The One Where I Become a Homeowner

The. Call. Came. In. Yes, that call. The one where Julia, my Realtor, told me my offer had been accepted…I’m buying a house! No sense in prolonging the process, so I got started securing financing immediately. Mortgage, insurance, appraisal, survey—all expensive to come by and necessary to buying a house. I went back and forth with my mortgage loan officer to finalize all financial background information, set a closing, found there was a problem with the self-ordered survey, thought we resolved said problem, and rescheduled the closing date.

Day of closing—literally the ups and downs of buying a house in a four-hour period. Apparently the little problem with the survey I mentioned had not been resolved. The carport on my almost property was actually two feet on my neighbor’s property. My neighbor had agreed to sign a waiver that would allow me to continue on with purchasing the house. Obviously he had not signed the waiver, and since the whole process was moving so fast, it was easy for the lack of waiver to get overlooked. Luckily, the sellers had chosen a stellar closing attorney who worked quickly with my dad to find a solution—I would sign something saying I would tear down the carport within 20 days of closing on the house. That was no problem since it kind of needed to go anyway.

Whew! That was a close one. Mom, dad and I headed to the closing attorney’s office to sign the several-inches-thick stack of papers around 11:30 in the morning. By 1:00 pm, I had signed the next 30 years of my life away and begun work on “updating” my new home! Lucky for me, Jodi Marks, co-host of my dad’s TV show, happened to be in town, so she was able to help me with some of the “demo” inside the house. We ripped up old carpet, started patching the smaller cracks in the plaster, and tore a hamper/bookcase out of the teeny, tiny bathroom. Maybe an hour and a half of work, and it already looked SOO much better.

Then came the first full work day. As I mentioned in my previous post, the house came with one major/minor issue—major and costly for some, minor for my Dad and his crew. The main beam running through the middle of the house had a dip in the middle from what looked like years worth of water damage. My dad and Tim, one of his workers, agreed to come over the first Saturday I was a homeowner to help assist (okay, they did all the work) with correcting the beam. They jacked up the house, while I was in it, and built a new pier (since the house was built on a crawlspace) for the beam to sit on.

Once they crawled out from under the house (hey, someone had to do it!), we got to work on tearing down that troublesome carport.

Read about the lengthy process of preparing the inside of the house for move-in in my next blog!