Drive by stalking

I have become a stalker. I keep driving slowly by our house everyday checking on the work of the chimney people. It looks like the sellers were there yesterday moving out the rest of the stuff that was in the house and someone was in the basement today doing some work but no more chimney work has been done for a couple weeks. With the closing date scheduled 8 days away I'm very concerned the work won't be done - particularly since the weather has gotten colder and I hear that's not optimal mortar-curing weather. Keep your fingers crossed. I think I just have waited so long and gone through so much to now feel like we may have to put it all off a while longer.

I can hardly stand the wait any longer!

Floor refinishing

After much, much, much discussion we have decided to use some of the proceeds from the retirement check to pay for someone to refinish our hardwood floors downstairs for us. We were really considering doing it ourselves - including much reading, consultation, research, and video rentals on demo - but decided against it. I think if this were our third or fourth home improvement project on the house I'd feel differently but I'm not sure about our skill level at this point. We'll paint the first weekend in February after we move in and the floor guy will come later that week before we move in. We may do the ones upstairs on our own at some point, we'll see.

Here's who we got to do the floors. I called about 6-7 places and one place said they didn't do floors in Bangor any longer but could recommend Don Dickel Floors - I figured that was a good sign if other flooring people were recommending them. It was pretty uniform to get quoted $2/square foot and that's also what we're getting from them:

http://www.dondickelfloors.com

Besides, this guy was on HGTV! Can't beat that!

Smooth sailing to 1/31

Happy New Year! I was ecstatic and quite relieved to finally receive my retirement check from Louisiana this week. We have paid off a couple loans and have the money for the FHA 3% down payment and our closing costs. What a relief! I think we are all set. They have been repairing the chimney this past week and hope to have that done soon. Not sure about the electrical work but we've scheduled a follow-up inspection for the week of the 21st so hopefully all is done by then. So excited to almost be in our new house after all the rigmarole! Woo hoo :)

Holiday update

I have been lax with the holidays, I know -- not that I think anyone is actually reading this... things are progressing well now. After many, many weeks of chasing after my retirement account, a check will be on its way in the first week of January. That means we'll have the money for the closing and to pay off some needed debt to get the mortgage. It will be quite a relief!

We also drove by the house the other day and they look to be finally working on the chimney so that should be done rather soon. Hopefully the wiring is also on its way.

In the meantime, we're looking at paint colors. I'm hoping we can paint the living room and dining room and get the kitchen wallpaper done and painted before we move in. I don't think, however, we're going to be able to afford to get the floors done and we're honestly a bit scared to do it ourselves. It would be a terrible thing to screw up! We'll also be going to Sears (credit account, here we come) the first week of February to order our new range, fridge, and front-loading washer. We're going to go ahead and get a fridge with water/ice dispenser even though we don't have water hooked up yet as we should be able to do this in the summer remodel. I applied for a summer grant to do some research so that might be another $7500 toward remodeling - probably a bit in the bathroom or maybe the floors - we'll see! We were also talking about using it some of it to take our honeymoon that we never took - that would be nice too :)

Other than that, starting the hateful job of packing. At least we don't have to be too meticulous about it this time - it's just a couple miles down the road!

Sigh...what friggin' now?

So I learn today that not only is my retirement account withdrawal form (what we planned to use to pay the downpayment and closing costs) lost somewhere in the hole of Louisiana but that we will have to pay our homeowner's insurance a year ahead of time before we close. That's another $720 that we'll have to find before we close! This is just all ridiculous - I mean, I feel like I really spent some time doing research to understand this process and thought I had a good idea of what we would need to pay for but there's always something new that's coming up that's $500 here or $600 there. I just don't see how people who are low-income can ever afford to do this - we're certainly not poor but we're not rich and this is tough.

I think I'm going to have a mental breakdown though with this retirement check. I have a feeling I'm going to have to resend the form overnight (if anyone there ever returns an email or phone call to let me know to do this) and with next week being Christmas, I probably won't see it until the end of January, if we're lucky. If we don't get that money we won't be able to close on the house. How mortifying. I hate this process - seriously. I don't think I ever want to do this again.

Appraisal a go-go

We got the appraisal back and all looks good minus some paint issues that FHA requires to be dealt with - mostly concerns about lead paint. So we need to put an additional few hundred at closing into the escrow account to cover the money we'll need to paint the one side of the house and the garage. The inspector originally thought that the seller probably rotated painting sides of the house every few years and it was most likely time to paint the one side before she died so it's peeling a bit. We think it will be a good opportunity for us to learn how to paint the outside of a house -- at least until we figure out, long term, about colors, etc. for the exterior (you'll notice it's just white now).

So, inching closer to the closing...phew!

Financing is approved

We were happy to hear that our financing was approved. We have to pay off a couple of loans but were planning to do that anyway. Here's hoping that my retirement account check arrives before the closing date!

On another note, we drove by the house yesterday on our way to buy our first real tree (it was realllllly cold out, by the way) and saw that the sign now says "sale pending" (see me above). That was really exciting! It's also fun to start thinking about how we'll decorate next year for the holidays :)