The Pudding Club Diary @ 16w0d

I can’t believe it has been two and a half weeks since my last diary entry.  Life has been chaotic as I alluded to in my last PC entry!  We bought our house….THREE AND A HALF TIMES over!!! What does that mean?  It means that we closed/completed not just once, twice, but three times! We are THAT couple – the one where the realtor/settlement people say to other buyers – well, there was this one time when we did this process three times, so count yourself lucky!  None of it was our fault, but mostly put down to an inept realtor on the seller’s side.

The house we had bought was known as a ‘short sale’…which makes things a little different to buying a house normally.  A short sale is a house that if sold is unlikely to cover all the debts owed on that house because it is in negative equity, so we had to deal with the bank to negotiate everything.  There is little room for negotiating and the house is typically sold ‘as is’.  This house had been on the market for almost a year by the time we came to close.  It hadn’t been lived in for at least 6 months.  It needed some tender loving care to say the least.  But that didn’t put us off putting an offer in, even after the inspection came back with a whole bunch of issues:

• Active Termites (creepy!)
• Leaky roof
• Broken toilet that kept self flushing
• Rusted up sinks, taps and plugs that all needed replacing
• Broken garbage disposal
• Broken garage door that wouldn’t open/close
• The whole house needed repainting – inside and out – the tenants had not matched the colour of the paint well so it looked like grafitti everywhere!
• Outdated kitchen and bathrooms
• A garden that had not been cared for and had fallen into disrepair, definitely not housing association approved!
• Ants, ants and more ants
• A spider/caterpillar graveyard (makes my skin crawl thinking about all the dead bugs there were in this house!!!)

But we could see past the imperfections and loved everything about the house we had been looking for…

• A single family home (i.e. a detached house) with garden surrounding the house, back garden south facing
• Beautiful hardwood floors (OK they needed a bit of love)
• Three additional bonus reception rooms including a sun room, breakfast-diner and ‘play room’
• A fourth bedroom (nursery!)
• A double garage
• A fireplace
• Gas stove
• Windows and light everywhere
• A double height foyer
• A ‘nook’ area over looking the foyer
• A community pool, tennis courts, playing field and playground opposite our house.
• The smallest house in a quiet, lovely family friendly neighbourhood, not far from any kind of amenity you could want in one place, at the edge of the city to escape into the countryside.

You probably think I am bragging….well I am a little bit! We simply love it. We are two lucky ducks and count our blessings.

We booked a day off work to sign the papers and get the keys to our dream home.  After we signed the mountain load of papers, we said goodbye to our realtor and thanked everyone we were given the keys to our new house!  Off we went to our new house….it was exciting! Our first home together that was all ours (except the whole mortgage debt thing, but you know what I mean).

We got to work right away in making all the home improvements we needed to complete before moving in.  The next day we got a phone call from our realtor to say that we technically did not own the house yet and did not fully close because of an issue with the bank.  Fortunately, our bank agreed to extend their offer because it was holiday weekend we had until after independence day to close again.  Yup – we re-signed all those papers!  In the meantime, we carried on fixing the house as we had booked all sorts of workers to get started on the house.  We were a little bit unsure what would have happened if the house burned down or was struck by lightening because we didn’t own it, therefore we had no insurance.  But, the settlement company or realtor didn’t seem to think it mattered much that we still were in the property.

We laughed and joked about re-signing, oh how we laughed!  Afterwards, we celebrated again.  Yey!!!! we own the house! Well so we thought….the next day Chris got the phone call saying we STILL didn’t close because the seller’s realtor had sent the documents to the wrong address.  Because he messed up he agreed to pay the fee to lock us in to our mortgage interest rate again – a cool $770 – out of his own commission.  Which ended up SAVING us $22 a month for thirty years because after BREXIT the mortgage rates went down.  So it wasn’t so bad in the end.

This time we just laughed like insane people, because that is all that we could do!  We resigned the paper work for a third time almost a week later than the original date.  No phone calls….yey! we owned the house! Ummmm well kind of, the next week, we had to go and sign another document because the city had decided to change it’s policy for having actual original copies of a certain piece of paper before we could get the application for the deeds.  But anyway….1.5 weeks later, we officially closed and owned the house!

In the mean time, we fixed the majority of the problems (well Chris did the handy work) and we painted 2.5 rooms ourselves before realising it would take us a month to finish the rest of the house and decided to pay a painter to do the rooms we needed to be done before the cats moved in! We also did a lot of packing and unpacking every evening after work.  Then there was the unruly garden we needed to address ASAP before getting complaints from the neighbourhood housing association!

Let’s just say that I am glad we didn’t do this thing when I was in my first trimester! It was exhausting as it was, I would not have been much use several weeks ago.  We did not stop for two weeks.  We had planned to do all this over a month, but because our rented house is a beach neighbourhood and we were cutting our contract early, the management company wanted us out of our house ASAP so they could re-rent it before the end of the summer.  Turned out it was pretty easy to rent out and after a few viewings it was gone.

Finally, we moved into our dream house last weekend!

We still have a lot of work to do around the house, and a few empty rooms that need furnishing, but we will get there.  My mum is visiting next week so we will get her busy with some decorating and gardening 🙂

The whole move has been pretty stressful for our cats Sushi & Diesel, we have been slowly packing/unpacking for almost 2 months now.  Sushi has shown us her distain for this process by frequently puking up hairballs in places like our beds, shoes, front door etc.  We know this is her thing that shows she is stressed.

Then when they arrived in the new house they hid for two days under the sofa in the corner and barely ate/drank a thing.  It was worrisome.  But they have now got used to their new environment.

It was almost three years ago that when we were looking at houses to rent we considered rooms for a nursery, and even a room for an au pair.  But that room we thought would be full of baby stayed empty for our whole tenure.  It was kind of sad saying good bye to that empty room , with memories of the number of times I thought that this time would be the time we would have to re-arrange the furniture to fit a nursery in, that never came to fruition…

….but I am excited now to know that whatever happens, the room we have designated in our new house as a nursery WILL be a nursery.

A new home, a new start on a new journey.

So that is my excuse for being absent from my blog.  I think it passes as being a valid one??!