We are finally in our new house. I'm going to break this post up into three sections. Hopefully it is not too long. If you get bored by reading about our house, you should at least skip down to section three.
#1. Getting the house.
This part shouldn't have been hard at all. The house was not a short sale or foreclosure. Our loan was ready to go about a week after we entered into a contract with the seller. The seller was quick to fix the minor little problems here and there that turned up in the home inspection. But, I think it is a rule that if you are going to buy a house, something has to go wrong. But for us, what could there possibly be? If you guessed the appraisal, you would be right. Because the house was being sold as a flip, meaning the seller bought it just to turn right around and re-sell it without living in it, our loan required two appraisals. Appraisal number one was done quickly and appraised for the purchase price. The second appraisal, however, came in at $10,000 under the purchase price. For those who don't understand what this means, I will explain. If the bank is going to loan you the money to buy a house, they want to make sure that the house is worth what they are giving you for it, in case they have to foreclose on you. They want to get their money back. So when an appraiser says, hey, that house is worth $10,000 less than what the buyers (us) want to borrow, the bank says, no way. They will only give you a loan for the lowest appraised price. So we had a problem. The seller doesn't really want to lower the sale price by $10,000 and we sure can't come up with that much
more money, and wouldn't really want to anyway for the same reason as the bank. The seller, who is an investor who buys and sells houses all the time, challenged the appraisal saying that there was a conflict of interest between him and the appraiser. They had had run ins before, and the seller had told the appraiser not to appraise his properties anymore because his appraisals were always too low. But the bank wouldn't throw out the appraisal. So the seller then wanted to go ahead and do the loan for $10,000 under the contract price, but split the loss with us by having us sign a promissory note to him for $5000 to be paid off in 18 months. We weren't going to do this for a couple of reasons. So we countered that we do the loan for $10,000 under and then give him $2000 at closing and be done with it. He agreed. We signed loan documents on March 5th and got the keys on the 6th.
#2. Moving in
We started moving in Thursday the 8th. Nate's parents came down on Wed. night and my parents came down on Thursday night to help. We moved all of the big stuff, like furniture, on Friday. The missionaries in our ward came and helped and so did my brother Rob. We got most everything moved but there was still a lot of other stuff at the old house. We are still trying to get it all over here. But we are enjoying our new house. On Saturday, Nate and I had tickets to go see Wicked in Phoenix. Nate had bought them for us for Christmas. Unfortunately, we had gone out to eat at a buffet on Friday night with our families and Nate ended up getting food poisoning and was throwing up all night. We were afraid he wasn't going to make it to see Wicked. (We had never seen it before.) But about a half hour before we needed to leave to make it on time, Nate decided that although he didn't feel good, he felt good enough to go. So we were able to make it. My parents were there too because my sister had happened to give them tickets for Christmas to the exact same showing.
#3. Announcement
If you saw this word and thought to yourself, I wonder if...
Well, you would be right. We are expecting a baby at the end of September. Hopefully. Just real quick in a condensed version for those who don't know--each of our babies has a one in four chance of having a genetic condition that is fatal at birth. We had one baby with it a little over five years ago. So we will find out what is going on when we have an ultrasound. We usually don't even let anyone know we are expecting until after we have the 20 week ultrasound. But this time, we just didn't feel like doing that again.
As an interesting note, I found out I was pregnant on the same day that we found out that the seller had accepted our offer for the house. The last time I found out I was pregnant (with Damon) I had just been hit in the back of the head with a softball thrown by a man trying to get me out at first base in co-ed city softball. (I would link back to that post for you, but I don't know how.) I had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance on a backboard. The doctor at the hospital did a test for us and let us know the news. I think I prefered the day I found out about this baby better. :)
