11 January 2011

Here's the deal

I'm over home buying and selling.
For real.
And it's not even that I am emotionally attached to buying or selling a house. It's just that the whole dang process of so laborious. And riddled with potholes and loopholes.

We put our house on the market October 18 with the knowledge that it might take awhile to sell due to the time of the year and the amount of "inventory" currently out there. No biggie. We were more than ready to wait and then end up having to make some changes in about 6 months. Not that we wanted to wait 6 months to sell our house, we are just realistic. A smattering of showings and then at the beginning of December a real offer came in. We were obviously thrilled and jumped on the chance to "unload" our burden on someone else. It's not that we didn't like our house; in fact, we quite enjoyed it. It just that making a mortgage payment plus utilities on an empty house ever month makes my anxiety meter go off the scale.

The offer was just under our asking price and the new buyers wanted to move in asap since they were also selling their current house. We would sign a lease agreement and in a matter of days close in the house.

Not so fast!

Does anything ever go as planned?

Nope.

One teeny, tiny detail in our contract with the new homeowners was the we could not close on our house until they closed on their house. Our Realtor assured us that this was not a big deal since our new owners were already in contract with their new owners. Just a technicality.

We move, literally, on with the assumption that we are closing on January 7th.

I was doing a little jitterbug as the date approached but then the smacked with reality when our Realtor called and said their was a little snafu.

The buyer for our buyer's house was having an issue with their lender due to some phrasing in the appraisal of our home owner's property. Apparently a horse barn was appraised at a very high value (it must be the Cadillac of horse barns) and so the verbage needed to be changed to reflect this. This ordinarily would not be that stressful except for the fact that our home owner's buyer is now thinking about switching lenders because he is so frustrated with Wells Fargo and their extra long process.

If he switches that means it's going to take XX amount of time to start ALL OVER AGAIN.

All the while, we are waiting (along with our buyers) for all this gibberish to happen so that WE can close on OUR house.

THEN (yes, there IS a then) I get a text from our Realtor yesterday evening that the gas had been shut off at our house because our tenants (I guess we are landlords until further notice) smelled gas and called the gas company, who then rapidly turned it off "to be safe." Again, this wouldn't have been that huge of an issue except that 1) last night was the coldest night of the year in Wichita Falls and 2) this is OUR problem because it's OUR house still.

No worries. Our handy little Realtor called her own plumber to head out to our house today and it was discovered that there were a couple of valves with issues (which he fixed). All is better now that the gas has been restored to our house and our tenants.

So here's the deal: we have no idea when we are going to close on our house.
And the nice little cold sores I got overnight would explain my anxiety over it.

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