When one house closes

It's done! We now officially own two homes! Um, yay? LOL That was never the plan, but there was just too much to do with closing only 30 days after finalizing the contract on the new house to get the current house on the market in the same 30 days. Had we known not having our current house listed would have caused the underwriters so much heartburn, we never would have waited! But no one said, "you know, the loan people will freak out if you don't have your current house listed yet." (If they had, we would have listed it.) No, they waited until just a couple of days before closing to let us know they were skittish. We'll put the current house on the market before Thanksgiving (and we sent them something that said so, in writing, *twice*).

The mortgage people were a pain for a large portion of the last two weeks. Once it left the hands of the local guy and went up to the "official" people at corporate, things went downhill. They were not the most organized with the paperwork, which amazes me since they pretty much handle paperwork for a living. I know our agent faxed them a copy of our contract 3 different times, including the day before closing. We had to re-fax some papers the day before, and sign and re-fax something (that they explicitly told me that very afternoon we did NOT need to resign) at 8:30 PM the night before closing.

Closing was supposed to be at 1 PM at the lawyer's office. They promised to have us the amount we needed for the cashier's check sometime in the 9-10 AM time frame the following morning, and they assured us the papers would be to the lawyer in plenty of time. At 10:45, we still didn't have the papers to the lawyer (for our 1 PM appointment!), nor did they have the final amount we needed, but they gave us an estimate. We ended up padding that number by an additional 10% or so, since they won't take cash or a personal check for the difference if you are short. And *then* they caused our actual closing appointment to be delayed by 2 hours because they could not get the papers to the lawyer in time to review it before our scheduled appointment (hint: 15 minutes is not enough time to review that volume of legal paperwork!!). They wanted to move it out to 4 PM, but that was unacceptable since we had to pick up Luke at school. We have not been happy with the loan people at all, and they will not get a good review from us on the survey they said was coming. I won't mention the name here, but you can contact me if you need/want to know. We were just very annoyed, to say the least.

Once we finally got to closing around 3:15 PM (the lawyer's 2 PM appointment ran over), everything went great. I think we were done in about 40 minutes, which still gave us enough time to pick up Luke. Not the best day, but it's all done, and we have the key to prove it!



Currently feeling: like we have one house too many