I should probably continue my last post about Disneyland, and perhaps I will do that later, but the whole house situation is on my mind currently, so I’ll spend entirely too much time writing about that now.
I’ve spend the past two weeks pestering Berta about the details of our mortgage on the new house. What will our monthly payments be? She doesn’t have any answers, mostly because the people who should have them aren’t giving them to her. Otherwise - and this seems a real possibility - I just don’t understand it.
There are time these days when I think that the lethargy setting into my mind is becoming more permanent the more reticent I become in doing anything about it. There’s antoher sentence deserving of about six posts. Returning from my digression now…
In tandem with receiving no information about the loan, I’ve been having nice dreams about many house disasters. In a recent dream, I found myself climbing out of the basement’s Bilco doors to find that the above-ground portion of the house had been swept away by some funnel of wind.
This really isn’t funny considering the recent crazy windstorms around here that have put 200,000 or more people out of power for several days. More disturbing about these storms is the actual physical destruction they’ve caused.
A gigantic tree near the town library was uprooted. I’m not talking about being struck by lightning or having a large branch torn off. This giant (maple?) tree had a trunk maybe three or four feet across, and had been ripped out of the ground at the root by this wind.
Worse is that if you trace the direction in which the tree fell to the next block, you’ll find a nother similarly uprooted tree and the accompanying house damage. Keep following that line of destruction and you’ll find our block very nearby. The winds have now subsided, but there is more real fear than the strange dreams I’ve been having.
It’s been a week since the buyer’s inspection of our home. This whole situation is pretty odd. We don’t really know much about the buyers. They are apparently an engaged couple, and for whatever reason, they were not available to attend the inspection. The guy’s mother accompanied the inspector around the house while we left for a few hours.
That’s all fine, but knowing the importance of the inspection, I would not have missed it. I’m not saying anything’s wrong with our house. The inspection isn’t just looking for problems, it’s learning how everything works.
Here’s a funny story- We went out to lunch to afford the inspector the time to do his work. Lunch didn’t take quite long enough to cover the inspection, since his van was still outside. I called Mom to see if they were up for a short visit. When she asked, “What’s up?” I said, “The inspector’s still in the house.” Having misunderstood me, she asked, “The inspector’s burning down the house?” I cleared things up and we arranged to visit, but I needed to get a few things from the house first.
I went in the house and found the inspector in the kitchen. I wans’t really concerned at anything I saw, but he asked me, “Is your oven new?” It was. “That’s probably why,” he said. “I have the window open because when I turned on the broiler, only half of it lit, and some gas filled up the room. It should be fine, it just needs to be burned-in.” So apparently he had been trying to burn the house down.
Since the time that they completed the inspection, we haven’t heard anything from them at all. Our realtor has been trying to reach them to get some idea of what’s going on. As far as we know right now, there’s nothing wrong with the house and the buyers are still moving forward with the purchase.
Did I mention that they’re buying all of our appliances? Washer, dryer, microwave, trash compactor? Weird. At least we don’t have to move them.
On the moving front, things are interesting as well. I mentioned the confusion about the loan. The estimated monthly payments vary up to $800 per month, depending on which papers you read. Someone’s supposed to call today to talk me down from my rampant “How can we afford this if this is the right number?” tirade.
I told our realtor last night that I was a bit confused about the mortgage papers we’ve seen. One of my main issues is that up until this past Monday, I was under the impression that a person named Norm (who is listed on much of the paperwork) was a mortgage broker in their office. That he was responsible for finding us a good lender. As it turns out, there is no such person working for us. Norm works for the mortgage company that works in the same building as our realtor. The interest rate on the paperwork is 6.875 (it’s 6.75 now, but we don’t have any paperwork to reflect that) which is certainly not average, currently 6.42% according to bankrate.com.
While I’m not opposed to convenience, and I’m not opposed to spending a little more for better service (and when it comes to paying a mortgage, I’m suddenly wondering how much better service you can get after you start payments), but .25% amounts to a lot of money per month on this house. I don’t want to give the impression that we’re scraping by, but why blow $200 per month because your realtor wanted to spend no more effort than walking across the hall rather than looking around for a good rate? Color me clueless.
Our settlement date for the new house is still the 8th. The settlement date for the old house is the 23rd. This may be causing all sorts of weird interest rate issues, since we can’t take out an equity-based loan on a house we’re going to sell, and financing nearly 100% of our new house (because our down payment comes mostly from the profits from the old one) skews the interest rates poorly for us. Maybe that’s the big difference? Still, our credit is awesome, and when presented with the operation we have in mind - which can’t be so non-standard - an they really assess that huge of a penalty? When I finally get someone to boil it down for me, I think I will have already had a meltdown.
I wrote a little last year about the chest pain I was having. I didn’t write the whole story, especially not as it was progressing, or certain readers would have started freaking out. With all of the stress over the past few weeks, the reflux is totally back. Apart from being completely unable to eat mangos without awful chest pain, I’ve been having other stress-related symptoms, too. At least, I’m calling them that right now, and if things don’t improve after the move, I’ll be checking myself into a hospital somewhere. Sleeping problems, concentration problems, weird body aches, headaches, stuff like that.
So because I clearly need more stress to add to this, we’ll be having Berta’s sister and husband out to visit this weekend. To give an example of the effect of my stress level currently, just thinking about their visit on top of everything else that needs done makes me kind of dizzy and nauseated. No, really. I took a short break to walk around just after I wrote that sentence.
Let’s focus on the positives for a minute. The roof on the new house is fixed. The HVAC has been serviced. They got an estimate on the garage siding and are applying a credit to the mortage of that amount, even though we didn’t ask for that, which is cool.
We have movers lined up for the 16th and 17th. We will be sleeping in the new house on the 16th. It’s both good and weird to think about.
The list of things that yet need to be done are bewildering. We need to arrange for insurance on the new house, which Berta called about already this morning. I need a final monthly number on this place or I’ll go nuts. We are considering recarpeting the kids’ rooms before we move in, and perhaps painting the walls so that it’s less of an intrusion after we’ve moved. This seems like a good idea, and there is time on the calendar, but I wonder if there is time in our schedule.
Sometime in August we’ll probably need to travel to Johnstown to visit with Berta’s other sister, who just had a kid. I think Berta filed papers for Abby starting kindergarten at the end of August, which means we need to find half a day of daycare for her, and more importantly, transportation.
I’m still trying to figure out how to mow the lawn at our new house. We don’t have a lawnmower of our own, and the riding mower that comes with the house is something I’d really like to be rid of. (The riding mower takes up too much space in the garage for parking a car in there.) So do we pay someone like we do now? And who?
I hope our new neighbors don’t suck.
Does it seem like things might be simpler if we just lived on a small grass lot with a tent and a shared public bath? KOA here we come!
