After so many emails and phone calls, less than a week after going around the typical steps to get the build started…the appraisal came through.
One can only laugh.
They did ask for a surveyor to give a contract from two visits before closing though. This is a tough one—surveys are as hard to come by as appraisals. Not sure why they didn’t have me working on that during the waiting, but here goes nothing!
We expected to close our building loan at the end of December, but the appraisal has yet to come through, nearly two months later! That’s frustrating to say the least.
A couple of the fins on the agitator of my 15 year old washing machine broke off, so it works, sort of. We were told to not make any big purchases and each week we thought, maybe this week…. But nope!
I finally was able to have the banker confirm that we could, in fact, make the purchase. Yay! So we are scheduled to have a new washer and dryer in this Thursday.
While that was a great step, the real goal here is to get moving on the building project. We spoke at length about the appraisal and that it could possibly come in at less than the amount of the project (they wrote the loan to cover 100% of the cost as a safety to them that the house will be built in its entirety, even if we have a financial drain for some reason), and that we would need to come to closing with some cash. This seems unlikely to me, as we own the acreage, but finding a comparable sale seems to be what is holding up the appraisal. This is why she had hesitated on us paying the first draw out to the builder, but running through our numbers and seeing we could both pay the first draw and have funds at closing if needed, she conceded we would likely be alright, but cautioned it was a risk.
With that, I contacted the builder. He sent me the paperwork to prove we had the cash for the first draw in hand—a note from our bank and recent bank statement were required. He authorized the driveway to be built and I purchased the insurance for the build!
Driveway authorization sounds small, but in the county we are building, it is the key to the next steps. Once the driveway is in and inspected we can get a 911 address. That allows three other things to happen—water tap, electric hook up, and the permit to build the house.
I can’t wait to see that gravel construction driveway!
In mid-January I walked the lot with the builder and marked out where the house would be. He and the fellow from the sales office also marked the grade, as there is some slope to the yard.
Now we just wait for the loan to go through. Any day now!
In my way home I got a flat tire though. I pulled into a little cemetery, and my knight in a white lab coat arrived to save the day after I was unable to break the lug nuts free.
Thankful for him!
From the moment we started discussing the build, the question was, ‘Where do we live in the meantime?’
Currently the market in our area is so hot, we could theoretically stay in our home and list it to sell a month or two before the new house is finished. The difficulties there are, or course, the timing could be off or, much more scary, the market could cool and the value of the house could drop dramatically and/or it could be impossible to sell the house. While this is the comfortable solution, we aren’t risk takers, so that was out.
Our next option was to sell our house and then rent a house in the meantime. The two moves didn’t sound like much fun, but it seems sensible. We might even rent closer to some friends, depending on what is available.
Then, out of the blue, the realtor who helped up buy this house, posted on Facebook that he had an investor looking to buy a few houses—only one showing, and it didn’t have to be quite perfect, since the buyer wouldn’t need to picture him or herself living here.
The realtor came by right before Thanksgiving, but as the week after Thanksgiving continued on, we didn’t hear anything, so we decided to move on with Plan B, to sell the house on the market. We cleaned out rooms, boxed books (so many books) to get my beautiful white bookcases out, since they look built in. We moved those items into a storage building.
Of course, three days later, we got an offer. Ha!
Such is life, but we took it—no more showings, no extra moves, and we are allowed to rent month to month if the building takes longer than expected!
We were no longer home owners as of mid-December.