Tuesday, September 15, 2009

six weeks erased in six minutes

i never pay any attention to what i say, so i'm not sure if i've ever written about what's going on with our current living situation. if i have, sorry...

we live in a two bedroom/two bath house which is probably around 900 sq ft (i'm being generous) and in a great location in the east atlanta village. in july, we decided it was time to move on and get a grown up house that could actually fit our kids and their stuff and be big enough to have more kids in one day.

we started looking for bigger houses in better school districts, but before too long we realized there was very little intown that we could afford. we looked outside the perimeter, but my heart wasn't in it.

finally we found exactly what we were looking for on the westside in a new development. i say exactly what we were looking for, but really it was just the house we were looking for and still had bad schools. i decided i could live with that and i would figure out how to get around it when the time came.

the house we picked out hadn't been built yet so we had an opportunity to customize it a little bit, which we decided to do by adding a full basement (a dream come true for me - finally a place to put things!). there were two lots that could accomodate a house with a basement, so we started writing up the contract for one of those lots.

in the meantime, i was working with one of their "approved" lenders who informed me that if we sold our current house, we would qualify for a grant that would provide 10% of the downpayment. hot dog!!!! until he said that, we were planning on keeping our house as a rental. we got to work immediately and started getting our house in selling condition.

if you've never tried to get your house in selling condition before, let me just tell you... it's kind of a nightmare. i won't go into too much detail, but it's taken us weeks to get it even halfway ready. had we been willing to pay someone to do all the little fix ups and painting that needed to be done, it would have been done faster, but we opted to save the money in case we ended up needing it. just when we were almost ready to put it on the market, everything fell apart.

yesterday morning i got a call from my realtor that 'oops' the lot we selected actually couldn't support a basement, but there might be one on a more narrow lot that can - we would just have to choose a different floorplan or be willing to lose a couple feet on either side to make the house work. that's if it works out, it may not even be possible to add a basement in the first place, we'll have to wait and see....

moments later, i got a call from the lender saying, 'oops' i forgot to tell you that you guys have too much money to qualify for this grant and when you sell your house you'll have way too much money, but you have to sell your house to even qualify. so... are you saying we should spend all our money and sell the house for no profit? does that really sound like it's worth it??? ummm, no.

so now i'm like, well, shit. do we even still move forward with selling our house? the only reason we were going in that direction was because of this grant that all the sudden, six weeks later this guy tells us we don't really qualify for it afterall. and there's not even a house to buy at the moment, either, since for some reason no one asked the right guy the right questions at any point in the last six weeks.

i feel like we're back at square one, but at the same time i have a strong faith that things happen for a reason. if things don't fall into place with this, then we shouldn't try to force it to work. these roadblocks are a sign that we should slow down and re-evaluate before potentially making a big mistake. it may all still work out - possibly even for the better - but for right now, i'm being cautious and re-thinking everything. i just wish i would have known about all of this six weeks ago....

2 comments:

  1. we're still selling the house and i'm feeling better about things, just fyi

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  2. well, I understand...having the house on the market for something like 9mo...taking it off and now putting it back on. It SUCKS! But I will tell you, it was a blessing our house didn't sell back when we first put it on the market. A REAL blessing.

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