Two Thoughts

Before I must finish my coffee, get dressed and get to packing.

1) Granny's post today on why she voted the way she did is an important read. Her reasons for voting they way she did are nearly exactly why I will be voting they way I will here in the near future.

2) We've been on a frenzied pace since we closed on the house. Del has been at the house every day fixing something up and still going to work. He gets up in the morning and heads over to the house until about 3, comes home, showers and goes to work until midnight and then sometimes goes back to the house. Last night he was there until about 2 A.M. I got up with him for my nightly snack and he told me that in one of the drawers he cleaned out he found the paperwork the bank filed for eviction of the last "owners." He said it was very sad and gut-wrenching to read, considering that this was their home and now...

The bank that owned the loan was Countrywide. Interesting indeed. Apparently this lady (no husband and several kids) had an ARM and was paying $2900 a month for her mortgage. When her ARM adjusted her payment went up from $2900 to $3700. Del said he found Section 8 paperwork and documents trying to get child support from...someone. To top it all off, she had $31,000 in unpaid taxes for two previous years. He said that from what he could tell, they were in the house as late as May of this year.

Very sad. It's interesting to be in the middle of this. I sort of feel bad for having their house. On the other hand Del and I avoided an ARM like the plague because we knew it was a horrible idea; it wasn't that hard to be just a little bit savvy about that (thank you God). She was alone though, with her kids. Scared, angry and probably a bit desperate.

I have so many thoughts about these people running about in my head. Like, why didn't they take care of the house better? The stove has obviously not been cleaned in a very long time and it's a flat top stove so it's not hard to clean. There are holes in the walls, sticky, icky stuff on the beautiful bamboo flooring and carpeting indescribably filthy. I don't get it.

Anyway, it's interesting to see the results of all the questionable lending in real life vs. hearing about it in the news.

Now, I have to go to work. My grandma is coming over to take care of me today. We have almost no food in the house so we don't have to move it and she's bringing lunch and dinner and will help pack up the kitchen. She's a real go-getter at 82. Maybe her two weeks in Maui shed some years. :)

It's Done, But Just Beginning

We closed on the house today. We officially own a home.

Del is at Home Depot right now buying a shop vac to mop up the water that's leaking from the air conditioning. It's been like three hours since we signed the papers. What a riot.

Sorry I don't have a picture. I'll try to get one tomorrow.

Anticipation

We're trying to close on the house tomorrow or Friday. So I started packing.

Did you see it? I bet you missed it. Take a closer look now.
I am sooooooo looking forward to being able to put this box in its proper place!

Is the House Hunt Finally Over???

Here's the latest.

I guess you sort of already know about the house. It's a 5 bedroom, 3.5 bathroom, 2 master, 3442 square foot house that is fully foreclosed. We'll be purchasing it for $68 a square foot; the single best deal we've come across yet. All other houses we've seen with this exact floor plan are selling for $100,000 more than the bank is selling this house to us for or more.. It is not in a CDD community, the neighborhood has one street and is gated. There are 37 houses in the neighborhood and it backs up to a large lake.

We had the inspections done on it on Saturday. They didn't uncover anything crazy, except there are termites in the front yard. They haven't made it to the house yet. It'll cost nearly $1000 rid the yard/house of termites or the threat of termites and fire ants and any other sort of 6- or 8- or 100-legged creature that may want to reside on the property.

Being foreclosed, the house needs work. We'll have to replace all the appliances in the kitchen and the faucet and maybe even the cabinet under the kitchen sink. It needs a very good cleaning (can you say "Merry Maids"). The upstairs has bamboo flooring (lovely) and the downstairs has tile (yuck).

All in all, I'm very happy about this. Although I wanted to just abandon this wretched state and all its taxes and CDDs and run away to Texas, I feel that this is where God wants us. We've tried to buy four houses this year and this is the only one that has gone this smoothly. We've asked God to bar the way if the current house we were trying to buy wasn't the one and he ALWAYS has. This house has been smooth sailing. We put in the offer Monday, they accepted Tuesday, We signed more paperwork Wednesday, they returned the signed paperwork/contract Thursday and had the house inspected Saturday. We've got insurance and a guaranteed 6% interest loan. All the things we said were a requirement have been met and I just have to believe that God wants us here for now.

I wonder what it is that I am supposed to be learning here. There is a never ending stream of "things you don't know about God but you should know." The waiting and the timing and the trusting...it's all very difficult for my frail excuse of faith. I very often found myself yelling at God because I lost my trust that he knew what he was doing. It's at times like this that I feel really stupid and sheepish and repentant that I ever lost faith at all and humbled that HE always knows what the plan is and whatever it is, it is good, even if it doesn't seem like it at the time. I need to learn to view my circumstances through his eyes instead of through my own flawed human eyes.

Haven't I had this conversation with myself before on many occasions? Why can't I learn?

Here's the front of the house. The house next door is for sale and there's one other house for sale in the neighborhood. It need a lot of yard work, to say the least. It's not the most attractive house I've ever seen, but it'll do.

