oh and by the way we own a house
by William on 2009-04-26
“Rebecca and I signed several dozen documents Thursday morning, and now we own a house.”
While this is only the beginning of a beautiful, heartwarming story of life, love, friendship, faith, and the house where all that takes place, this is also the end of a thrilling, suspenseful story of twists, turns, schedule changes, and last-minute inspections. It is the latter story I wish to tell here.
When we first made an offer on the house which we now own, we set the closing date as April 29. And we were happy. The seller wanted to close sooner, but we stood firm, for we had our reasons, and we prevailed upon said seller, and we were going to close on April 29.
Then my manager at work came to me and said, in essence, “Do you mind if the University sends you to Las Vegas for a week beginning April 26?”
As one can imagine, it would be difficult to close on a house in Austin, Texas when one is in Las Vegas, Nevada. I knew this kind of opportunity would not come often, though, so I immediately checked with Rebecca and our agent Lisa to find out if we could possibly reschedule the closing. We could! We would now be closing on April 22, and I would get to go on my trip to Las Vegas.
Then, one week before our new closing date, our mortgage broker Mark called to tell me that the underwriter requested a structural inspection. The normal inspection made some mention of cracks and gaps in a few places in the ceiling, and the underwriter wanted to make sure the foundation was not the cause.
I was blessed to find an engineer that was available the following day, and he kindly told us that our foundation was in amazing condition. We grumbled a little that we had to pay for this inspection out of our own pocket, but we would not have received the loan without it, so we didnʼt really have a choice.
Unfortunately, the structural inspection was enough to throw our schedule off a little. On Monday, April 20, we still didnʼt know if we would be able to close on Wednesday morning. We decided to push it back to Thursday morning, just to be safe. This was a good idea, because the paperwork wasnʼt ready for us Wednesday morning.
Thankfully, both our employers didnʼt have a problem with our taking leave Thursday instead of Wednesday. Rebecca and I signed several dozen documents Thursday morning, and now we own a house.