The Extended Saga is FINALLY Done

I haven’t blogged about this because I really didn’t want to mess with the karmic universe any more than it was already messing with me. If you have noticed, I never blogged about the closing of our Renton house. That would be because it didn’t close.

The first issue came up when we found out on the buyers switched from a conventional 30 year loan to a FHA one. Okay … not great, but fine, we can deal with that. Just a few more hoops to potentially jump through, but it shouldn’t be a big deal.

The second issue came up when we found out that on the day of closing, the buyers switched lenders a week prior. Not only were they obligated to tell us that they were switching lenders, this last minute activity would push our closing out, potentially mean another appraisal. We were assured that they were going to be able to close within two weeks, everything was fine with the original lender, but there was an issue inputting citizenship status that meant it would be faster to go with a different lender than deal with it.

The third issue came up when we got to the day of closing AGAIN and found out that they switched to a THIRD lender. Apparently the costs of using the second lender was too high. So we sign yet another extension on closing.

Then it seemed like thing after thing after thing cropped up. We were told that we were close to closing for two weeks solid, yet there was always something going on. Apparently the buyers own their own business, their paper trail of money was not straightforward, and with the extra terms of the FHA loan, they kept having to jump through hoops to provide everything.

To say I was pissed about the whole process is an understatement. We had no idea if they were even going to be able to make this work, we kept hearing things like, “They had to refinance a truck” and “They reported some income incorrectly” that made me wonder if we were ever going to offload this house. I knew things had gone too smoothly, but even this was ridiculous. We could have sold and closed our house twice at this point.

And finally I was at my breaking point, where I was ready to tell them no and that we would go to the other people who made an offer on our place. That is finally when progress was made. They were able to get paperwork to escrow. Then this morning we learned that everything was done, all that was left was the courier to get it to the county for recording. I told our agent I expected the courier to get struck by lightning or for an earthquake to hit so that we had to sign another extension. Just so we could set the record for the highest number of extensions for a single transaction.

I just got the call from escrow – we have recording numbers and the house has FINALLY CLOSED! Five weeks late. But hey, thankfully we didn’t overlap mortgages (had it gone into July, we would have).

Time to break out the Champaign!!!