Phil online

It’s official now. I own the Castle House. It wasn’t easy getting here, though. My buyer’s agent (highly recommended) really had to work to get this one through closing. Thanks, Buddy!

Here’s a brief rundown of some of the hurdles we ran into unexpectedly:

1. The house was heading to foreclosure. I had to be prepared to buy it at auction for cash (or let it go) if something went wrong in our timing.
2. The bankruptcy court trustee agreed to sell me the house but took a long time getting me a final price. (The final price of $209,000 was a tad less than the appraised price of $320,000, so it was worth the wait.)
3. During the wait, though, the mortgage company was granted a motion to allow them to proceed to foreclosure!
4. We had to wait another 5 weeks for the hearing to see if the judge would approve the price. (He did — eventually.)
5. We prepped for the hearing by going through a dry closing. That would let us complete the closing the morning after the judge signed the papers with just a few paper swaps. This turned out to be a waste of time, because…
6. The judge was sick the day the hearing was scheduled. And the next day. Normally this would mean that the motion was put off until the next scheduled hearing in 6 weeks. Except…
7. We now faced the danger that the house could be sold at foreclosure. The motion had been granted for foreclosure a while back, but our timing had meant that we could get the sale approved before foreclosure was possible. But our timing was disrupted by the judge’s illness.
8. The judge approved the motion for the sale (four days later!) the day before February’s “foreclosure/auction day” in Georgia. But because of the timing of prior events, we couldn’t close again until after the auctions were called. So…
9. We had to do a last-minute scramble to make sure the house was not on the auction block in the morning. It wasn’t, and the closing was allowed to proceed.

Last night, we all camped in the living room of the big, empty Castle House, in sleeping bags, with some board games and no TV, radio or internet. It was great!

But we’re not done yet. We still have to

• get the old house ready to sell (including getting a new roof),
• replace the (Castle House) polybutylene pipes with copper,
• get the basement waterproofed and repaired,
• remodel the kitchen (completely),
• replace the carpet upstairs,
• replace all the windows with double-pane windows,
• fix some structure and water problems here and there,
• move all of our stuff,
• sell our old house,
• and more, certainly…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 at 12:35 pm and is filed under CastleHouse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.