There's the stairs up and the room that Del is coming out of is the bonus room. That there will be where we accomplish all sorts of school and fun stuff like that. There's a wet bar in there that I didn't like at first but then Del mentioned that it's got a working sink!!! What school couldn't use a sink for things like cleaning up after art class and such. Great idea. It has room for a small fridge, too. Don't know if we'll actually put a fridge there or build shelves in that area. We think the former owners played a lot of pool in that room.

Here's part of the kitchen and the breakfast nook. The pantry is nice and big. It's not the biggest kitchen we've seen in our house search, but it's about 3 times as big as the current one I've been working in for 2.5 years and the biggest one I've ever been able to use on a daily basis so I'm happy. My dream would be to have a gas cook top and double ovens in there. How does a large family survive without double ovens?There is the bedroom the girls will stay in. Look, it's already purple! And check out the bamboo floors! I think it's so cool because it's big enough to fit all five of the girls in there, and their dressers and all their toys. It's as big as both the secondary rooms put together in our current apartment. That leaves enough rooms for a sewing room for me. THANK YOU JESUS!!!

Homes and Homeschooling

Remember that house we tried to buy and our offer was $245,000 and it was such a disaster? Can you believe that it STILL hasn't sold, even though our realtor-at-the-time told us there was another buyer waiting in the wings to snatch it from us!! And can you believe that they have reduced the price to $229,000. Can you believe that our original offer for the house was $220,000. Isn't that hilarious. You just have to laugh.

I have finally finished purchasing everything for school which starts the second week of September. I'm in the midst of writing lesson plans for 2ND grade and kindergarten. I still want to get an art book for Ella and a music appreciation book for her, too. I am really anxious about starting her on an instrument but with the small place that we live in and the constant feeling of "we're about to move" I just feel it's a bad time for that right now.

My parents are headed to Hawaii again. They'll be "working" on Maui for another six months, although my mom is to come back in late Dec/early Jan so she can be here for the baby to be born. I have planned to take 5 weeks off of school during that time. I've never had a baby in the midst of schooling so I have no idea if that's realistic or not. My dad thinks that my mom should just stay here until he gets back from Maui. She'd be a huge help with school and EVERYTHING else, but I doubt she'll stay that long. I think she'll go back since round-trip tickets are often the same price as or cheaper than one-way tickets. Go figure.

We are still steeped in house hunting. The market here is just insane; it's hard to know if you're doing the right thing by buying right now. We are just expanding beyond this apartment though. On top of the insane market, most of the places around here are located in Florida's INFAMOUS Community Development Districts (CDD) and the fees for living in these places is often $1-2000 or more a year on top of taxes and HOA fees and sometimes "monthly maintenance fees." Whatever those are. What happened to places where you just went and bought a house and lived there? Make sure you read the article about CDDs. And keep in mind that we live in Hillsborough county and that the article is 4.5 years old. It's hard to find a house that isn't in a CDD. The fees are, I believe, partly responsible for the high rate of foreclosures and short sales here. The taxes are already high but then you add these exorbitant fees - that can be raised at any time - on top of them and your house payment just doubled. When they say your monthly payment for your house is $1000, you have to add anther $5-700 on to that and it prices many buyers right out of a decent house. It's infuriating.

I think I'll stop talking about this now, I might punch my computer screen and then I wouldn't be able to check the blogs anymore and that would be a tragedy. Or maybe I'd hurt my hand and not be able to cook dinner. Hmmmm...now that's an idea.

Relief

I was watching the news today and saw that stocks aren't doing so hot because of a report that home prices fell 15.3% in April. Curiosity got the better of me and I checked online to see if the house we just finished not buying was still on the market. Keep in mind that our former realtor had told us that another buyer was waiting in the wings with an offer on the house and we were going to lose out big if we didn't go through with the deal.

Well, I found the house. Still on the market. And they've lowered the price from $264,000 to $249,900. That's less than $5000 off our offer. We're stunned. They should have just accepted our initial offer of $220,000.

What's with our former realtor? We plan to interview realtors next time, because we think this is crazy.

Bye-bye Housey

We wrote our realtor back with our list of concerns and told her we were not going to extend the contract. She told us that we misunderstood everything and it doesn't matter anyway because there is another buyer waiting in the wings to get this fantastic deal...so there.

She might as well have stuck her tongue out at us. Sigh.

It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of thing. I was getting more and more nervous about our ability to make the payments on this house considering that everything is getting more expensive. Del was confident about this, but I'm a Nervous Nelly and I'd rather be in a house where we didn't push our threshold of comfort on the price of the house to it's very outer limits and beyond. My only regret is that I'm pregnant, now and this apartment is already too small for us as we are. I'd be happy with this size house, if we had a back yard. These poor kids are sadly indoors way too much.

Not that I regret another baby, by ANY means. WOOHOO, for baby.

The prospects for resale on this house are not good. We don't want to be here for another 10 years waiting for the prices in this area to stabilize. We really feel that 3 years is the most we'll stay here and - as I've been told before (Granny) - it's apparently taking quite some time for the prices to recoup. Everyone knows that Florida is one of the hardest hit states with this whole housing "crisis." It's worse than I thought it was.

