The master nearly done!

Yay! The oven is clean! We ate our first dinner at the new house last night in between painting and cleaning.

The walk-in closet got a fresh coat of paint.

Here is the new light fixture in the bedroom

Here are the finished green walls! Peggy and Deanna came over and helped me paint last night, it took about 2 hours and now it is done!

We got a lot more done last night. We finished painting the master and the closet, put in a new light fixture. Bryce caulked the tub and added the new sink in the bedroom, it still needs a faucet though. We have to go to Pullman tonight because I am speaking at a Teen Power convention tomorrow, but we will be back early afternoon to start packing! We are renting a moving truck on Sunday and several of our friends are going to come and help us move. I will be taking a break from the moving to go to a friends baby shower in Ione. It will be a very busy weekend! If I don't post over of the weekend I will be back on on Wednesday when we get internet at the new house! Have a great weekend everybody!

Painting!

Last night was another late night. We continued to clean and I painted the ceiling and this one wall in the master bedroom. Tonight a couple of friends are coming over to help me finish the paint job in this room!



Today I called the power company, water/sewer, garbage, recycling, cable and the post office. I think we are getting close to having all our important bills changed to our name. It feels so good to be getting so much done lately!

Working on the Bedroom

So of course my pictures posted in no particular order:


Here is Bryce replacing our locks and door handles!

The Master bedroom taped and plastic, the big green spot is the color that we are going to paint it. It's very brave of me to go with so much color!

Here are the before pictures of the Master bedroom.

Walk-in closet in Master.

Sink and cabinets in Master.

The new sink in the bathroom!

The before pictures of the bathroom sink.

I have been sick all week and finally last night I was feeling good! So we spent about 4 hours at the house last night, we didn't get to bed until midnight, which is VERY late for us! Bryce fixed the fence so the dogs got to play in the backyard for the first time, he changed the locks, put in a new sink, and took out the light fixtures in the Master bedroom. The house is looking so much better already! I mostly spent the night figuring out colors to paint the room and then taping it and laying down plastic. Today I hope to paint the ceiling and spackle the many holes in the wall. And then hopefully the rest of the painting will be done tomorrow!

Today the house is officially ours! The court is currently processing our papers and recording us as the new owners! We have been over there the last two nights cleaning, but now we can start to really get to work. We are planning to get the Master bedroom done this week because we are planning to move in on Sunday. That way we don't have to pay rent this month, whoo-hoo! We found a used washer and dryer to buy but we are still looking for a fridge and dishwasher, hopefully we can at least find a fridge this week, I think living out of coolers will be awfully challenging!



Apparently there was a death of a doll in this cupboard in the kitchen. Pretty creepy, Bryce had to vaccum it up.

They painted this vent green, we were very happy to discover that the paint peels right off and now it is white again, much better!

The inside of the vent in the living room, gross! Apparently the previous owners never thought about cleaning it up.

Bryce took out the bathroom sink and discovered that it is completely rusted through.

Here is the inside of the fireplace, love the cigerettes.

More pictures of the rust...yuck!

Tonight we will be trying out some paint colors and replacing this sink! We also need to fix the fence so the dogs can go outside and play!

Pictures of the Inside

Time for some pictures of the house!

This is the basement living room

This is the basement bathroom and laundry room. Note the two different colors on the wall.

This is the master bedroom, I will add more pictures soon as this is the first room we plan to fix and paint.

This is the main bathroom, the pocket door on the right goes into the master bedroom.

This is part of the backyard with the big dog kennel.

This is the hideous but nice and big kitchen.

Here is the main living room.

We signed the final papers today! We should get our keys on Monday after the paperwork has been processed with the county and the title recorded in our name. Then the work begins, whoo-hoo!

Closing?

Bryce trying to get my computer fixed while I am packing away!

Here is our little bedroom getting very messy while I try to pack!

So today was a crazy day as we tried to get all the necessary paperwork to the underwriters. We are getting an FHA loan so that we can recieve a "gift" for our down payment which is coming from my mom. To recieve the gift my mom has to sign a gift letter and we have to provide a copy of the check. Today we found out that we also had to provide a copy of the deposit slip and a copy of the cancelled check from the other bank. We could not provide this last piece since we just deposited the check yesterday and it hasn't gone to the bank yet. Finally, they agreed that they could go without it. How much proof do they need that we actually have the money!?

If all of the paperwork was turned in on time today and the bank that owns the house can get it all done tomorrow there is a slight possibility that we can still close tomorrow. We are not holding our breath, but hopefully I will have good news tomorrow! We spent a little more time working on packing tonight, there is still so much to do! We have way too much stuff!

Car pictures

Here are the very sad pictures of my car. Although it looks a lot better than when I first saw it and there was glass all over the place. I think I especially love the happy newly wed ducks smiling above the recently torn out stereo...at least those weren't stolen!

