moving

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow! (I hope everyone sang that in their head – you’re only a day away!) We are closing on the house tomorrow at 10 am! I am going to end every line in this post with an exclamation point! Not really.

I would like to share this comic that was posted, ironically, just yesterday: Homeownership

We will be better homeowners than that, I can assure you.

Unfortunately we won’t be able to be present at the closing, so tomorrow won’t actually be that different from any other day. Monday and Tuesday of next week the movers are coming to pack and load, and then Wednesday we are driving North to Charlotte. (Not to be confused with North to Alaska.) It is only about 8.5 hours from Orlando to our new home, but with a dog and cat in the back seat it should be fun! We did get some sedatives for the cat, so hopefully he won’t complain too much.

We’ll be able to get the keys from our Realtor when we get into town, so our first night in Charlotte will be spent in OUR house! Eek! Also, if anyone needs a Realtor in the Charlotte area, look up Tracy Gentry with Prudential Carolinas, because he has done an amazing job, definitely working overtime to get this done for us.

Next time you check in here, there will be a new title and new layout, for our new life in The Queen City!

is a pain. We knew it would take a long time, but a few things have come up that we were not expecting. This is the house we are trying to buy:

Even though it is a short sale, we decided to put an offer on it because the sellers had already done the necessary paperwork to sell it as a short sale, the bank holding the mortgage had already agreed to sell it for a loss, and that bank happened to be Wells Fargo, which is the bank we are doing our home loan through. Based on that knowledge, we were fairly confident we would be able to close by the end of April, which was a month and a half away at the time. Wrong.

Enter the mysterious Second Investor. Wells Fargo was all set to accept our offer, but first they had to run it by the Second Investor. Apparently this Second Investor holds a lien on the mortgage and so they get a say in the deal. And what they said was, “We want $5000.” What they did not say is how they wanted it – included in the closing costs, added to the mortgage? We did not know. This is 10 days before we are supposed to close. Almost a week goes by before we get clarification – the Second Investor wants it up front, at closing. We say fine, we’re tired of waiting, do it. Not so fast!

Turns out the Second Investor can not legally have us pay that extra $5000 at closing because of the type of loan we have (FHA.) It has to be written into the contract. Which is good and bad news. Good because while we probably would have had the cash to pay it up front, our savings would have been almost drained after the fact, which is never a comfortable place to be. It is bad news because now we have to do more waiting while the negotiator between the parties informs the Second Investor of the legality (or lack thereof) of what they want. We are also not sure yet if we will have to start the process all over in order to work that $5000 into the contract, or if it will be an easy change. So, waiting, waiting, waiting…

While we wait, here are some pictures of the backyard of our future home, if it all ever gets worked out!