The New House...and the Complications of Buying a Short Sale and Working with a Crazy Realtor

For those of you who wants the whole story (well, okay, this is actually the short version of it, particularly once I get to the interactions we had with our realtor, but it's going to be a long post...if you want the short version, what you need to do is ask Adam. He'll give you a very short version.)
Several months ago (I'm not sure on the exact timing but I do know it was before Thanksgiving 2013), I was talking to Sandy Watrous, a lovely lady from church who had come over to help out with Zed and Alice, and I mentioned how we were going to outgrow our little house faster than we anticipated. She said, "Oh, I wish you'd buy the house across the street from us!" Well, just out of curiosity, I looked that house up online, but then I pretty much put it out of my mind; I wasn't super impressed with the photos, and it was time to get ready for Christmas, and oh yeah, I had twins to take care of.

Well, as the weather started to warm up in 2014, I would take Zed and Alice out in the stroller and walk around the neighborhood, and I'd frequently see the sign in front of this house (which I will refer to from here on out as the gray house), so I knew it was still for sale. At some point on those walks, my curiosity was piqued again. Adam and I had talked about how we like our ward and don't want to move out of it, but there aren't a whole lot of homes for sale in our ward, and there are actually only a few homes in our ward boundaries that we'd seriously consider (a lot are no bigger than our house; others are twin-homes, and Adam and I aren't twin-home type people). So Adam and I had kinda talked about it a little, and we looked at the pictures online again, and we kinda wondered if we should go look at it

Then, on March 11, Adam texted me to ask if I thought we should go look at the house that night; I responded, "Idk. What do you think?" He said he thought we should go look and that they could show it to us at 5 that evening. Our plan was that we would have the seller's realtor show us the house, and then if we happened to like it, we'd call the realtor we used when we bought our white house...except somehow (to this day, Adam still doesn't know how this happened), the number Adam saw on the listing for the house wasn't for the seller's realtor but was for some other random realtor, who I will call CJ.  CJ showed us the house, and we were surprised; I think we both went into it thinking we would get over there and just know right away that it wasn't a good idea (the photos--and the condition the house was left in--didn't exactly inspire a lot of hope in us). However, as we were walking through the house, rather than being put off by it, we both thought that maybe it could work; it definitely needed work (painting and re-carpeting the whole house and some serious cleaning, among other things), but it was also do-able work.

Well, we thought about things for a few days and we talked to CJ about what selling our home would entail. He was VERY optimistic in what he thought our house would go for; we were surprised to hear he thought it was worth as much as he thought it was, but hey, he's supposed to be the expert, right? We decided to go ahead and put an offer in on the gray house and put our house up for sale. We knew that this could be somewhat complicated because the gray house was a short sale and the seller's realtor said that Wells Fargo (the bank holding the mortgage) wouldn't consider our offer without us having our home sold. (At this point, I will note that we debated whether to keep CJ or go with our preferred realtor, and we ended up sticking with CJ pretty much out of guilt, just cuz we felt bad that he was expecting us to use him...so it turned out to be like a several-months-long pity date, and it was a terrible idea.)

So, we put our offer and put our house up for sale, and we quickly realized that CJ had been way high in the price that he recommended we list our house for. So we lowered our asking price, and we got an offer that was even lower than that, but CJ reminded us we needed to have our house sold in order to be considered by the bank for the short sale. So, with that in mind, plus what turned out to be a communication error from CJ in which he made it sound like we'd be netting more money than we actually would (and of course we didn't discover the error until months later), we accepted the offer...only to find out that the seller for the short sale filed bankruptcy, which meant Wells Fargo couldn't even give us a decision on the house because the seller had to go to court and get the house discharged back to the debtor.

Well, CJ assured us that would happen just after Mother's Day...except, when the seller went to court, it took longer than expected so then the judge had 21 to 45 days to get through his case...and he took the full 45, which took us into the beginning of July. At that point, the debt was discharged back to the debtor and our realtor told us we should have an answer from Wells Fargo within 48 hours. Well, 72 hours later, we heard from CJ that we needed to extend until July 31st. When I asked him what the hold up was, he said there wasn't one (Really? 48 hours and the end of July aren't the same thing to me but apparently they are to CJ.) but that Wells Fargo's employee working on this was new and needed to have time to review all of the files. Good grief.

We did get the approval on July 24th, and we quickly got our inspection done and were ready to move forward, but then our buyers were slow getting their inspection done and then the inspector they used was INSANE. He was seriously really weird with the comments that he put on his inspection--like that the appliances (including our fridge which is 2 years old) were all marginal because of old age (but the swamp cooler that he estimated to be 35 years old and only half works was acceptable), that we probably had asbestos in the basement floors because of the age of the house (uh...Adam and I put those floors in and we've only lived here 3 years, and given that we barely use the basement, they certainly don't look old enough to have asbestos in them), etc. So then he kinda freaked the buyers out, and then our realtor made it sound like they might back out entirely. They ended up submitting a lower offer than we really wanted to accept but we accepted it, rather than countering since CJ made it sound like these people were completely unreasonable and weren't going to meet us in the middle and would just walk away if we didn't do exactly what they wanted.

