The woes of buying a short sale.

This is the listing picture of our house. It truly is an adorable little house, and luckily/unfortunately, it is a short sale. The name, short sale, is such a misleading term too. The process of buying a short sale home is NOT short. In fact it's fairly painful. Working with a nameless bank instead of a seller is so frustrating because they do not work with you at all. They will respond when they see fit and will haggle over the stupidest things. For example  the bank owning our soon to be home took 2.5 weeks to initially reply to our offer, and an additional 2 weeks to respond to our counter offer. It's like they didn't want it to sell. Then we haggled over what percentage of closing costs they would pay. We wanted all of them covered, til we eventually figured out that max they could was 3%. So we put in our offer with them paying 3% of the cost of the home and they agreed. 2 more weeks down the line, they get a new negotiator and put everything on hold for ANOTHER 2 weeks while they attempted to indian give and try to make us accept 1%. 

Thanks for the pittance, but no. Eventually they agreed, but as you can see, all of this hemming and hawing means we are about 6 weeks into the process, and we still have not sent out our inspection or even paid for an appraisal. 

Scary Bananas.

In addition to all of this loveliness, we ran into a large speed bump in our mortgage process and ended up having to switch to another lender. We're with a lovely local company now (well it's Wells Fargo which isn't local but there is a man sitting at an actual desk that we can visit in town, so it's local to us!) and our closing costs will be a couple of thousand cheaper so it is for the better. We are getting cheaper closing costs because apparently our previous lender was having us pay to buy points for a lower percentage rate (several thousands of dollars worth and the difference between 4.25% and 4.72%). We went with the later percentage rate because the saving sin closing costs will be worth it if we sell this house within 20 years, which I'm sure we will. 

This experience has been very painful for us, especially since all of this process is so foreign to us first time home buyers. If it ends up with us owning the house above though we'll be well pleased. 

In other, non new house related news, Rob found a couch sitting on the curb of our street:

Please ignore the garage clutter. Also, that pile of wood in front are the legs. 

It's clean, has no smell, and the fabric is in brand new condition. The only problem is that one of the back supports broke. We'll just need to nail in a new one and voila! Free and comfy couch! Nice, eh? :)