House Update

I have not really posted about the house buying process since we found the house we wanted to put an offer in on. So here is a bit of a timeline of the process.

We put in the offer on Tuesday night. Our offer was apparently nearly identical to the other offer that was put in. Thanks to our real estate agent suggesting we put in a personal letter about our family and a picture, our offer was the one chosen. Thanks to email and the ability to sign documents online, they counter offered, and we accepted, and everything was finalized by 10pm that night.

After that, it was a lot of waiting and getting paperwork together. Our mortgage guy had already asked for most things he needed from us, but he needed a few more. In addition, we had to let our insurance agent know, and get earnest money checks to the escrow company.

Based on our two previous (and horrendous) experiences with escrow, I took the closing date off work so that we could be available to sign the paperwork. Turns out, laws have changed since we last bought 10+ years ago, and now, you do not sign the loan paperwork on the closing date. You sign the paperwork a couple of days before and the loan funds on the closing date.

This created a bit of stress for us, because it meant we had to be available to sign paperwork BEFORE the closing date, and my schedule did not allow for taking a different day off work. Thank goodness for mobile notaries. The notary came to our house at 8pm to get it all done. Even with all the stress of trying to figure that out, it was actually the least stressful escrow/closing process we have had.

On the date of closing, our real estate agent brought over the keys after all the paperwork had been filed and recorded.

That was over three weeks ago now. A little over one week ago (after the kids were out of school), the movers came and moved our furniture. We’ve been living in the new house since then. Of course, because we have not sold the previous house yet, we do not have a deadline for getting all of our stuff out of it.

This means that we are not completely out of the old house. C has been going down a couple times a week during the week, and we have spent considerable time there on the last two weekends. We are a week or two (I hope) from having all of the stuff we are keeping out. Then we need to get a junk removal company in to remove all the things we are not keeping.

So, we got the house. We are in the house. Now we are working on getting out of the old house. Hopefully that will be done soon.