We have a lot!

For real this time. Closed and everything. It's OURS! (Take THAT, loser who is keeping things tied up at the gas company!)

I can't believe I haven't posted since December 4! Clearly, a lot has happened. Since the appraisal came in so low, we had to use part of the existing home equity to make up the difference. Yep, two mortgages. So now we have our original mortgage on what we owe on our current house, a new mortgage/construction loan for the new house, and some other kind of mortgage over the home equity in the current house. (Not a home equity line of credit - I'm not even sure what it's called. That's awful. A grown woman should know what kind of mortgage she has - especially when she has three!)

ANYway, mortgaging our existing equity meant another appraisal, this time of the current house. Super-Busy-Appraiser-Man managed to get that done pretty quickly, and it came back within $2k of what we expected. No biggie.

Then we were able to go fill out new paperwork at the bank. Ron the Lender originally said we could close on 12/21, although this was admittedly because he wanted to fudge the date on some forms. Hey, I don't care, as long as we can start building our house. Well, turns out his quality control department wouldn't let him do that (I wasn't surprised) and that given the holiday we wouldn't be able to close until 12/27, but that he had everything he needed/wanted to do that.

We ended up signing our lives away on 12/22 and really truly did close on 12/27. After the closing, we went by the lot - er, OUR lot - and took our first legitimate, wholly-owned (well, except for that whole bank part) walk around. We each swung on the our rope swing. I'd say it was very exciting, except it was about thirty degrees and the thing was a muddy swamphole. And silly me - I wore lipstick instead of workboots to the closing.

Next up: Sign Terry's contract, make a few "decisions" (I use quotes because we're constantly changing our minds about something. And by "we" and "our" I mean "I" and "my") and hopefully start test digs on January 7!

That's barely more than a month later than we originally planned. Good grief.

Appraisal is back.

It's $30k less than we wanted/needed it to be.

Even if we manage to stay within our exact budget and not use the overage budget, it's still $5k less than we'd like. But you know we'd use the overage budget, although hopefully not the whole thing.

There are a few "wants" we can shave off - the wood trim, the granite countertops. The really expensive stuff, though, is not really negotiable. It's not like you can add better insulation later. Or pay less for utility service. And the lot costs what it costs.

So, we'll see. IF we sell the house quickly, we'll be able to come up with the $30k. If not, there are some other possibilities. I'd hate to lose the whole thing over $30k.

long time, no blogging

To be fair, there was a holiday in there, but a lot has happened. I hate to think that the whole process will be filled with these emotional highs and lows, but I think it will be worth it. Assuming it happens. More on that in a bit.

On Tuesday, November 20, I dropped off the annotated plans to the appraiser. I also filled out our gas utility request form that night online. So far, so good.

We left for Destin (Thanksgiving) on Wednesday the 21st. On the way down, we got a phone call from the gas company saying someone else had already requested gas service for that property. WHAT?! The request was from Aug 24, "and the guy talked to one of our engineers and everything!" The woman from the gas company couldn't/wouldn't tell us anything more over the phone, and of course we didn't have any of our paperwork with us in the car. So then we had to call Jane and ask her about it. Later that afternoon, she called back with the name of our seller. Turns out it does NOT match the name of the person who had previously requested gas service. But, oh, the gas service request expires after 90 days anyway, so it'll be resolved one way or another by Monday.

Gee, lady. Thanks for freaking us out this morning.

Over Thanksgiving, we worked with our favorite architect to play around with the plans. We have several different orientations of the master bath and laundry/mud room to ponder. We also went to several open houses. Here's a picture of what our master bath shower won't be looking like, as our budget is less than the $1.99M that house was going for.

On Tuesday (yesterday), I dropped off the loan application and associated documentation at the bank. We found out that we'll definitely have to delay the Nov 30 closing because the appraiser is way too booked up to get his info back to the bank in time. We should find out early next week whether the appraisal comes back in our favor.

Last night, we looked around the Singature Kitchen & Bath store in Fairview Heights. It was moderately interesting - we found a few things we liked and a few things we didn't - but they only had one bathtub, so we're still starting mostly from scratch there. It's always good to get more info early like this, so I'm glad we're doing it, even if the appraisal doesn't end up favoring us. We'll do it sometime..

Tonight we are going to the "Design on Tap" kitchen & bath store in Shiloh. Hopefully they will have more BATH stuff and be able to actually give us information about various materials and things.

Hopefully, the next update will be in all capital letters with a ton of exclamation points, saying the appraisal came back just fine and that we've set a closing date!