Today is the day. Boy have we been looking forward to this. Time to get out of the apartment.
I am still pretty sick today so working from home again. Just what I need when we are about to close on the house.
Brian and Tara left Philadelphia this morning around three in the morning. We were quite surprised when we learned that they were already in the mountains of Virginia by mid-morning. We had originally not been expecting them down until the beginning of next week. At the pace that they are going they are going to be here tomorrow. We are not going to be ready at all.
The morning was very quiet. I just worked from home and tried to not get any more sick.
At just after noon we received the total amount of money that we were going to have to pay today and were told, without any warning, that we needed a cashier’s check. What!?! It is a little late to be telling us that now. All along we were told that we would just need a check. Over and over again this was said. I’m very aware that it was said because I was surprised that that would be enough but was thrilled because getting anything else is a major problem.
So now, obviously, we have a major problem. Not only do I not have a local bank from which to draw funds for the closing but even if I was already standing in the bank when they told me I probably would not have enough time to get a cashier’s check cut and get to the closing in time. I was pretty much getting ready to head out to the closing when the email arrived. Not good.
So we panicked for a bit. We figured out that a wire transfer would work but they waited so long to tell me about the cashier’s check that the wire transfers were closed for the day already! I pleaded with my bank in New York and they said that they would see what they could do to manually get the wire done before the actual transmission went through but we were almost a full hour after the close of wire for the day so we were likely screwed there.
I didn’t even know if the money would go once I was on the road and driving to the closing so I was just taking my chances. Dominica emailed me while I was en route to let me know that the money had gone through. Pheww. Thankfully we use ESL Federal Credit Union back home who were able to maneuver things for me. Had we been with a normal bank, we would have been screwed.
I got to the closing to discover that because of Texas Homesteading laws, of which we know nothing, Dominica has to be present at the closing even though she is not on any of the paperwork. That’s not very convenient. So now we have to figure out how to get her down here for the closing paperwork since she is at home with a sleeping Liesl and I have the BMW with the car seat.
We decided to proceed with the closing and have Dominica jump in later. So we did the closing which went smoothly and we were done before three thirty. Maybe even by three.
What is exciting is that the mortgage cost of the new house is only about 64% the cost of our current rent on the apartment that we don’t even like all that much! The house is at least 50% larger than the apartment too plus has a garage. Overall, a major win. Even after taxes and insurance the house is a little cheaper than the apartment.
I ran over to 7-Eleven and grabbed a snack and then drove back down to the apartment to pick up the girls. We got them loaded then drove back up to the title company and Dominica did her signing and we were done. Now, it turns out, that the sellers are not able to get to the closing until after work so even though we did all of our portion we have to wait a while for everything to wrap up. They are scheduled to do their portion of the closing at four thirty.
We went back to the apartment and I did some work for the office and we loaded up the BMW to get ready for when we would be able to go up to the house. At around five thirty we received the email that the money had cleared and everything had been signed and the house was now ours! We would be finding out about the keys in a little while.
It took a little bit before we heard that we would be getting the keys around seven. The former owners were still in the house doing last minute cleaning and wanted a little time to wrap up before we headed on over there. The bad news, though, was that while they were cleaning the water had been shut off. Apparently in Carrollton they just turn off the water when a house is sold. News to us. We had no idea. Electric we had already switched over. Internet is set to be turned on on Thursday. But water? We figured that the city would either contact us or just switch over to the new owners since the city knew that we were swapping over. Nope, not the case.
Our real estate agent told us that the other real estate agent told her that the sellers had told her that they had set the water to be on for one more day and were very surprised and angry to find it turned off this afternoon. We were not too happy either. We have been waiting to do laundry and to move into the house and had already planned to have been moved in several hours ago and now a major snag this late in the process is not fun.
It took a while to even track down who we were supposed to contact about the water and when we did it turned out that the office had been closed for eight minutes. Again, had the closing been on time this wouldn’t have been an issue. Now we lost a day in the house.
So at seven we drove up to the new house with the one car load of stuff including some folding chairs. We had some issues finding the key that they had hid outside and it probably took us thirty minutes poking around in the yard in the complete dark and several phone calls to track the thing down.
Once we got into the house there was really pretty much nothing for us to do so we just set up our folding chairs in the living room and sat there for about an hour or so taking it all in. Our first “day” in our new house.
We were pretty bored by the time that we were done as there is literally nothing to do in the house. Without water you can’t even clean and using the bathroom is a bit risky. Without Internet we can’t really do anything entertainment wise. Without a truck we can’t really move anything real into the house. We are pretty much stuck.
More information tomorrow. We are very hopeful that we can get moved in and start living in the new house. Brian and Tara made it to Nashville tonight so there is a good chance that they will be arriving tomorrow in the DFW. So much for our plans to be out of their way before they arrived.
Liesl seems to like the new house. She had fun hanging out in it and Oreo was very excited to have a new, large, open space to explore. He is going to love being out of the apartment.
Off to bed. Tomorrow is going to be one crazy day.