a burrow of my own

Life has, I believe, finally begun to settle down a bit. And having done such, I really ought to get back to blogging.

So, I have decided to begin with what has been so all-consuming of my time of late--The Great House Hunt.

It began back at the end of May, when I decided that I really truly despise the commute from Draper to Park City, especially in the morning when it could take up to an hour and a half. That, and since my lease was up at the end of July, I figured I had best get cracking on the hunt.

May 31 Dec and I send an e-mail to one of our friends who is a realtor. We tell him what we think we're interested in (price, size, etc.).

June 1 We get our first e-mail listing of properties. We continue to receive these daily.

June 3 We begin our drive-by process after I've made a map of where the initial 25 properties we want to start getting a feel for are located. I find it interesting that you can tell when you first drive into a neighborhood whether or not you would actually want to live there.

June 5 We begin looking inside houses. Dec likes one downtown; I like one in Sugarhouse. We go out for sushi with our realtor. Dec had some deranged inclination to offer to pay for our meal, whereas I'm thinking it's a write-off for our realtor. Needless to say, the realtor pays. And it was good sushi. I highly recommend the Happy Sumo at the Gateway.

June 6 We return to look at a couple houses. The Sugarhouse home has beautiful, decorative ceilings and an amazing kitchen. Everything else there, though, despite being in the process of being updated, is crap. Too much work.

June 7 We go back to the downtown home. After visiting a few other houses, this one looks amazingly better. It's clean. It has hardwood floors. The garage is enormous. We decide to put an offer on the house with a closure deadline of June 28.

June 8 The seller counteroffers, and we accept. I shuffle money around here and there to put the earnest money down.

June 9 I contact our mortgage broker, who Dec used to work for, to get things going there. I contact my insurance agent (my uncle) to get things going there.

June 11 We go to Rock Springs for my niece and nephew's blessings. I catch the flu. (This is important later.)

June 13 As alluded to earlier, drama ensues. The appraisal for the house comes in $90,000 under selling price. This is not a good thing. Apparently the bank will not give you money for a house if the house doesn't appraise at value. As we do more research into things, we discover that the appraiser merely did a computer search and felt he didn't have the comparables, so he didn't do an actual appraisal. Our agent is livid. After weighing our options, we decide to get a new appraiser for the house (one who actually works the downtown market and understands what's going on there with the real estate). We also postpone the inspection we had scheduled for June 14.

June 18 I had assumed that my inability to eat was just lingering effects of the flu. Suddenly I realized that the flu had nothing to do with my inability to keep food down; I was stressing about the appraisal. I call our realtor to have him make sure the new appraiser stops dithering and gets the new appraisal done the next day. Especially since we had rescheduled the inspector for said day.

June 19 Even though we don't have official word from the appraiser that the house has appraised, we go through with the inspection anyway as I find I am anxious to actually move. The inspection comes through pretty good. There are some things that we consider. Because of how one of the additions to the house was done, I do some internet research into the termite history in Utah.

June 20 The appraisal comes back. Unfortunately, it comes back $500 under the selling price. We bargain with the seller to lower the selling price if we don't ask for any pre-sale repairs. Since the things we were going to ask him to do were simple things we could do, we agree. We begin pushing the realtor to get everything in order so we can close by the end of the week.

June 22 Apparently now the bank wants a visual appraisal of the house done. Stupid appraisal crap. On top of that, Dec's birthday at Boondocks kinda sorta sucks since the teenaged girl running the bumper boats is, apparently, too stupid to keep up on the charging of said boats, meaning that there are about four running boats, and we just don't have time to wait in line for two hours for a turn to putter on the water. Mini golf was good though; I won.

June 23 The bank's appraiser can't be bothered to get the appraisal done, so there's no way we can close on the house or move this weekend, even though we had cleared our schedules and lined people up to help us. Sigh.

June 26 The bank agrees to let us close on the house as long as all parties sign a little addendum saying said closing is nullified if the visual appraisal doesn't come back to their liking. I spend too much time signing my name over and over and over again.

June 27 I harass our realtor and our mortgage broker all morning to see if they've heard anything yet. At 2:00, we finally get word that funding has gone through even though the title company hasn't seen anything yet. That's good enough for the seller, and we start moving in at 3:30. The house records at 4:30.


And that is, in a nutshell, the process of getting a house. I've learned that I hate appraisals. I don't think I look forward to paying a mortgage, seeing as how it's so much more than what I was paying rent. But I own property. I guess that's good.

Since then, we've gotten everything moved in. We swapped the kids' bedroom and the office, which is a good decision. We installed the bunk beds that Sister used to have in her condo. We went shopping with the Momma for a fridge. It's rather lovely. We also got a microwave, though we're still trying to figure out how to install it in the space that is an inch too short for it. We had our DirecTV installed. Even if he did miss the morning window when he was supposed to be here and then missed the afternoon window when his car broke down. But the following morning, at 7:45, he was here to install. I've unpacked a portion of my books. The others are still, sadly, packed away in boxes. Last weekend, we painted the living room. It looks hot.

I'm sure there are more adventures to follow.