The bottom line is that our most fervent prayer was that if this was not the house God wanted for us, if he TOTALLY disagreed with our decision to put an offer on this house, that he would make it abundantly clear to us. I am of the humble opinion that the lock expiring and then the contract itself expiring before we heard anything back about it, is a pretty clear sign and I am not in the least interested in missing God on this one. I have a hard time keeping myself in his will and since this seems to be so very clear, I'm happy to be in it.

Here Housey, Housey, Housey

Our lock expired yesterday. Isn't that nice? And no we didn't hear from our realtor.

Del did talk to the loan guy - who's title I don't actually know...but his name is Jason - and he said that the second mortgage guys (for the former owners, we don't have a second mortgage in the works) are the ones giving us all the trouble. Anyway, it would have cost us over $600 to extend the lock for a contract that, what is going on with it, we have no idea. So we didn't extend the lock.

Our realtor very kindly sent us an email last night at 11:42 - a full hour and 42 minutes after I was soundly asleep. Maybe if I had stayed up to watch Antonia get kicked off Top Chef I would have checked my email one more time and gotten it. Actually it's Del's email, but I digress. I finally checked the email about 9 this morning. In this email she told us that not only has our lock expired, but our contract expires tomorrow, the 6th. COOL! And, AND...we have until tomorrow to decide what we want to do, sign an extension to the contract and then get the sellers to sign it also. Nice. Then she told us that the county appraisers office always puts the market value of the house at 85-95% of the actual market value so what's listed there is correct for what the VA appraised the house at, which is $252,000. She said that since it's been a week since we called the county appraisers office and they still haven't fixed the mistake on their website that the house listed there must be correct, never mind that it's still listed as a two-story house. This might just be me, but I'm pretty darn sure that attics don't count as a second story, and if they do I still say I've been deceived about the livable space in this house, because who is going to live in the attic?

Del reacted quite badly to this email. He has no faith that any numbers she throws out there are trustworthy since not one single number she's given us has been correct so far; from house payment to insurance payment, she is always, always WAY off.

She said that "they" were wanting to appraise the INSIDE of the house and wanted to do this on Monday or Tuesday and that maybe we'd hear back by the end of next week. Great! Another time to look forward to. Or not.

The best word I can use to describe Del's tone when I talked to him about this is: disgusted. Why didn't our realtor think of this on Monday when we would have had a full 5 days to talk about our options and then get an extension signed.

Oh and here's the best part. We have asked her about a half dozen times for a copy of the contract, which we should have had upon signing the contract and we STILL don't have a copy. I have sent her an email asking her to send us one AGAIN since this will help us to make an informed decision about what our next step should be.

BLAH.

The Beef On the House

The countdown begins.

After hearing nearly a month ago that we had "a verbal agreement" we still have not heard anything else about the status of the house. Our realtor only contacts us when we contact her first. If I was the realtor here, I'd be emailing or calling at least once a week to assure them that I was still interested in what was going on. If this deal doesn't go through, we're finding another realtor.

The loan guys sent out an appraiser before we approved them doing so and we found out that the square footage on the house is 120 sq. ft. smaller than what we had been told (2754 vs. 2873). The insurance people are also quoting us a rate on the larger sq. ft. amount and when we asked why, it turns out that the county thinks the house we are buying is a two story house with 2873 square feet. We went and measured the house ourselves and it is indeed 2754. So, we're not buying the house we thought we were buying. Also, the county appraiser thinks we can sell the house for $221,678, a far cry below the $245,000 that we are supposedly going to pay for it. And that's for a house that's listed as bigger than what the house actually is!

We feel we've been deceived every time we turn around. The square footage isn't right, every time we ask for a number from our realtor she tells us a low number and then it turns out MUCH higher than she said, she refuses to see our point of view on the "wrong house" issue and instead has only been trying to bully us into continuing with this contract (she wants paid, I guess).

We feel we offered to buy the house as a short sale, and instead we're going to pay a huge amount for a house that is continuing to depreciate in value. We've been waiting 8 weeks for an answer and in the mean time, the grass is dying in the yard and we'll have to spend loads replacing the sod, adding more to our costs. We feel that part of what we were paying for was resale value and now the resale value is less because the house was sold to us as bigger than it actually is, and we won't lie to the next buyers.

I'm sick of this house. Sure the back yard is nice, but at this point I think I'll hate and resent the house and that's bad.

On top of everything else, our mortgage rate lock was for 60 days and that ends next Wednesday. If we lose the lock then the contract is void. The rates have been going up and up and up and if we can't get a loan with less than 6% then we can't afford this house.

Del called a real estate attorney and he said that we're not obligated to buy the house and the most that we stand to lose is our $1000 down payment. We'd rather risk losing the $1000 than tens of thousands on a house that isn't worth what we're paying for.

So, the countdown is to the loss of the lock...6 days. Unless we both decide before then that we want out.