, that's all there is! My dad estimates that over half of the homes on the market there are foreclosure homes. So sure, he could have avoided them all...and we would have had a list of about 5 to look at!Needless to say, we are frustrated. We aren't worried or panicked; we know that God holds us in the palm of His hand and that He has a home for us SOMEWHERE there. But it is frustrating to be dealing with these owner banks who won't even bother with the politeness of a response. We'd be thrilled with a "nah, this won't work," so that we could at least move on. Or our current offer...is it able to be listed ANYWAY?
And oddly enough, I'd made an error in my formula, and we didn't really have to lowball House #1 after all. But by this point, we are so fed up dealing with them that we feel like Vivian in Pretty Woman, with the store that wouldn't wait on her. We'd love for them to accept our offer and for us to say, "Sorry, you missed your deadline. No deal." I can picture her in my mind, standing there with her shopping bags saying, "Big mistake. Huge." But they probably won't do that.
So now we wait. If they do not accept our offer by Monday at 6 pm, we will most likely have to rent. Neither dh nor I wants to do that - we don't want to have to move our stuff twice. But we need a place to live!!!
I'll keep you posted.
The world will know we are His disciples
By this shall all [men] know that you are My disciples, if your women wear only dresses, if you go to church every Wednesday and twice on Sunday, if you never set foot in a bar, and if you boycott Disney.
Right? I mean, that's what we hear anyway. We are to be separate. We are to be different. That's how people will know that we are Christians.
Um, wrong. We will be a separate people not because of the stuff we do but because of Who we follow. We won't have to purposefully DO things that are different, we just will automatically BE different because, as followers of Jesus, we will be a peculiar people, aliens in this land.
So just how will people know that we are His disciples?
Joh 13:35 By this shall all [men] know that you are My disciples, if you love one another [if you keep on showing love among yourselves].
The Lord is opening my eyes to just how much the conservative Christian community is failing at this. And then we wonder why we aren't having an impact on the world.
We spend so much time bickering amongst ourselves over whether we should have real wine or not at the Lord's Supper, whether it's OK to have youth groups or nurseries, whether it's OK to use the NIV as a pew Bible, etc. And then we wonder why the world wants nothing to do with us. I also notice that Jesus didn't add any conditions to loving each other. We are to show love to one another. Period. Even if I am not dresses only and someone else is. Even if that person accuses me of being immodest. Even if I am an egalitarian and someone else is a complementarian. Even if I only listen to hymns and someone else listens to contemporary Christian music. Even if someone else listens to secular music. WE ARE STILL TO SHOW LOVE TO ONE ANOTHER.
Jesus said that all will know that we are His disciples when we do that. Despite our differences. Despite the particular calls He has placed on our lives. I am learning that I need to take Him at His word.
