Well, Friday the Thirteenth came and was luckier than we had hoped.
We had to be out of the house in Orem that we recently closed on (they let us rent it back from them for a couple weeks) but the short sale we've been working on for over two months now is still not finished (it keeps going and going and going . . .). We had planned on moving back into my parents' basement for a couple weeks until we finished negotiations with the bank for the springville house (although we weren't looking forward to a family of four living in a one-room apartment!). I worked every day for a week on my parents' basement to get it ready but we couldn't get it done on time (it's still waiting for tape and texture and paint).
Meanwhile, Amy had been noticing a house for sale near our son's school. She drove past several times in the past two months, but never stopped to get the phone number. Wednesday, she stopped to look at it and noticed that it had a lease option on the sign. She called and set up a walk-through for that evening. She saw it and, though it wasn't perfect, she said it was "intriguing" and talked me into going over to look at it later that night. I had been spending one last night working at my parents' house and didn't get done until 10:30 or so. We drove by and the owner was still there cleaning so I stopped and walked through. We went home and made an offer which we drove over to the owner's house at 12:30 that night! We started packing the moving truck Thursday afternoon but still hadn't heard back on our offer. Finally we got a call saying that the seller was having our agreement looked at by a lawyer and that he couldn't get back to us on it until Friday morning. We continued packing on Friday (not knowing where we would be moving to) and had everything out by 2pm.
Amy and my mom cleaned while I talked to the seller of the lease option. He was very skeptical about having us make an offer so quickly and was worried that we weren't serious or would just be trouble for him. He did agree, however, to meet with us later that night. We sat down with him and his wife Friday night and went over the agreement to make some minor changes. After meeting with each other, everything got worked out quickly, and we got excited about doing the deal together. I was just going to move everything Saturday but U-haul called and said if I didn't get the truck back by 7am they would charge me an extra $300.00 to make up for the money they would lose to rent it to others (we had mistakenly thought that we could extend our use of the truck by just paying for an extra day). Since we weren't interested in padding U-haul's pockets at our expense, we headed over for the house as soon as papers were signed on the lease option. At 2 am we finished unloading the truck into our new home with all of our new neighbors pitching in. I couldn't believe that neighbors would come help so late but they did, and a truck that took me over eight hours to load was unloaded in 45 minutes.
I paid asking price for the house which was $160,000 but I only pay a $1000 a month and a hundred of it goes to principle. The house has a basement apartment that brings in $500/month. I installed a garage door on Monday and already put in about $2000 in improvements. I put in a couple doors, put a sink in the downstairs apartment, and bought all of the flooring I will need to make the downstairs rentable. We don't plan on spending a lot more on the home but there are a lot of superficial updates and fixes (painting, tearing off old wall paper, etc.) that will do a lot. More sweat equity is needed at this point than anything!
We still plan on closing on the Springville house and either selling it for $20,000 more than we get it for or just renting it out. We haven't quite decided yet.
I started my last semester of college a few weeks ago and hopefully it will go well. At least I have a place to live! (That always makes my wife happy.)
0 comments:
Post a Comment