Yesterday, Berta and I took a day off work to finalize the purchase of our new home.
We dropped off Abby at school/camp around 8am, then waited around at Manhatten Bagel until 9:15 before our walkthrough of the house at 9:30.
When we arrived at the house, the previous owner had three cars parked in the driveway and a ton of crap still sitting in the garage. Judy, our realtor, drove up shortly after we arrived, and we headed toward the house.
The seller followed us aroudn the house as we looked to make sure everything was still in working order. He would not stop talking. Judy told him, “I’ve done a few of these, I can probably manage on my own,” meaning, “go finish moving,” but he didn’t take the hint. I thought she was going to blow a gasket with all of this jabbering. I was irritated, but I figure that’s easy enough to do that I’ve built up a tolerance for my own irritation.
Apparently, he had some kind of family crisis overnight with his son being manhandled by his ex’s new boyfriend, and he hadn’t had any sleep, nor enough time to move, nor any luck getting a new moving van, since their original van wasn’t large enough to hold everything.
Anyway, aside from the garage and the refrigerator still containing stuff, the house seemed in working order. So we departed for our 10:30 signing of the papers. With about 45 minutes to kill, we stopped at Target and wandered around looking at various things in a weird “no place better to be” sort of pre-mortgage limbo.
Soon after, we went to the Keller Williams office, and found Judy. We sat in a small conference room with Bruce, representing our lender, and he started to go through all of the paperwork.
Everyone says that there is a lot of paperwork involved in a mortgage, and that you’ll be signing a lot of stuff. But really, I don’t find the paperwork disproportionate to the lending involved. If they were only loaning us $50, then yeah, that’s overboard. I think they probably could reduce the amount of paperwork involved, but it’s probably just easier to break everything into individual parts, since it seems like it all has to go to separate places to be handled, anyway.
As we were going through the paperwork, the realtor for the prior owner showed up. He was one of those “big” people.
There is a whole impression I got while dealing with our realtors about the Assist-To-Sell company that the prior owner of our new house (heretofore named “Lemmy”) used for his sale. The basic idea is that they put your house into the computer system with the required paperwork, they give you a sign to put in your yard, nd they tell you when your house will be shown, and they send someone to the closing with your paperwork. Apart from that, they don’t do too much.
A while ago, we received the disclosure on the property from Lemmy’s realtor. The disclosure did not include reference to a capital improvement fee required by the homeowner’s association (this is a one-time fee that new owners pay into a fund that pays for improvements in the common areas in the development). Also, the documentation that we got for the HOA was missing every other page. It was quite some time before we got these notices, and they even neglected to tell us about a significant increase in the capital improvement fee from when we finally received it.
Well, our realtor called Assist To Sell, and they hashed out a plan where Lemmy would pay half of the increase. One of the realtors at Assist To Sell wrote out a check to us for that amount.
The big guy that arrived for our closing was not aware of this, and he started to have a discussion with Judy about it. Berta and I were trying to go over the mortgage with Bruce, and I just couldn’t her him over their arguing. So I told them, “Sorry guys, but I can’t hear Bruce over you, and we’re spending a lot of money here, so if you don’t mind…”
I mean, really, $167 is nothing compared to the whole mortgage.
Anyway, Lemmy eventually arrived to the meeting. I assume he had still been moving things out of the house. He was kind of disheveled, and he seemed a little out of it.
We got so far into the payoff and he had some kind of issue with the alimony his wife owed. It was something about her being in arrears. I don’t know what that’s all about, and I’m not really concerned. I mean, after the fact, I suppose I feel a bit sorry for the guy, but we’re at the table ready to buy his house, I don’t want to have to hear him argue for 15 minutes over $450 in back alimony with the notary and his realtor.
Anyway, everything finally got signed and we were done with the paperwork.
We decided to let him just finish up moving out, rather than make a big deal out of it. It wasn’t like he was trying to get away with something, just that he’d run over. Judy suggested that our alternative might have been to hold some money until he was totally out, but he said he would be gone by 4pm, and that didn’t seem too unreasonable. Had we been in a moving van with all our stuff, that would have been different, but we weren’t in a rush to be in the house that afternoon.
The afternoon went by really slowly.
Finally, Berta, Riley, and I went to pick up Abby from camp, and we drove some toys up to the new house. Lemmy and his family were still there at 4:45 moving the last bits of his stuff into the van. They had everything out, and basically only needed to hitch the car to the van, but they hung around for a while fiddling with this and that. The thought crossed my mind that they might not leave after all, but they finally did.
Berta and the kids spent a good bit of time in the back yard looking at the willow tree. I chased the kids around in the basement. We sized up some rooms and dumped a bin of the kids’ toys into the living room.
There is virtually nothing in the house now but toys. We’ll have to take pictures before we really start moving in.
Things are going to be busy over the next week or two. We’ve got all the utilities coming out to hook us up. Dish is on Monday, FiOS is next Friday. I forget when the new washer and dryer are supposed to arrive. Maybe Tuesday. Geez, if someone’s got to be at the house to accept all these shipments, that’s not going to leave a lot of time to pack for the movers on Wednesday and Thursday.
At some point soon we’re going to have to change the locks. Berta wasn’t too concerned, but they haven’t been changed since the house was built, and the last folks were in that sketchy divorce arrangement, so who knows who has a key. We’ll also have to see about the codes for the security system, and for the garage door opener. He gave me his code (he couldn’t figure out how to change it) for the alarm, but he didn’t know the code for the garage. It’s odd, considering that the garage is the main entry for the house - the front door has only the dead bolt lock.
Hmm. More things to think about…
