Cancel That Bit About the Good News

I must have spoken too soon.  Yesterday was the home inspection, and I stayed for 2 hours of it.  By the time I left, the inspector said he just needed to check out all the windows on the second floor and the attic.  Nothing really significant had been found yet, so I was very pleased and figured the worst thing he’d find would be inadequate insulation or maybe some critters in the attic.

Unfortunately, this morning I got the inspection report and saw that he’d gotten suspicious about something and gone to check the foundation.  There he found significant bowing and a crack, which may indicate serious problems.  Apparently this is a huge problem that can cost tens of thousands of dollars to fix and make the house very undesirable to future potential buyers.  We’ve got a civil engineer scheduled to look at the place tomorrow to give us a definitive answer, but based on our current bad luck, it’s looking more and more likely that we will have to walk away from this deal (after we paid for all the inspections, too…).

Guess we gotta look at some more houses and places to rent now…

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Conjunction Junction

Ninjas need directions to find Velius

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Finally Some Good News

The FUH’s seller tried to open the sale up for a bidding war between us and another buyer and we were like screw that.  We decided to give up on the area we had been looking in (Ben Avon).  The bus service was very quick there, but there were simply too few houses on the market and all the sellers were jerking us around.  We shifted to more family-friendly Mt. Lebanon, and the process was very different.  With a much bigger inventory of houses, we definitely found ourselves in a powerful position.

We went to a few open houses this weekend, and while a few were terrible, one house really stood out to us.  It had been nicely kept up, had more space than we needed (4 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms) so that we probably would not have to move again, a finished basement that the owner ran her computer business out of (wired man cave YESSSSS), an ok yard, and a two car garage.  Although a few things were dated, everything was well-maintained.  Even better, the owner only needed 3 weeks to move out.  This meant we might not have to sublet a place temporarily and pay for movers to truck our stuff around twice.

We decided to put in an offer the next day.  We knew the house had been through two open houses, and might be due for a price reduction, so we came in very low (~$27k under listing price).  In spite of this, the seller still countered very quickly, probably because she had no other offers.  A few more quibbling rounds of back and forth took place, but we had a good feeling throughout the whole process.  The seller was very quick to respond at all times, and she realized she would have a tough time getting as much as we were offering from anyone else.  In the end, she accepted our offer for about $14k under the listing price.  We were willing to go up another $5k, but fortunately she did not know that.  Essentially we met in the middle between her listing price and our lowball offer.

Needless to say, Bunky and I are excited and relieved.  The previous sellers were so uncooperative, that the process was tortuous.  This one went through super-smooth, and I guess our third time making an offer was the charm.  In other good news, no pipes burst in our place; it turns out the washer hose sprung a leak.  Apparently this happens all the time with cheap rubber hoses.  Now it’s just a matter of making sure both the sale of our condo and the purchase of this house go through and we’ll be living it up in a place with more than twice the space!

On an immature note, after learning that people call Mt. Lebanon “Lebo”, I have started referring to our new town as “Lesbo” and “Mt. Lesbian” to Bunky’s great dismay.

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House Decision

Mixed bag:

  • Already-done-house (ADH) sellers finally formally rejected our offer.  I don’t think they were ever really planning on selling, because we put in a very attractive final offer (since Bunky loved that house so much).  Bunky and I felt used, and the chase put us behind in our search and likely cost us quite a bit of dough.
  • Place we were planning to sublet got rented out 2 hours before we were going to check it out.  We didn’t immediately just plunk down an offer for it because we weren’t completely sure we’d need it, since we were waiting on ADH.  This was partially my fault too, since I didn’t realize how hard it was to get a sublet that ran through the end of August, and so I said we should look at the place first.
  • The reason we wanted a sublet was because if we bought the fixer-upper-house (FUH), we had to do extensive renovations.  The contractor we want couldn’t start until late July, so we needed something through August at the very least.
  • Since we were waiting on ADH, we didn’t immediately put an offer in on FUH.  This allowed someone else to put an offer in on FUH, putting us in competition.  Our offer was countered at about $5k higher at 9:00 PM of the final night before our offer expired.  While it’s encouraging that we finally have a measure of control, we’re a little peeved that we don’t feel secure quibbling for a few extra thousand dollars because of the other potential buyer.
  • Restored most of my computer.  Lost about 2 weeks of data, which is not so bad, considering the next oldest restoration point was about 2 months old.

We’ll probably accept the counter-offer just to put the search behind us.  There’s still the search for a place to live during the renovation period, and the renovation itself.  Fortunately, we qualify for a second mortgage so we don’t have to spend all our cash on the renovations.  This process is much more stressful than I expected… Buyer’s market my ass!

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