Why would anyone back out of such a good deal?

"Oh, that's why"
          It was time to do a walk through and find answers to questions like, "Why would anyone back out of escrow on such a low price?", "That roof looks old, think there's any water damage?", "Is that a porcelain knob up under the eaves?", or my favorite, "What's all this sawdust falling out of the front porch from?"
          Turns out there were reasons why it had sat empty for ten years. The heater was one of those reasons. I didn't turn it on because I'm particularly afraid of third degree burns.
          Oh and our good friend, the industrious termite! There was termite damage, mainly in two of the kitchen floor joists.
The roof was a good 50 years old, knob and tube wiring reigned supreme.
          Let's not forget the bathroom! Someone had tiled over the top of plywood, I only know this because I was able to pull the tiles loose by hand with little effort.
          There was also a lovely brown carpet throughout the house that smells like it was browner than originally intended. Under the carpet was a a layer of vinyl tile or linoleum, under that was an older layer of vinyl tile or linoleum and under that was layer of tarpaper that had become one with the lead based paint on the doug fir sub floor.
          So just to make it liveable.....we do have to live here, we had 3 weeks of evenings and nights to accomplish:

1. Tear out - Bathroom and 3 or so layers of flooring
2. Refinish wood floors
3. Remodel bathroom (minimum: working toilet and shower)

Did I mention we have one year old twins? Hali resigned herself to not having a husband and I resigned myself to not sleeping. YIPEEEEE!

Ducks in a row

          After we got a call that the house was available, it was time to get our affairs organized. I had already started to repair some of our young and foolish credit mistakes, but it had only been a few months. Would our credit scores reflect the changes? We need a real estate agent and a lender that won't have our best interests in mind. After getting some recommendations from friends we settled on our real estate agent fairly quickly. Finding the right lender was a difficult process.
          We met with a mortgage broker who had a safe sounding, conservative approach and another lender who's promises sounded too good to be true. Which way should we go? The further I went with the broker, the math started to make sense. safe and conservative was her way to get more of my money in her pockets.
          It turns out that Mr. "too good to be true" made it happen. We ended up with an Acorn loan and the CHDAP to buy points. He got us 0 down, 40 year fixed @ 5.25%, first 10 years is interest only. You might be looking at your monitor right now thinking "WHAT?!, that's too good to be true!" You would be correct, except for the part where ..... it is true. I don't know what he did to get us that loan and I'm not going to ask.

We bought a house!

          We bought this house in April of 2007. It's a 1925 craftsman style bungalow. The previous owner's parents had built it (and many other houses in the neighborhood) so you could say we are the second owners. The place had been abandoned for 10 years before we laid eyes on it. The daughter of the builders had recently past away and it was put on the market.
          Now I've done some remodeling in the past and Hali, my wife, has her degree in interior design, so we had been looking for something that we could put some sweat equity into. Hali saw it on one of our walks with our newborn twins, the "For Sale" sign had been switched to "Sold." She called me at work and urged me to call about it.
          Being the ever supportive husband, I replied "Why would we bother calling? It says sold. Besides I'm at work and can't waste time calling people to inquire about sold houses." "Can you please just find out?," she asked. I called and they told me, "It's in escrow but we'll call you if something happens."
          The next day they called back,"Our buyer backed out because the house was going to be too much work. Would you like to make an offer?" Shakily I responded ".................yes?" Now I would just have to find a real estate agent and a lender. That night Hali and I prayed that God would make it happen smoothly or frustrate our efforts.