House Update

You may have remembered this post from a couple months ago... yeah, we didn't get that place.

Here's what's been going on on the house hunting front.

1) We put an offer on a place in Chula Vista (the nice part, thank you). They already had an offer they'd just accepted. Boo.

2) We put an offer on previously mentioned place in El Cajon. We put our offer in the day after it went on the market. We offered $10,000 more than the asking price. We had the place in the bag. In. The. Bag.

Without going into too many details (since we are now so over getting incredibly screwed by Bank of America), the bank who owned the property passed it on to one rep to clear us to make our offer official. One rep. One clearance. Should have taken a day. We heard nothing for two weeks. Finally got a new BofA rep. He got our offer finalized by the next day; bank told us they accepted an offer just the day before. Bank of America's selling agent told us we even had a higher offer, but thank you to Miss Doesn't Do Her Job At all at Bank of America, nobody won.

(The moral of the story is if you try to buy a place through Bank of America, go in and sit in the office of whoever has your offer and stare at them until they do their job. This is my plan for the next time this happens.)


3) We found an A-freaking-mazing place that was CHEAP. Completely remodeled, amazing layout, high vaulted ceilings, everything brand new... we fell in love in one night, sent in our offer the next morning. They already had a cash offer, but the guy wasn't responding to a counter-offer by the seller. We offered $15,000 more. The selling agent made us feel very optimistic. Another one In The Bag. We waited out the weekend to hear the good news that we had the place.

This past Monday: They went with the cash offer.

I prepared myself for Chris and I have to have roommates for our first precious months of marriage.

4) We put another offer in on Tuesday, for a place we'd looked at while we were quite confident we would be getting the remodeled place. It was a great place, but we didn't really bother with it, since we were already pre-decorating our newly remodeled condo that was In The Bag. When we found out we'd lost the other place, Chris put in the offer just because... why not?

On Tuesday afternoon Chris called me: "Um, they sent us a counter offer."

Me: "What does this mean?"
Chris: "Basically if we accept it, we start the process of actually buying and no one else can beat us out."
Me: "Okay, but I'm not getting my hopes up. I've been hurt too many times before." (Dramatic hand raise to the eyes.)

We found out Thursday we got the place. It's a pretty nice 3 bedroom in El Cajon with a brand new huge kitchen.

BUT!!! I won't believe it until we have the keys. I went digging around online and found all kinds of horror stories. Allegedly (Chris' favorite word) we will close at the end of August and the place will be ours. Our main hurdle we foresee is that the place won't appraise for how much the seller is asking for it, in which case the bank won't give us the full loan, and the seller will have to be okay with dropping the price. Hopefully, the seller isn't completely blind and has looked at the comps in the area as well, and isn't really expecting what he's asking... if he is, then hopefully he'll realize that no one else will be able to get the full loan amount either.

In conclusion! We are in escrow. We could move in beginning of September. We could lose the place and have to start the search all over. We are not discussing where the TV will go, what carpet color we want, or the fact that we could have a library in one of our 3 bedrooms.

But crossed fingers and prayers and good thoughts are completely welcome!