Home Sweet MY Home

It’s official. Someone finally sold us a house . . . second bathroom included. For those of you who haven’t heard all the sordid details, here is the sweetened (no swearing) condensed (not five months long) version.

We began looking for a house in October. In the time since then, we have looked at over fifty homes and submitted five offers. Offers #1 and #3 were submitted after someone else had already offered for the same property. On offer #2, the bank selling the house wanted more than we were willing to pay considering the enormous amount of work the house needed.

After offer #4 was submitted we waited for a month, during which time (and unbeknownst to us, of course) the bank was collecting numerous offers on the same house. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity, they counter-offered all the offers at the same time at a price that was $60,000 above the list price. Apparently they never had any intention of selling the house anywhere near the list price and had just listed it there to get some action on the property. Anyway, as we considered a counter-offer, we were told there were already other people that had countered at a price which was higher than we could afford.

As we were preparing offer #5, the selling agent (unfortunately for us, the same one handling the property in offer #4) essentially said, “Oh and by the way, all the other offers on the last house fell through” and now the bank would accept an offer that was exactly what we had planned to counter with. So we spent twelve hours deciding which house we liked better and opted to continue with the submission of offer #5. A week after offer #5 was submitted, we were told the bank would accept the offer, with the exception that they would only pay $4500 in closing costs instead of the $6000 we had asked for. We did a happy dance and asked where to sign. They said they would have something for us on Monday (it was Thursday at the time). Two and a half weeks later, they finally got back to us and said they were just kidding, they wanted $10,000 more than we had offered. In the month that had passed since we first offered on the house, the interest rate had gone back up and we no longer had any wiggle room in what we could pay for the house. We couldn’t pay what they were asking and we most certainly didn’t want to start pursuing offer #6, so we spent the week trying to decide what to do. After a week of silence from us, they finally put out the white flag and agreed to sell us the house at the originally agreed upon price. They sent our agent a paper saying so, but as it was not the official addendum needed, we decided to proceed with caution. We started getting all the inspections in order and kept our fingers crossed.

We signed all of our closing documents last Friday and in the midst of that discovered that instead of preparing the addendum with the change in closing costs, they had just signed the original sale offer, the one that gave us $6000 in closing costs. It would appear that after everything they put us through, their lack of organization actually worked in our favor.

So there you have it (those of you who actually read all the preceeding garbage). I have a house. And a second bathroom. And a big freakin’ tub that is all mine.

Happy dance! Happy, happy dance!

(And by the way, anyone willing to lend us your muscle and/or your expertise as we get the house ready and move will reap extra points in Heaven. And very possibly baked goods in this mortal life.)