House Hunting - Part 2

We decide to put an offer on the Victorian, and go ahead with a renovation loan. It meant changing loan officers, since the one I had gone to wasn't trained for that type of loan program, but that ended up being a good thing in the long run anyway. We sat down with John, our Realtor, and started signing papers. And more papers. And just a few more papers. I knew that there would be lots of paperwork, but it is still sort of daunting to have to initial here and date there so many times.

We finished that off, I wrote out a check for our earnest money and we sent it off, knowing that since we were dealing with a bank as a seller, it might take awhile to hear back. Luckily, our wait was not long, and we had a signed purchase agreement within just a few days! We were so excited, and couldn't wait to get in and start having contractors in for bids and all that insanity. But first...the home inspection.

I called up the home inspector who had talked to my first time homebuyers class and made an appointment. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that while it was just a little over a month ago, it feels like eons since then. Anyway, he met Justin and I at the house and we got started. Now, we knew the house needed work. It was missing copper from the heating system, so the baseboard radiators would need to be replaced, and there was certainly lots of cosmetic work that needed to be done, but as we were going along, it just seemed to get worse and worse. With the kind of money we had to work with, and the amount of damage that the house had, it eventually came to the point where we had to go ahead and use the inspection contingency clause on our purchase agreement and pull out. It turns out that there was damage to the plumbing system as well as the heating, the electrical needed a lot of work, the windows all needed to be replaced, and on top of that there was new damage being done. It looked like people were continuing to break in to try and steal more copper piping and had started to poke around the gorgeous woodwork in the downstairs, which was one of the major selling points of the house to begin with.

So we canceled our agreement, which was disappointing. But we decided to go back in
with a new offer, one that was considerably lower and would give us more money to rehab the house. Considering the listing agent denied any ongoing damage to the house, we knew it was a long shot that our offer would be accepted, but we wanted to try. At the end of the day, our new offer was rejected, but at least we could walkaway knowing we had tried everything we could to buy that house. It just wasn't meant to be. We were back to square one.

(to be continued...)