Our House Saga

We've been living a few different nightmares lately.  One of which has to do with our lovely little home.

The whole story involves too many details to be included here, but I think the gist of the nightmare can be conveyed with this Reader's Digest version.  (Have I told you how much I love Reader's Digest?)  

A few months back, we decided to put our house in MN back on the market.  We got an offer on it fairly quickly and we eagerly accepted it.  It was a bargain price, but we just wanted to be done with this whole process and move on.

Here is a little breakdown of what followed from there:

-We flew our family to MN for a whirlwind house-hunting trip.  It was overwhelming, exhausting, confusing, and expensive.  (I’m not going to mention the added strain of having to spend two whole days with our realtor.  The one we were ready to fire right before we got an offer on our house.)

-We didn’t find a house that we liked.  {Nothing}  (Well, we did find one house that we loved, but before we could get our offer on the table, it went under contract.)

-We were introduced to a builder we liked and found a lot for a steal of a deal in a great neighborhood, so we decided to build.  We got right to work planning our “one day” house.

-We planned the blueprints down to the last square inch.  We poured hours and hours into researching our selections for the house, i.e. paint, windows, appliances, faucets, toilets, cabinets, trim, front doors, garage doors, interior doors, knobs, flooring, mirrors, showers, baths, balusters and the list goes on and on and on.  I bought a plane ticket back to MN to spend a couple of days finalizing my selections.  My parents were kind and generous enough to buy their own plane tickets to meet me in MN and help me with all of the big decisions I had to make.  It was a tremendous sacrifice on their part, but I could not have done it without them.  From there, I spent days and days and hours and hours planning our house down to the doorbell.  We had everything {READY} to go.  Seriously.  All we were waiting for was the money from the closing of our current home so we could finalize our loan for the construction.

-A day or two before the scheduled closing, we got word that it had to be postponed by ten days because the buyer’s lender did not have the money yet.  Okay…  Fine.  We weren’t too worried.  It was nice to have a few more days to finalize our plans, I guess.

-The new date for the closing rolled around and I spent it watching my bank account to see if the money had been wired in yet.  The minute it was in our account, I was going to get the ball rolling with our construction loan.  But... the money never came.  I will spare you the details of the chaotic evening during which my realtor called to inform me that the house did not close, but I will tell you that it was at this point that we started to get nervous.

-We spent the next week losing more hope every day.  We began to come to terms with things and weighing our options

.

-Seven days later our realtor called with the final news- The buyers were out for sure.  (I won’t go into the fact that he was sobbing when he called because his wife’s grandfather passed away the day before.)  (I do need to say that we have felt heartbroken for the buyers through this process and recognize that this was not their fault.  The responsibility lies solely on the mortgage company.)

-The next seven days were filled with torment, confusion, agony.  We discussed, weighed, pondered, and prayed {constantly}.  We needed to decide where to go from here and we wanted to make the right choice for our family.  There were several factors playing into this that made it especially confusing and difficult for us.  And we were under major pressure from our realtor.

-We finally made a decision that we were confident was the right one.  This involved giving our realtor the boot.  If you’re wondering how this went down, imagine breaking up with your 15-year-old boyfriend.  It was worse than that.

-We are now taking a break from “house” stuff so we can deal with the other nightmares on hand.