Tuesday, June 30, 2009

...8 Days Later

Today I actually closed on this house. Apparently when you, or rather the people selling this house, hire a cheap lawyer to file your bankruptcy they don't do it right and you might end up with a $3,000 dollar lean on the title of your house when you try to sell it. Just make sure you don't figure that out until two hours before the sale is scheduled to close.

That's pretty much what happened last week in a nutshell. So there was this $3,000 bill hanging over the whole deal that I certainly wasn't going to pay. Long story short I reluctantly agreed to pay a smaller portion of it (I know, I know, I shouldn't, but give me a break I wanted in).

Monday afternoon we finally rescheduled closing for 3:30 pm on Tuesday. There were some lingering paperwork issues all the way to the end. In fact I was told closing was still uncertain while I was driving to the closing.

I've said all that to say this: The process of buying a house wasn't very much fun.

On the bright side, at the end of closing I was handed a cashier's check for the exact amount that I had reluctantly agreed to pay for the portion of the $3,000 lean. I don't know exactly why, for some reason I wasn't inclined to ask too many questions about why I was being given money, but I guess the numbers crunched in my favor.

Then I get to the new place to find out that the sellers had the electricity disconnected. So instead of simply transferring it to my name I had to fax (really? fax?) all this stuff to Xcel and hope that they get around to turning my power back on before the weekend, which includes freedom Friday this week.

Anyway, that's the update, I'm in, but in the dark. Amish projects only for now.

In the meantime, here's a random picture of the rotten part of the floor in my kitchen, hopefully you'll see documentation of it being fixed in the next week or two. Enjoy.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Genesis

If I could ever pin-point a turning point in my life, that late-night facebook post would be one. Naturally, there was a thought process and events leading up to such a noble declaration, but I wasn't keeping a journal. I immediately started playing less video games, watching less tv, even keeping my apartment cleaner (most of the time). By the middle of January I had managed to considerably increase my normal savings, but still hadn't even considered that I might be able to buy a house. Within a few weeks I started hearing things about low-interest rates and $8,000 tax credits and "best time to buy a home" and I was set on it. The new laptop will have to wait (hopefully not indefinitely).

60 showings, 5 offers, and 5 months later I'm closing on a 4-bedroom Battle Creek house full of little and not-so-little projects. This blog is intended to chronicle these projects as well as other aspects of first-time home ownership. Ideally I'd like to do a lot of before and after stuff, with photos telling a lot of the story.

I'm closing at 3:30 this afternoon, and other than 2 showings, an inspection, and a miniscule amount of scraping and painting the exterior window-sills last weekend, I really haven't spent a considerable amount of time in or around the house. The following pictures were attached to the online listing of the property and feature the furniture and decorations of the previous owner.


Living Room

Dining Room
Kitchen
BasementBasementBackyard - House on left, garage on right
Back "yard" from house
Dining/living room
Master Bedroom w/ 2-blade fan