Today at 2:30 PM we will be closing on our new house. We may not have been chosen to be on TV, but there was plenty of drama anyway.
Our story really began in November of 2007, when we first started looking for a house. And by "looking for a house" I mean "Carrie started looking online and we drove past some places." Carrie found one house in Glen Ellyn (near COD) that she thought was perfect. She drove past it and her parents even looked in the windows. Of course, when we went to look at it with the selling agent, we discovered that not only was the inside kind of cruddy, but it lacked a basement. Thus we learned our first lesson of house shopping - despite how stupid it would seem, some people actually do build houses without basements.
Flash-forward to March of this year. This is when we started looking in earnest. First we thought we'd be smart and just go look by ourselves. We spent on Saturday going to see houses that we found online and by calling the selling agents. Of course, every agent we saw wanted to be our realtor. We saw a bunch of houses that day, but only one of them did we like. It was in Winfield, and it came to be known as The Blue House.
We got a referral to a
realtor through
Homegain, and in April went out for a day of "shock and awe" house hunting. I think we saw 10-15 houses in one day. We saw everything from huge homes in Glen Ellyn to run-down foreclosures that would take $70,000 to fix up. We came away from that trip being pretty sure that we'd narrowed things down to three houses - the aforementioned Blue House, a house in Wheaton that had some funky issues with bedroom placement, and a giant house in Glen Ellyn with a bedroom
pre-decorated for a young cubs fan. Actually, now that I look through my emails, it seems like in that same day we also saw the infamous Witt House, which was in Lombard. It was a house we really loved, however, it received an offer the day after we saw it. For quite some time, the Witt House was the standard by which we measured all houses, and we were very depressed that we didn't have a chance to try to get it.
While this was all going on, we were interviewed for the show
My First Place on HGTV. As it happens, we didn't get chosen to be on the show. in retrospect, we think that they missed a great opportunity, because as you will read, once the offer process started, the drama started coming out every which way.
We spent most of the summer looking at houses and wavering on what we wanted, where we wanted to live, and what were acceptable compromises. One of the houses we saw in the original "shock and awe" day was a pretty nice house in Winfield that we called the East House. It was really spacious, and had a good yard that backed up to a forest preserve. However, the location was a little further out than we wanted to be. That being said, I always thought this would be the house we would end up with. Eventually, we narrowed it down between this house and a house in Lombard called the Pinebrook House. Carrie had fallen in love with that house, but we really weren't sure, as it only had 1.5 bathrooms and a small kitchen.
We were standing in the dining room of the Pinebrook House with our realtor trying to decide what to do, when she said "Hey, remind me...why haven't we been looking in Lisle?" We told her that it seemed too expensive for us. She replied that there were several houses she had listings for in Lisle that were in our price range that she thought we would like. To humor her (and put off making a decision) we agreed to go look at them on Monday.
We looked at three houses in Lisle that Monday, all in the same subdivision. The first two we saw weren't for us. The third house.
The third house will be ours in about six hours.
As soon as we saw it, we knew it was our house. There wasn't a single thing that we considered a "compromise". It was completely move-in ready with all sorts of brand new appliances, new woodwork, etc. We walked out of the house and under my breath (the sellers were in the house) I told our realtor that we were ready to make an offer. So a few minutes later, at
Chinn's 34th Street Fishery, we drafted an offer.
Over the next few days, there was quite a bit of drama. The sellers would not reply to our offer until we gave them a copy of our pre-approval letter from our lender. So I faxed the letter to our realtor, and this kicked off all kinds of crazy back-and-forth between our realtor, our loan officer, and the seller. We were arguing with our realtor as well, who kept insisting that our loan officer was trying to rip us off, and that we should go with someone she suggested at Chase. We felt we were in the right. However, once we did talk to Chase, we discovered that our original loan officer WAS a bit of a shyster and that he was charging us thousands of dollars in closing costs that Chase would not charge us. So we switched to Chase.
While this was all going on, we were going back and forth with our offer. We sent our final counter on Friday afternoon, and then never heard back again. Luckily, on Sunday afternoon when we were on our way home from the Ren Faire, we got a call from our realtor saying that our offer had been accepted (actually, she called with a final counter-counter-counter from the seller, but the final counter was actually exactly what we were trying to get to, so it was a no-brainer to accept).
For a while, things were going well. We signed the contract and put up our earnest money and starting going through the process with Chase. Our original closing date on the contract was Sept 25, since everything we'd heard led us to believe that it would take a least 6 weeks for our loan to go through all the process. One of the items in the contract was for the seller to pay all closing costs "up to $8,000" as that was the closing cost estimate from our first loan officer.
Then things hit their first snag. When our lender required a modification to the wording of the contract in order to do our loan, it was sent to the sellers to initial the change. We were then sent the same document to initial - and I noticed that the seller had crossed out part of the change - which would, in essence, mean that they would be paying about $3,000 less of the closing costs. This resulted in a spirited back-and-forth with the lawyers. Then it came out that if we would be agreeable to close in early September, the sellers would give in on the extra closing cost credit. Now, remember - the only reason we had put in the late Sept close was due to the bank. And the bank was now telling us that we could easily close in early Sept. So we agreed, and ended up getting our credit as well as an earlier closing. There was also some fun drama when our house inspection showed high radon and the sellers responded that they thought that was baloney, but they would pay us $1,500 to remediate it anyway.
It gets better.
Last Tuesday, I got a phone call from our realtor's assistant. She was calling to inform me that everything was good to go for our August 29th closing.
Yes, August 29th. Of course, nobody told us about this. A few minutes later, my realtor called me and explained that the sellers really wanted to close in August, not September, and were willing to offer us $1,000 cash to do so. Again, our reply was sure, as long as the bank can do it.
The bank could do it. Carrie and I made plans to take off work on the 29th. We were all set.
Then, on Friday, our laywer tells us that the seller's attorney will be out of town on the 29th...so they want to close on the 28th now. The whole thing was getting ridiculous (especially since every time these things happened, our laywer's bill goes up, so that $1,000 starts to dwindle away). Even though we were upset about all of this, it ended up working out. So we are now closing today.
When I was thinking about what to put in this blog post on the train this morning, I figured it would mostly be about the house itself, with pictures and descriptions. I think that will be a separate post which I'll either do later this morning or maybe this weekend (as soon as we are done with closing we are heading Up North for the whole holiday weekend).
I'm pretty sure that after all this, we're not going to buy a house again ever. We'll live in this house until we die :) Or move to Florida.
Our dinner...yum!
the Marion House has two bedrooms on the second floor, but all the bathrooms are on the first floor (so the kids would have to go downstairs in the middle of the night ot use the bathroom). The Park House is amazing, but it is on a busy street and across the street from a school. The Park House also has the extra appeal that one of the bedrooms was already decorated for a young Cubs fan.
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