Until You Come Home

Buying a house is a Pain.  I won't say where, but you can imagine, especially if you have already been there.  Someone told me, that if you can survive buying a house with someone, you can survive anything with them.  That may be a small exaggeration, but not too much.  The paperwork alone is enough to drive a person completely crazy.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  When we got our tax return back, we decided to use it towards buying a house.  We started looking and the second house we visited, I just fell in love with.  It is an adorable fixer upper beach cottage right by the water right here in Niantic.  It came with beach rights and was in a small beach community.  It needs some work, but it was perfect.  Jon has some problems as some of the doors are too short for him to go through without hitting his head on the frame.  That's a priority to fix.  It has all kind of gone down hill from there though.  The house is a short sale which means a lot more paperwork and long waiting since we not only have to have the seller's approval, but also the banks.  But before we could even get to that point, we had trouble with the bank we were trying to get a loan with.  The bank was going to give us a $10, 000 grant and told us we could use that money as our downpayment and to cover closing costs.  Great news, right?  Wrong.  They kept telling us this information over and over until we went to file for the actual money.  Then the terms changed.  Basically, this was just not going to work for us.  We had to go through a different agency, and do not qualify for the money anymore.  But it gets even more complex.  Within less than a week from putting in our offer, the seller accepted it.  We had to wait a month and half to hear from the bank.  When we finally did hear back from them, they wanted us to pay an additional $20,000.  Greedy jerks (and that is about the nicest word i can think up for them).  So we started looking at other houses.  We found a condo in Waterford that fills our housing needs.  I think it's ok, but I would much rather live in the beach house.  After having given up (and many tears of disapointment later), we were filling out the paperwork to rescind our offer on the beach house, and our realtor got a call.  The bank's negotiator for short sales asked for a few extra days before we rescind our offer to try to get the bank back to the original price.  However, we found out that in the mean time, the negotiator has gone on vacation and won't be back for another week, putting us over the days asked to prolong rescinding.  More tears and disapointment.  We went back to the realtor today and found out, we can't put the offer in on the condo yet as someone is in the process of taking back their offer.  So we are going to prolong our offer on the beach house until we hear back from one of the two.  Plus we have been having a few issues with the realtor.  He has scheduled meetings for us without contacting us (and then calling to find out why we aren't there?), forgotten to give us important paperwork and then had us go to the office at 11 pm to fill it out, forgotten some of our meetings, and foisted us off on another realtor who we didn't like at all and when we asked to switch back to her he was upset we didn't like the other realtor.    And we cannot leave him because he had us sign papers to say we would work with him exclusively as a realtor for a year.  Anyway, I am cautiously optimistic and have my fingers crossed that despite all the odds that some how, we will end up in the beach house.  Wish us luck!!  We need it!