The Keys to the House - at Last!

From Blog Favorites Sept.Oct.

This day seemed to take forever to come. On October 26th we signed the papers for our new house and on October 28th we got the keys! Unfortunately, we wouldn't get to move in until November 1st because of scheduling with the movers, but the house was finally ours. We went to see it every day and got a few things done while we waited to move in. (Appliance delivery, carpet cleaning, etc.)

This whole process did not go as smooth as we had hoped and there were a few days when we wondered if we'd lose the house altogether. Because we were doing the whole move through a relocation agency, we got perks for working with their preferred lender. A lender that resided in Maryland. In hindsight we will never do that again. The perk was that we would not have to be reimbursed for the closing costs - the company would bill the relocation company directly. We wish we would have just chose our own lender and waited for a few days to be reimbursed. It would have been much less of a hassle than what we went through!

We had to do all the paperwork via delivery. The most important paperwork was the loan application that we filled out in Oregon as soon as we got home from the house hunting trip. It was a little stressful figuring it out on our own as compared to the other two times we bought homes and did the process in the lender's office with their help. We carefully looked over every detail, copied everything and shipped it off via UPS right away.

Chuck* called often to check up on things with the loan officer and even checked to see if they got the papers. We checked that off our list and weeks later thought we just had to wait out the rest. There were a few other hurdles we had to go through - we definitely noticed a change in the loan process since the Fannie May disaster. We had to prove and verify everything to show we (and our money) were legitimate. That was a little more stressful as well, but the real kicker came when Chuck* and I suspected something that made our hearts stop. The loan officer had made a comment that seemed kind of strange and made him suspect she never got our loan application. He called her immediately and discovered to our horror that she was still waiting for those papers. I completely LOST it. We had sent the paperwork three weeks earlier and were supposed to close on our house in just days. We were stunned and could not believe this was happening. Long story short - apparently UPS lost it - the tracking number hit a dead end. Had we learned it was missing sooner they probably could have found it. We were furious with the lending officer for not communicating this minor detail. Somehow she misunderstood Chuck's direct questions as to whether she had received it. I still don't understand how that happened.

So now we had two huge problems. Our paperwork with social security and bank numbers was in limbo and we had to get new papers to the lender or we would lose the house. Of course, the extra copies of the loan papers were in the filing cabinet in some storage unit nearly impossible to get to. We didn't think we'd need to refer to them so soon. We (mostly Chuck*) spent the day printing about 100 pages of documents, refilling them out and faxing them to the lender.

After a call to the "office of the president" of the company when I was furious about the mistake and worried we could possibly lose the house and/or have our identity stolen - they offered to pay for identity theft protection and apologized profusely. They made sure to put our loan at top priority to get everything through in time. For a short time all I could think of was that if we lost the house, our poor girls might have to change to another school after everything they'd been through already. I couldn't bear to uproot them again. And we loved the house - it felt like ours, the ward was so nice and it all felt so right. Luckily, in the end it was, but we got a little roller coaster ride out of the whole experience. My word of advice - go through a local lender your agent is familiar with.

From Blog Favorites Sept.Oct.

We were finally able to rest easy as things worked out. This was one of our last nights in the hotel. Ahhhh.