Then it came time to close on the house, and we needed to get a rental agreement from our buyers, since they had said we could rent the house back from them while we were fixing up the new house. Well, once again, CJ made it sound like they were completely unreasonable people and were playing hardball here and were demanding a $900 deposit and $40 per day for rent  and wanted us out as soon as possible because they were mad that the whole process had taken so long because they had wanted their kids to work on fixing up the house over the summer and just wouldn't work with him on this at all. So, Adam and I were getting really frustrated and worried that if we went and signed all the papers to close, these people were going to show up at the door demanding we get out, since we did not want to pay a deposit and thought $40 per day for rent was a little high. But again, CJ is making these people out to be the devil incarnate, pretty much, so Adam and I are trying to figure out if we need to go rent a storage unit and if we can stay with my sister and how we're going to get the house finished super quickly, etc. (And in the middle of this, for an extra does of awesomeness, every member of our family got the stomach flu and threw up and had body aches and felt awful.)

Adam ended up talking to the buyers directly, skipping CJ and all his crazy talk, and they were super NICE people who didn't want a deposit at all, wanted a much more reasonable rent, and assured him that this is our home and we can rent from them as long as we need to while we're fixing up the new house. Adam said they apologize profusely for the confusion, made sure that he and I had both of their cell phone numbers and knew we could just skip CJ for any further communication, and said that we could take as long as we need to get the new house fixed up and we don't need to feel rushed at all. So, yeah, totally nice, reasonable people...not at all what CJ described. (And, we didn't ask them about this, but we did a little Facebook stalking, and considering that their five children range in age from about 5 to 15, I don't think they were going to have them do a whole lot of repair work on this house. Cleaning, maybe, but I don't think most kids are qualified to do roofing or electrical work.)

So, we went and signed the paperwork to sell our house and then signed all the paperwork to buy the new house, and the seller for the new house did NOT sign the paperwork to sell it when he was supposed to (OF COURSE!)...but he did sign it the next day, and finally, finally, Adam and I were able to purchase the house that we have been trying to buy since March. And I guess for a short sale, that's actually fast, but it still feels slow, and it was made worse by having a realtor who is either completely incapable of communication clearly or delusional...or maybe both.

And now we move onto the house repairs...

Fifteen Months!

I can't believe Alice and Zed are fifteen months old!  Both of them have had a good growth spurt since their 12-month check up.

Zed weighs 23 pounds, 2 ounces (58th percentile) and is about 31.5 inches tall (69%). He has six teeth (four top, two bottom). His hair has been getting darker (he's still blonde, though). He has turned into a little climber and tries to climb on the couches, the rocking chair,  his toys, anything that he can and especially anything we don't want him to be on. He likes to dance, and he is especially good at doing "twirls" (turning in circles). He will sometimes fold his arms for our prayers, although he folds them when he hears "Amen" as often as he folds them at the beginning. He is very good about making sure things go back in their proper place...except for with his toys; those he just wants out! But he's good about putting his shoes and Alice's shoes away and has even recently figured out where to put mine and Adam's shoes--when he's not encouraging us to put them on our feet.

Alice weighs 18 pounds, 5 ounces (12th percentile--yay, double digits!) and is about 29.75 inches tall (28%). She has four teeth (two top, two bottom). Her hair has been getting lighter (she's still a brunette, though). She likes to wave bye-bye and blow kisses and says "Uh-oh" and "thank you" (which mostly sounds like a-oo, but she definitely is saying it in the right context and mimics our intonation). She folds her arms when she hears us say "prayer" or "pray" and sometimes even when we put her in her high chair because she knows we pray before eating. She thinks it's funny to find her belly button; she also knows head, toes, and nose, but belly button is her favorite. She loves to dance, especially shaking her little shoulders, and sings little songs in her sweet little voice. She has a favorite pair of shoes already--her pink sandals with butterflies and flowers on them.

Both of my sweet children continue to bring such joy into my life. I love seeing how they are similar and how they are different. It's funny how almost everything they do is cute, just because they do it (I'm not a big fan of whining, but isn't it funny how your kid can look adorable even with his finger shoved up his nose?). I love seeing them together; they don't always share so well and we're working on "being soft" but those moments when Zed is crying and Alice comes over to stroke his head or Zed leans over to put his head on Alice's shoulder just cuz he loves her just make me melt. Ah, adorable. Love those kids!