closing time

There is something wrong when less than thirty minutes later after closing on a house you find that the kitchen faucet is broken and leaking everywhere. It’s even better to find out that even though the faucet looks fancy the sprayer design is the problem and the leak is easily fixed. That’s what happened to us on Thursday when we closed on the house. A stressful moment that was easily fixed.

I think for some closing on a house is easy. For others it must be extremely stressful, difficult, and downright not worth it. We had a little of each when closing on our house. Much of the process wasn’t stressful or difficult, especially for a short sale. I think this was in part because of realtor and mortgage broker who kept moving things along and had a positive attitude. (It also helps to have a competent lawyer working on the short sale too.) The short sale took about three months. That’s about as short as it gets, too. Many of them last six months to a year, and some even longer.

At the beginning we were told a closing date of May 13. Unfortunately, this number was more of a goal than anything concrete. Fortunately, the goal was not too far off. The paper work seemed to be going through, the banks approved the short sale. And at the end of April it looked like we might move on the 13. By the beginning of May we met with the mortgage broker again who said that we should have a closing by the end of the month. We moved our moving date to Memorial Day weekend. It was better this way. We had a long weekend; it didn’t coincide with work that I had the previous weekend. Then the title, the last part of the process, was found incorrectly processed from the previous sale of the house and it needed to be done correctly. We found this out the Tuesday before the Saturday move. There would be no way to move on the weekend.

Again we had to postpone our moving date. This time it was not a good change. All the help that we had before now couldn’t come. We were frantically looking for help. So much so that we begrudgingly used Facebook to ask for help. Not only that, but the change in date meant that we would be moving in a different month. We had told our landlord we would be out by the end of May. In the whole process we were blessed that the new renter wasn’t moving in until June 8, and we were able to stay in our rental for a few extra days.

We were told that the closing would be the Tuesday or Wednesday after Memorial Day at the latest. The closing? It was done the Thursday after Memorial Day. This brings us back to the beginning where after finally closing and getting to go in our new house – the first thing we find is the faucet broken.

Well, it’s all better now. And so is the house now that the main two rooms are painted. There are still boxes everywhere, and the lawn still isn’t mowed. The walls though, they look good.