Coffee in hand, we anxiously awaited our agent's arrival to write up the contract and offer on the Manor on Broad, which is what we've "termed" the house we so desperately want. Once she arrived, we sat down and got right to work. Wow, I always thought that at closing you had a ton of paperwork to sign, so I was floored at just how much goes into the initial contract. We went over pages having to do with military noise zones, lead paint, asbestos, etc. It makes it sound like we're buying a death trap, but due the proximity that nearly everything in this area is to some type of military base and the fact the house was built in 1900, it's all just formalities.
We finally got to the actual offer. The house was listed at $179,900.00. Our agent felt like we could go lower, so we wrote the offer at $170K. We were well prepared to pay list price if need be, so this left plenty of room for negotiation. We also included items such as the seller contributing 3% of the purchase price toward settlement costs, which should pay most, if not all of them. In addition, there were provisions for anything critical resulting from the home inspection and of course, the termite inspection. What really hit home though for me was the closing date documented in the contract, January 28th. Wow, could it really be that by the end of next month, we could own our own home? We spent an hour going over everything, signing and initialing what seemed like a thousand documents. By the end of it, she left with contract in hand along with our earnest money deposit and the waiting game began all over again.
I've probably watched too many episodes of Million Dollar Listing on Bravo because in my mind, the two agents would get on the phone and hash it out, probably before she even pulled her car away from the curb out front. In reality though, we went all day waiting to hear something. Finally around 9PM, we got an email from our agent that the seller lived out of town and the listing agent was having trouble reaching him. We'd hopefully know more tomorrow. I don't think I slept more than a few hours that night as I ran through multiple scenarios in my head. It was about 9:30 the next morning before I got the next email. He didn't accept our offer for $170K, however he would counter at $174K, keeping all other terms of the contract the same. This still put us about $6K below asking price, so not only was our reply yes, but hell yes. Within an hour we had the updated contract back to initial and just like that, we bought a house!
Our agent is very no nonsense and a full steam ahead type of person. Within that same hour, she had our home inspection scheduled for the following Sunday. That would be only one week since the holiday homes tour when we walked around the neighborhood and simply toyed with the idea of calling her to look at some of the homes we saw. This was moving at lightening speed, which in my mind was good. It left less time to be nervous about the entire thing. As the weekend approached, we were excited and anxious about the home inspection. Would it give us all the more reason to be excited about this house or dash our dreams and force us to start over with something that we in no way loved as much? Is there ever a time in this entire process where at least something isn't present to worry about?
Speaking of worrying, I nearly left out another gut wrenching moment. What about our apartment? We obviously can't wait until the finality of closing to tell our landlord, "yeah, by the way, we're moving by the end of the week". Now that we had a contract, the right thing to do is to tell him, so he can begin planning as well. Our landlord owns and lives in the building. He's been very good to us over the last six years by making improvements and addressing any issues before we could even get the words our of our mouths explaining what as wrong. We had seen many people in the building come and go at various times in their lease, so I really wasn't too worried about the fact that we had missed our renewal notification window by about 30 days, but still, what would his reaction be? I was down in the basement doing laundry the day before the home inspection. I could hear him in the next room in his workshop and kept praying he didn't come out while I was down there switching loads of clothes. He had to know, but I just didn't have the words formed in my head yet about how to tell him. I am one of those people who can't just spit out what I have to say. I have to start everything with a back story, sometimes dating as far back as the day I was born. On the next to the last load of clothes, my luck ran out though. I heard that door open and we came face to face. He thanked me again for inviting him to our Christmas party and stated that he wasn't sure what we could ever do to make our annual event more over the top than it already was. There it is, the perfect lead in without having to go all the way back to 1967 and the birth of a child in the Catskill Mountains. So I did it, I just spit it out...a new big house, THAT would make our party more over the top! There is was again, that flush of relief. The same one that came over me after hearing from the banks, again after hearing we had a contract, and now, after telling the landlord we had started the process to buy this house. He couldn't have been nicer and more understanding. He congratulated us and expressed how much he'd miss us and the way we treated the apartment and paid our rent on time every month during the six years we've been here. He even offered to let us use our deposit as our January rent so that we could keep that money aside for whatever we needed it for. Wow! How could that have gone any better? And oh yeah, he had someone in the wings who was dying to get into our building, so he'd be up with them in about thirty minutes to see the apartment. Well damn! As I knew anyone would, they loved the apartment, gave their deposit to hold it and now we must pray harder than ever that everything goes as planned!
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