A very tired Sarah.

House things we are dealing with 24hrs before closing:

• Our agent finding out the appraiser valued our house based on the wrong garage type, and it’s original 1917 build date; not the date of 2000, when it was ripped down to the studs and totally rebuilt. Ardell spent the whole day on the phone with these twits (that we PAID 450 bucks to!) and yelled at them until they finally admitted they made a mistake. This singular incident has cost us days in closing time, and will probably require us to get an extension. Ardell ended up exhausted and sent us an email late in the day saying she was on her second glass of wine trying to wind down.

Sarah’s 2 cents: Ardell kicks ass.

• Our brilliant mortgage broker handed us our FIRST good faith estimate at 3pm TODAY. And our closing costs are almost 3000 dollars MORE than we planned in any way. This even INCLUDES the 2,500 dollars we put down on earnest money and the 5000 dollars the seller is paying of our closing costs. Once again Ardell stepped up and told us to bring 1000 dollars, and SHE’LL PAY the rest.

Sarah’s 2 cents: I think Anne has actually been great. There’s a good reason for us not getting a good faith estimate until this point. This is the 3rd loan and part of the reason we were accepted is due to Anne not getting good faith estimates on the first 2 loans. This prevented them from showing up as 2 rejections which would make any lender give pause. Ours has been a very complicated situation and I think that both Anne and Ardell have really pulled through for us. We may not always understand the ins and outs of this whole process, but we don’t have to - that’s what Anne and Ardell are for.

Steven’s 2 1/2 cents: As I told Ardell in an email, it was not the fact we went through three different mortgages, or even getting our GFE late. It was Anne never telling us in three weeks ‘what’ she was doing each time. It was Anne going “you definitely got X loan”, then coming back a week later and saying, “Um.. We didn’t get it, but I’m trying a different one”. And that happening three different times over a month, and zero status updates. It was not what she ‘did’ for us (she got us a loan), it was how she did it.


• We STILL don’t have the required house insurance for the loan. The one person that responded to our query over the weekend literally quoted DOUBLE what Ardell and the Mortgage Broker said it should be. The Mortgage Broker said she would deal with getting the quotes, but this is the same person that just got us the good faith estimate, and SWORE we had three different loans only to come back a few days after each promise to say, “uh, we didn’t get it, yeeaah”. To make it even worse, we are trying to get the same insurance the current owner has, and his insurance guy seems too busy to take Sarah’s call, constantly having his assistant switching Sarah to voicemail, and then not calling back.

Sarah has 2 more cents: Both Anne and I put out feelers and requests for quotes. Out of the six agents that I contacted, only one contacted me. So I completely understand that the delay is more than likely due to agents not responding, or simply responding slowly. The good news is that once a quote is received and accepted, it’s really no time at all to get a policy together.

Steven: I wasn’t blaming you, poopie doopie angel-butt. I was blaming GOD. :-)


• I’m in training 8:30am-5:00pm every day this week, yet the Mortgage Broker is still trying to call me to give me “status updates” even though I sent her an email saying please only use email. Of course this is in response to me dropping the hint to Ardell that the Mortgage Broker has been near useless with keeping us informed. (And that we hate phone calls and prefer email for communication.)

Sarah somehow found the time to eat a healthy dinner of brie and apples. My stress coping mechanisms work a little bit differently. I ended the day eating a total of four pecan bars and a slice of cheese cake.

Sarah is running out of pennies: It was St Andre, a lovely French cheese with a subtler taste than Brie. And it goes wonderfully with Golden Delicious apples. But Steven did wave cheesecake under my nose. Maybe it’s a good thing I forgot my piece in his refrigerator last night.

Can you believe it?  I just bought 5 books after packing up 600 of them.  I couldn’t help it! It was the bi-annual library book sale over the weekend and I had been looking forward to going since the last one.  But I went in with a dollar amount and a book limit in mind.  And I stuck well below both.  So all in all, you should be proud of me. 

Anyone have another box?

My assignment: Find an insurance agent who can get me a quote and write up a policy by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest.

We had been “working” with an insurance company at one point, but that went nowhere fast. Even though the house shows a build date of 2000 (when it was completely remodelled), this first insurance company decided not to cover us because it’s a 1917 house. Talk about leaving us in the lurch. We need to have a policy in place when we sit down to sign all the escrow papers which will be either Tuesday or Wednesday.

So after a flurry of emails, quote requests, and a couple of phone calls I was pleasantly surprised to have an agent call me on a Saturday. I explained the urgency of the situation and it didn’t phase him in the least. He’s promised to email me a quote today.

Our other option is to transfer the existing insurance policy on the house to us. I left a voicemail for that insurance agent but he’s out of town until Tuesday. That may be cutting it just a little too close for my comfort. Even though it would be the easiest route, I don’t feel comfortable waiting that long.

Wish us luck!

Gene Kelly shimmied out of my crawlspace today and wished me “Good Luck” (see above) on a finely constructed house.

Well, he was a dead ringer for Gene Kelley, but it turned out to be “Wally” from AmeriSpec home inspectors. He was the last phase of our house buying experience. (Except for shakey times with our mortgage broker, but that’s another post).

He gave the house a big thumbs up, saying the roof was in excellent condition, the electrical looked and tested fine, and the heater was a brand new high-efficiency model that was properly installed.

So, in theory, today marked one week until we take possession of the house. It seems oddly close. It’s starting to settle in that:

A. We have a house.

B. I REALLY need to clean my apartment.

I just finished the last few pages of Bronte by Glyn Hughes. It turned out to be one of those books where I just dread getting to the last page. But that’s a good thing - I didn’t want it to end. Even though I was familiar with the story of the Bronte family, even though I knew what was coming, I just didn’t want it to end.

This may be a fictionalized account of the life of the Brontes, but Glyn Hughes has kept as close to reality as possible. He’s darned the holes in their story with such fine stitching that it appears seamless. They have not been romanticized. They have not been glorified. They have been portrayed with complete and utter flawed humanity. This was total realism written in a way that the reader cannot help but to be drawn into the lives Hughes writes about.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this book had much of a printing in the US. The copy I ran across was in a used book store and it was an Advanced Reader’s Copy. But it’s one of those gems worth searching out.

Packing. Cleaning. Packing some more. And then cleaning some more.

And then there are the books. Roughly 600 of them need to be packed. I’ve begun sorting them by size so that when I start pulling out the boxes, they can be dropped in with little to no fuss. (Except for the antiquarian books - those get fussed over.) I’m already anticipating the sore back from moving all of these around.

Would you like to know how much books weigh? Stacking them 1 foot high, standard paperbacks weigh 4 pounds; trade paperbacks weigh 7 pounds; standard hardcovers (10″x8″) weigh 12 pounds; larger hardcovers (12″x10″) weigh 18 pounds; and coffee-table art books (15″x11″) weigh 22 pounds.

Any volunteers?