Post Closing Letdown

I closed on my house last Tuesday. A friend of mine came over that evening and took a bunch of before photos for me.  Like this one:

Since then, I've been running nonstop. Shopping for paint, painting, packing, babysitting the movers, placing furniture... then, well there was supposed to be unpacking.

Not a lot of unpacking has happened yet. I still have the dining room to paint before I can place the china cabinet. There are a lot of boxes that go in my china cabinet so that's kind of overwhelming. Also, I kind of left the bedroom stuff until last. So that stuff was dumped into boxes and the thought of unpacking those boxes is horrifying.

I have a friend coming over tonight to help paint. Hopefully we can get the dining room done so I can start unpacking in that room. I still need to pack and bring over all my kitchen and bathroom stuff. All the stuff in my closets too. So I'm kind of living between both places. I'm sleeping at my condo on an Aerobed, and spending evenings at the house getting things painted and organized. Hopefully by this weekend, I'll be ready to move fully into my house.

Right now I'm just kind of tired and still anxious to get things done - although I feel like I could just go home and sleep until morning.

I can see clearly now

I've gotten to a point in my life where I don't like to see myself naked. When I'm brushing my teeth, I usually wear a towel because the girls no longer are perky and my belly is saggy and..... well, I'm fat.

I'm still waiting to close on my house btw. Which means I'm surfing house websites and decor websites trying to stay excited about owning a home. So I ran across this:

Spaces design by Interior Designer prizmastudio

It was on Houzz which is an interesting site, if a little cumbersome to surf.

But seriously???? A glass tub, that you can see from the kitchen! What skinny designer dreamt this up? Talk about my idea of hell. The only thing that would be worse is putting it in a room that had a wall of mirrors so I could see all my squishy bits smooshed against the tub walls.

Okay, I'm back to surfing. I felt I had to share; in case you were planning your dream home and loved the idea of seeing yourself naked in a tub.

Second verse (hopefully not) same as the first

So....


Wednesday morning I frantically called several banks. I also had to tell my broker and the seller. Well, the seller wasn't happy but I understand that - I was pretty upset too!  It had been almost 7 weeks since BoA started the loan process and they're just now telling me they can't loan me money?

My broker got me a deal with a local bank. They could do a three year balloon type of loan and close in 10 days. This would make the seller happy and was kind of scary for me. But I'd have the house and I'd have time to get a conventional loan.

The seller gave me the name of a guy who did a friend's loan or their loan.... I wasn't really paying 100% attention since I was feeling kind of numb and not in my body and cried at the drop of a hat. I called that dude and he called me on the way home. I told him the whole sordid tale and said I wanted to know if they could loan me the money or not before I went through another seven week process. He said he'd get some basic information from me and it wouldn't take seven weeks. He could close in three weeks - tops.

So, it looks like I have another loan. Heartland Premier sent me all the paperwork today. The interest rate is .125% higher but they can close in 10 days. I'm not counting my chickens before they become loan commitments though. I'll check back with them on Tuesday morning and see if they have the appraisal scheduled and if I can get a loan committment letter from them. Because a verbal yes clearly doesn't mean dick in the banking world.

Yeah, it sucks that I have to pay for another appraisal. But I'll have the house early enough to do some painting before the movers come on the 8th. And...AND... I'll have a house.

Oh, the worst part? The loan processing POS at BoA couldn't even call me to tell me that they denied my loan. His boss called to tell me and even she kind of beat around the bush. Seriously, grow a fucking pair! Seven weeks of bullshit and you can't even tell me it's a no? How did they get to be "too big to fail" if they are such fuck-ups? He asked for the same information multiple times and apparently it takes 5 weeks for them to even open up the file. 

Bank of America, you denied my loan and I'm pissed; but I'm more pissed that your employees don't have enough professionalism to tell me or enough timely work practices to not leave me hanging on so long. I used to defend you to people, now I'm on the other side. I have no idea how you got so big, but if success in the banking industry is that easy, sign me up!

Returning calls *Updated)

Hey, the loan officer's boss just called me back to tell me they're declining my loan. After a good ugly cry, I called my boyfriend who gave me the name of his loan officer. Officially worst day ever.

I'm still trying to close on my house.

Hell, I'm trying to get a final loan committment from the bank.


Apparently, when they preapprove you it doesn't mean squat.


I talked to the Home Services Specialist last week and I called him yesterday, this morning, and this afternoon. My original closing date was tomorrow, but he said we may have to move it back to Friday or Monday. But the dude has quit returning my calls. If I don't hear in the next hour, I'm calling the main office number. Surely someone can give me an answer or go smack him upside the head for not returning my calls. Look, I get it. If you don't have an answer, it's painful to call someone back.

I've avoided calls before from applicants because I didn't have an answer yet. Maybe this is karma. However, and here's what has me worried, if you have bad news you also avoid calls. If I have to tell an applicant that the agencies aren't agreeing with their plan and we've got to review for the umpteenth time; I avoid calling them.

What if he hasn't called because they can't loan me money? I can almost pay for the whole house with a check - but not quite. But shouldn't that, and the fact that I have a job, count for something? I haven't defaulted on loans, I have a couple 30 days late payments but not a lot but come the FUCK on!

