Yesterday James came home and told me our agent was going to crawl into the crawl space and remove the dead rats before the appraiser saw them. He said the only advice he gave her was to wear a respirator. I flipped out. I started hurling questions at him like "Why is she doing that?", "Did you try and talk her out of it?" and "Does she know we want to look at other houses?". He had no answers for me. Our sweet agent is no spring chicken. She has no business going pro bono into a crawl space to remove dead, rotting rat carcasses in a house we may not even get. It's just whack.
For starters we got our bids back from the contractors. We had to get 2 bids from licensed contractors on how much it would cost to fix the deck, put up siding and replace the roof on the barn. One bid was $31,000. The next bid was $17,000. How there is such a huge difference is beyond me. What those bids do mean though is we rescind our offer, make a new one with those costs factored in and put in a new closing date. Starting all over again. We have no idea what the bank will do. We never heard from them in the 3 months its already been. They never even got to consider our first offer. Thankfully the appraiser came too early and that's why all this is happening. So, now we have to deal with dead rats.
James and I decided to go ahead and re negotiate the house price. It's low, like $50,000 less than our original offer. We are also trying to get a construction loan to pay for the fixes. We wait. We decided that if the bank takes it, great. Freaking awesome. If not, oh well. Someone else who has the budget can fix the problems. We are not going to fight to get this place knowing all the fixes it needs. The list is starting to get ridiculous. James has already found another house he likes and wants to go look at it. He doesn't seem to get that a short sale takes a very long time. The listing agent supposedly has a knack for speeding up short sales but she isn't doing it fast enough for James. Me, I am fine. I have recently discovered that we may not actually be able to comfortably afford this place. James thinks we can do it, but it will be tight. So I am fine with it taking forever and us saving money. To me that seems logical. To James that seems painful and a waste of time. He thinks the bank is dicking us around and doesn't want to be stuck waiting on this house to go through. If it doesn't go through he feels we may have missed out on other opportunities. He has a point. However, it's a catch 22. If we are smart and wait until we can comfortably afford a house we lose out on the best interest rate there will ever be. It royally sucks. We have not told our agent this. She is willing to crawl into damp death to help us get this place. Her heart is in it more than ours.
Don't get me wrong, I really want this place. I would go get those nasty fuckers if I could. But I can't. Neither can James. In our efforts to get as much money as we possibly can he works his ass off in overtime and going to school. I watch the kids so we don't pay for daycare. That leaves no time to go clean dead rats. Bless our agents heart.
However, if we have little faith the bank will take our offer and we are ready to pursue other housing avenues wouldn't you tell your agent this before you let her go clean up dead rats? I would. James did not. All he did was tell her to wear a respirator. He didn't even ask if she had the proper tools to do such a task.
After my flip out and hearing each others sides on the issue we came to mutual agreement. James is a smart cookie. If she does that for us and we do get the house for the cheaper price, we are in the win. We owe her big, but we are all the better for it. We emailed her today though stating we didn't want her compromising her health for our benefits. We stated that if the rats get discovered they should be removed by a professional who gets paid. We said we would remove them ourselves. I am not sure why James said that part when we obviously won't be removing them.
He sent me the pictures of the house he likes. It's less land, more expensive and has bizarre roofs in the bedrooms. It supposedly has a view, is in a neighborhood and is less than a block from his moms.
This buying a house game is painful.
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