they accept our bid, we felt so relieved! we (meaning i, since steven doesn’t dance) did a merry little jig. we asked “what do we do now?” and we were told all we had to do was finish paperwork with the bank and it would be about a month before the house will be officially ours.
head on down to bb&t and find out our interest is even lower than the 7%! go steven, with your on-time-always-paying-your-bills-even-with-your-minimum-wage self! yeah! more paper work and days go by. i keep asking what else we need to do. the bank tells me i’m fine and have nothing to worry about, so i keep packing up the place we were renting and making plans for my 30th birthday party (a mere 3 days after we get the house!).
we even ask my old buddy mike, who used to be a contractor, to give an unofficial inspection of the place to see if we’re not about to toss money into a pit and set it on fire. he is upfront and honest and says it does need a lot of work but is livable and not bad for the price we’re going to pay. but he wanted to emphasize this wasn’t an official inspection. he is no longer a contractor due to health reasons, and can’t give us anything official. we say it’s just for us to get some kind of idea of what work we would need to do to it. he smiles, knocks on the wood and says he thinks this is a good buy if you’re not afraid of hard work.
i border on annoying asking the bank what we need to do next and they tell us everything is going smoothly. that wasn’t enough for me, though. all the things i had read up on, mentioned things one needs to do, but i knew since we were buying a foreclosure it was a little different.
less than a week before we close, the bank asks us if we did all the stuff we needed to do with the group giving us down payment assistance. steven and i give this confused look to one another since i have been asking for the past 3 weeks what i needed to do and everybody told me to relax, and they pull this on us the last week? we set up the earliest appointment with the fellow, the monday before closing. he seemed very much aggravated with us and we try to explain to him we had no clue, we asked and nobody told us. apparently we were supposed to take some classes on buying a house and get an OFFICIAL inspection and a few other matters, but those were minute. i was enraged. why didn’t the bank even tell us we were supposed to meet with this fellow in the first place? i kept asking what i needed to do and i hate doing stuff last minute when i could of done it weeks ago.
and then there is the matter of getting an official inspector out to the house last minute and do it in less than 24 hours and pull the magical money out of our asses to pay the fellow for his work. a mere 4 days before closing. i spend the next 5 hours trying to find an inspector that could and WOULD do it in less than 24 hours. being a very anxiety ridden person as it is, this pushes me over the edge. i sit down, write a very polite and elegant email asking the fellow in charge of our down payment assistance if it was possible to accept the unofficial inspection if i gave a detailed list of what needed to be done to the house and it’s condition.
being that everything was last minute and he understood this last minute bullshit wasn’t out fault, he said he could accept it if it was was done professionally. i thank him so very much and spend the next 3-4 hours typing up the inspection report like it was official. due to the fact that is unorthodox and i’m not supposed to tell anybody he did that, i save the organization’s name for they did me a great favor and saved us 700$ we didn’t have to spend anyways.
3 days before closing that debacle gets cleared up at the end of the business day and i got no packing done. did i forget to mention i was not only planning a move, arranging buying a house, packing, planning my 30th birthday party, but also trying to get things straight for when my family comes down into town to help us all with this? to say the least, frantic hell is breaking loose.
i thought that was that. i could concentrate on packing till my family got here and we bought the house. how wrong i was.
the bank calls the next day and thanks me for getting all of that straightened out, but the appraiser just gave them the report and everything looks good except a piece of fascia board is hanging from a nail. i say “okay, and?” they tell me… we have to hire somebody to fix it by the end of the day.
whoa. wait. what? what the fuck? no. whoa. wait… you want me to do WHAT!?!? 2 days before closing? you want me… to get somebody to go onto private property and fix something… i don’t even own? and you want it done by the end of today? what the fuck!?!? i hang up and call steven at work. he gets freaked out with how fucked up that is and i call the lawyer presiding over our closing. you know what she says to me? “well, why don’t you fix it?” my eye starts to twitch with how angry that response gets me “because it’s not mine. i don’t own it. isn’t it illegal to go onto private property and mess with it? how is this legal?” i can hear her dismiss me “well, if you want the bank loan, you oughtta do what the banks asks.” then you know what she asks me? “do you know when the bank is going to send over the paperwork for us to go over? we need to draw up the contracts.” TWO DAYS BEFORE SIGNING and the lawyer doesn’t have the paperwork.
so mad at this point. all this last minute unprofessional shit the bank is pulling on me is making me so angry and i deeply questioned the legality of some of these shenanigans.
i call up the bank once more and ask what exactly is needed to get this over and done with. i need a quote and receipts of the cost it would be to repair it and have it signed by the contractor. i said i was going to do it personally with the goblin, and they said i still needed to write it up like it was an official thing.
we go and fix the dang thing, in the misty rain, with a hammer and nails we had to unpack and a ladder we had to borrow. after it was done i take the above picture with my cellphone and tell them it’s fixed and we head back to give them xeroxed copies of the receipt (i no longer trust them with anything original). then i go home and i try to calm down, but it’s really hard to. i don’t get the last of packing done and my family shows up the next day.
the bank calls to tell me the paperwork looks good and they are going to send the appraiser back to take a picture of the fact it was fixed. i tell them i took a photo and they retort it has to be the appraiser and that it won’t be of cost (they lied, cause when it’s all said and done, i looked over the paperwork and they charged us 50$ to go back and take ONE PICTURE that i am sure was with a digital camera). i ask them when the lawyer will get the paperwork since she mentioned that she needs it right away in order to get it done in time. the bank tells me they can’t release it until they get the photo from the appraiser.
now the problem is this. the house is a foreclosure. we signed a million papers saying we will take the house AS IS since it is a foreclosure and not a person owning it who will make repairs at their cost in order to sell the house. these were papers drawn up by the bank selling and we signed and the bank giving us the loan knew this. and the one piece of fascia board isn’t the worst thing needing fixing. not in the least. we have two broken windows and the stairs in the back of the house have a broken top step. why that one piece of fascia board was more important or even that important, we still don’t get any answers about except “because the appraiser pointed it out“.
oh my anger was large.
Posts