Car

So I am hoping that I will post a happier post later today with news of our house...but as for this morning I am not so happy.

Every morning Bryce and I get up and take our dogs on a two mile walk, it takes us about a half an hour. This morning we left for a very nice walk in the cold sunshine. As we walked back up to our house I saw that the window was missing from my car. Someone had broke the window and stolen my stereo and CD's of course. The windows were so frosted there is NO WAY someone could have walked by and seen it. Somebody already knew that I had a nice stereo. They also knew that when we left they would have about a half hour, although I'm sure it only took them a few minutes to unplug the fancy stereo Bryce bought me for my birthday and steal it.

I feel so violated, this person knew about the stero, they knew that we walked the dogs every morning, and they knew they would have some time. None of our neighbors saw anything so no leads of course. Bryce took my car to work and will be calling the insurance to get the window replaced. Oh and of course they couldn't just break the window but they also had to ruin the frame by trying to pry the frame open before breaking the window.

It is so hard for me to understand why a person would do this. I hope that they are starving and really need the money for some food. However, I'm sure that it is just a punk kid who wants some money. I hope this house goes through so that we can move out of this "bad" neighborhood (I didn't really think it was that bad until today). I know that most people have had something stolen from them and I'm certainly not the first, but this has never happend to me.

Packing

So today we gave our 30 days notice in our du-plex, hopefully things actually close and the house becomes ours! I was supposed to spend my day off packing, Bryce still had to work today so i agreed to stay home and pack. But then I discovered something bad happened with my groups assignment at school (I am currently working on my Master's in Organizational Leadership through Gonzaga University). So I instead spent the whole afternoon trying to fix our assignment. Here is the packing that I got done on Saturday:

This is the living room of our basement and it's probably only half of the stuff in our basement. I haven't even started on the upstairs. Maybe Bryce will help me with some packing tonight when he gets home from work! The banks were closed today so no news on the paperwork, we will probably hear a lot tomorrow!

The Bank

Here is the first picture of our house on Indian Trail. From the outside she looks beautiful. However, if you have never seen a repossessed home before, they are often trashed on the inside, which is the case here. There will be many more pictures to follow as we start fixing things up!

We are currently working on the final paperwork to make the house ours. We are set to close on Thursday the 19th, just a few days away! However, we are a little behind and we are not certain that we will be able to close that quickly. Buying a house from a bank often takes longer than from an owner. We left ourselves 31 days for closing. We got the inspection done right away. The appraisal was requested and should have been done the week following the inspection. With an FHA loan our lender has to request an appraisal through Washington DC. However, this request was made and after three days we were informed that there was already a request for an appraisal so we were denied our request. The bank that owns the house had made a request because they assumed we would get our loan through them. So then that had to be cancelled so that we could make a request. This took about two weeks. Then it took a few more days for the appraiser to actually get to our house. So now that is all done and we only have 4 days to get all the paper work done. However, the bank owning the house needs 48 hours to get the paperwork back to us, so they need it by Tuesday and Monday is a Holiday! Hopefully this will all get done in the short amount of time we have!

The 5th Try

We are on house number 5 and it looks like we will finally be able to sign closing papers! We started looking for a house nearly 6 months ago, before we were even married. We made an offer (too high) and it was accepted. During the inspection we discovered that the gazebo in the backyard was being moved away...the $10,000 gazebo. So we were out of that deal. We decided to wait until after the wedding (October 18th) to try again.

The end of November we found the most beautiful old, needs lots of updates house. We offered very low this time and the counter offer was great. So we accepted. The inspection went great, I bought new dog tags for the dogs so that as soon as we moved they would have the right address. And then the appraisal...we are getting an FHA loan so the appraisal came back with lots of repairs that needed to be done before our bank would be able to loan us the money. One of these was a new roof. The owner refused to put on a new roof, and we of course couldn't afford to. So that deal was off.

House number three was way out of our price range but we offered anyway and got a big fat NO WAY with our obviously low offer.

House four was just fine. Nothing spectacular but would work for us. It needed minimal work but didn't have a garage. So we offered pretty low. And the owner came back with the decision to lease it to somebody else. So there went that house.

Here is where we change Realtors.

Now on to house number 5...
House number five is in a beautiful neighborhood where every house is way out of our price range, except this one. Because it is repossessed. It is the newest house we have been able to look at, it's the nicest neighborhood we have looked at and it has everything we wanted, including an attached garage and walk-in closet! Because it is being repossessed there is a lot of work to be done. The carpets will have to go and the whole thing needs painted. New light fixtures, molding, painting outside, fence fixing, kitchen re-modeling. Adding appliances.

So now we will go through the stressful process of closing the deal...and then the real fun begins!