Almost 6,000 Miles

Today’s post title is rather prosaic, I’m afraid. I want to thank Dirty Dingus McGee for commenting that he would reach out to me if I stopped publishing this blog without notice.

I also want to thank my brilliant high school classmate, TI, for calling me from Switzerland yesterday to express the same sentiment, among other thoughts. We live about 6,000 miles apart and that is how today’s post title came to be.

We had a great conversation that lasted about an hour. In deference to him, I will not reveal too many details other than to write that many topics were discussed, as one might imagine would happen over the course of an hour.

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Up until now, I have not revealed details about our attempt to sell our current house and to buy the Goose Bumps house. It is not hyperbole to write that the latter is one of the nicest houses I have ever seen. My wonderful wife doesn’t like it quite as much–it doesn’t have a swimming pool–but her feelings for it are still orders of magnitude above those for our current dwelling.

Foolishly, we allowed ourselves only three days to find a house in Arizona during our trip in September of 2020. Not wanting to return to the mid-Atlantic without buying a house (since we already had an accepted offer on our house there), we bought the house we have now lived in for almost 28 months. Without airing any dirty laundry, I’ll just write that we did not share the exact same views of the house we bought.

We have been looking for another house, off and on, for many months. The reason I call the object of our efforts the Goose Bumps house is that the first time I walked through it, during an open house, it literally gave me goose bumps, or chill bumps as they call them in the American South.

We put our current home on the market around Thanksgiving, which is terrible timing, of course. Listing the house then was in response to our efforts to buy a house with my wonderful wife’s father and the seller, in a real time crunch, did not give us much time to sell either of the houses from which we would have moved.

We couldn’t sell either house in the time allotted. My wife’s father decided to take his house off the market. Because we had already seen the Goose Bumps house, we decided to leave ours on the market and to make an offer. The offer was accepted and was contingent on having an accepted offer on our house by January 31.

Not surprisingly, we had very little activity on our house in December. However, around the 5th of January interest increased and one open house, in particular, attracted many people. It was from that open house that we received two offers on this property.

We thought we had a deal with the first buyer, but the deal fell through when that buyer, in our opinion, tried to re-negotiate the purchase price through the back door by asking for what we thought, at the time, was an outrageous amount as a seller credit towards repairs. Subsequently, we have learned otherwise. In any event, that buyer’s utter disregard for our timing needs led us to say Good Riddance to them.

Just a couple of days later another open house attendee made us an offer. The deal to which we ultimately agreed will put a little more money in our pocket than the first, but not a lot in the context of the sales price. The problem with the second offer is that just 17-18 days before the scheduled closing date, our buyer decided to change mortgage lenders. Given what is happening with the vast majority of American companies, the new lender has not yet been able to extend final, formal approval for the loan. We are supposed to close on the sale of our house in FIVE days. I must admit I have some suspicion that the buyer is trying to scuttle the deal via a “Pocket Veto.”

By the terms of the contract, they are supposed to have final mortgage approval by Tuesday, the day after tomorrow. If tomorrow were not another one of those ridiculous federal holidays, I probably wouldn’t be quite as stressed.

Although our realtor and my wonderful wife don’t seem worried, I am very worried that the deal will fall apart or we will have to move the closing dates back, which creates a real issue since we have already booked the movers for specific dates and no guarantee exists that they could accommodate a change in dates.

We are supposed to move into the Goose Bumps house on February 28, but that is very much up in the air as far as I am concerned. You are now up-to-date.

#Almost6000Miles

#GooseBumpsHouse

#somanyCARSjustonelife

#disaffectedmusings

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