It's probably a good thing that their office isn't here; I'd be sitting in his office chair working by laptop so that I would annoy the crap out of him and he'd annoy underwriting.

I think I need a drink.

Delay of game

I've been so excited about the house, it never bothered me that I hadn't really heard from the bank asking for additional information. They asked for a couple things right up front and I kind of thought that was it.

It wasn't.

They didn't review my file until this weekend. Dudes, they've had it four weeks! So I emailed them this morning asking what time my closing was and where was it... Since it's only a week away.

My loan officer called me and said he'd meant to call me yesterday but they needed some additional documentation and that would put my closing behind by a couple days up to a week. I kind of had a tight schedule for this all so a whole week would suck. I'm supposed to close next week and then in two weeks I've got movers coming to get all the stuff I haven't brought over. Then I've got two more weeks to clean my condo and move any incidentals. Somewhere in there I need to get someone to refinish the floors in the bedrooms and get roof vents put in and get somewhere on getting tile done in the bathroom. Oh, and I also have to paint the cabinets.

Now, obviously the only thing that has to be done before I move is the floors but I don't even know when I could do that since I don't know when my closing is. Especially since folks tell me that I should expect them to change the date at least once more. Apparently anything that they need means that the file gets pulled from underwriting and then has to go back through the process and get reviewed again. Now, I got them the things they needed about two hours after they asked. But I'm guessing that won't matter.

Geez! I've got a schedule here. Oh, I've also got stuff posted in Pinterest about the house.

Stuff like this couch. I don't like the color but I love the style.

Making lists

Okay, so I could be queen of the procrastinators. No, you might think you have me beat; but it's really my one true talent. Sure I knit, I play piano, I blah blah blah.... but I can really procrastinate like nobody's business. I've actually tried to commit a little afternoon time once a week to blogging just to get stuff out of my head. Of course, it always falls in the last half of the week in the last half of my day!

So I've always heard to make lists.

"If you cross stuff off your list it's very satisfying."

"If you put everything on your list you can get a feel for how easy it is to tic things off."

That's all crap! If I make a list I can procrastinate doing any actual work. Making lists at work is just too damned depressing. My job is one where my inbox is never empty, my plate always has something on it and that's just hard to swallow in hard print. Look, I'll admit here (I'd never admit it to someone in meatspace) that I've even had utilities shut off because I procrastinate paying the bill and forgot about it.

Which, btw, is very different from when I lived in Iowa and worked a bunch of part-time jobs and sometimes had to choose what bill to pay and.... well.... sometimes I didn't have enough to pay even the most dire bills. 

If you're ever in that situation, my advice is pay the water bill. Not because water is essential to life - hell, I always could get water to drink at work - but because the water man comes to your house and shuts it off and then has to come back to your house to turn it on. See, the phone and electric were shut off not at the house. Well, not right away. They did some kind of soft shut off a few days before they came to the house. I didn't have a cell phone or cable back then, so I have no idea how that last one works.

Anyway, my point is I'm not a list maker but I am a master screwer-upper of important tasks.  I'm also a lover of technology. So I downloaded a calendar app for my android called pure calendar and also there is pure grid. These put a calendar on my home page with little bars of color showing what event is on what day. I think someone said HTC phones have this type of calendar already. But, BUT, that's not the cool app. I also downloaded Astrid, which is a task manager. Saying it always reminds me of Asterix, which is some kind of French comic book hero - but the little icon that represents the app looks like the warm fuzzies that the nuns handed out in high school. I used to have one somewhere, but it was a line drawing of a happy furry little guy that looked like a ghost from Pac-man.

So, Astrid has really helped me get my shit together. Seriously. Which is good, since I'm buying a house! So, I can put the due dates for all my bills in this little app, and tell it to repeat every month and on that day - or earlier if I set an alarm - it pops up and reminds me to do it. I can have it appear on my calendar or I can put a widget on my home page so that I can see what's coming up.

I just learned a neat new trick too! I can make lists. So, I made a list of all the things I need to get done before moving or just after moving into the house.

Now, I don't have a due date on most things yet. But as they get closer I can go back and set a date. Like I did with contacting my insurance agent.



Instead of letting it auto-order things, I did some click and drag and put things in the order I'll probably need to complete them. It lets the procrastinator in me breathe a little bit since there isn't a hard and fast date.






It's not fancy; but it's at least kept me on time with bills. Oh, in case you are wondering why I don't just set up bills for autopay.... It's a leftover from my days of not having any money. It's not that I can't pay bills these days - but I spent enough time having to only pay what I could that I don't like to autopay things. It's not a paranoid "then they know all my info" conspiracy crackpot thing like it is with some folks (not that there's anything wrong with that) its just a leftover bad habit.

Kind of like rubbing the sating edge of the blanket when I need to go to sleep... it's something that I probably should get past but as long as I'm aware of it, it doesn't hurt anything


Yeah, the folks who made PureCalendar, PureGrid and Astrid didn't pay me, didn't give me jackshit and don't really give a rats ass who I am - but if you need to get better organized like I did.... it's a little less painful than a paperlist.