House Lady came over last night with the counter offer and we put together a counter-counter offer. The whole thing so far has sort of been like this:

Us: We'll give you 3 grand more than you're asking for but we want about 13 grand (for a relative lowball figure of about 10 grand) in concessions, kickbacks, closing costs, etceteras. We want your refrigerator, washer, dryer, trampoline and pets too. You can keep your kids.

Them: That's mighty white of you. How about "No"? Let's clarify a thing or two, here's a better way to fix this and that and altogether this gets your lowball to around 4 grand. We're keeping the trampoline and the pets. The kids are negotiable.

Us: Those changes are mostly acceptable only your legalese on this one is a bit off so we're correcting it and we'll go ahead and specify a couple of things that were generalized before. The lowball is about 5 grand and that's really where we need to stay. We really don't want your kids.

Hopefully we'll have a binding contract this evening. Your finger crossings are working wonders!

Posted by: Jim at 10:24 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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The sellers didn't accept our offer. A couple of the things we want were based on the wrong info so it's not too surprising. See, we didn't have a copy of their Seller's Disclosure (this is the form where they say how old everything is and what is included in the house purchase) when we made our offer. House Lady had an unofficial one that Mister Seller had whipped up really quickly but there were errors on it. The biggest error was for the HVAC system. The unofficial Seller's Disclosure said that the HVAC was 17 years old and the water heater was 7. Part of our offer included a replacement HVAC. Turns out the HVAC is 7 and the water heater is 17. No need for a new HVAC.

So, we're now waiting for their counter-offer with the HVAC replacement part removed, hopefully a water heater replacement added, and assorted other niggling changes. Hopefully we'll get it today and hopefully it'll come complete with a genuine Seller's Disclosure. Then we'll put together a counter-counter offer!

Have I told y'all about House Lady yet? No, I don't think I have. She's...motivated. She talks too fast, too. Like somebody from Maryland. On crack. We've been in Georgia for over three years - we can't listen that fast any more. But like I said, she's motivated. That first evening that she came over for house surfing said a lot. She went through the realtor listings with us. The actual realtor listings with all of the super secret house information that lowly buyers aren't supposed to have access to. She also left with her Realty/Company accoung logged in. Not that it mattered since she didn't really hide her password (slightly easier to remember than '1-2-3-4').

We've spent a bit of time cruising around the Realty/Company database, by the way. We can't help it. I'm naturally curious and Lovely Wife is female. No way we could leave that alone. I'll just say that they could definitely use some new programmers, at least one of whom understands the concepts of crafting a user interface.

So to summarize, waiting on a counter offer, probably will lead to a corrected offer. Still working the same (very cool) house. Continue to cross fingers, please.

UPDATE

Just found out that they're supposed to be getting together with their agent this evening to craft the counterproposal. They're not happy with our earnest money. For those of you who haven't purchased a house before, earnest money is sort of like a deposit. It's the money you'll be out if you change your mind at the last minute and stick it to the seller. We don't have a whole lot of earnest money - we're credit rich and cash poor as they say. Apparently the buyers are concerned that we might not be serious about buying the house because we've put in about as much earnest money as a speculator might.

I'm getting the feeling that brokers and agents just get in the way and that if we could sit down with those folks face to face we'd have this whole thing wrapped up in a half hour or so.

Posted by: Jim at 11:09 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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It's quite intense and very expensive and it hopefully won't last very long. Ryan was into it. So was Clancy. Michele almost had multiple strokes doing it. Yup, I'm talking about home buying.

On Friday we got our preapproved mortgage and the House Lady came over the very same night so we could surf for houses. We identified a short dozen that we liked and House Lady and Lovely Wife planned on looking at them the next day. In a couple hours. Can you say "stressful shopping"?

Fortunately we managed to eliminate half of them so the tour de houses was actually possible in the time frame allowed on Saturday. Four of the houses visited were eliminated. That left two. On Sunday the boys and I joined Lovely Wife and the House Lady to see those two and two others that sort of surfaced while we were out. Both of the ones that popped up were quickly eliminated. Both of the ones that Lovely Wife had pre-scoped for us were very cool.

They each had their advantages. The one was closer to Dopple-G (important for commuting). The other had a workshop (important for manly beer drinking while using power tools). The one had a fenced back yard (we've got two dogs and three kids) and a sun room. The other had a mostly fenced back yard and a den. The one had a nicely sized eat-in kitchen. The other had a bedroom right off of the kitchen. What's up with that? The one had a big two-car sized carport. The other still had that workshop, and a nice dry crawlspace under the house. The one had a magnificent magnolia tree. The other...um...hardwood floors! Yeah, that's it. The one had landscaping and was on a cul-de-sac. The other was right on a major road and had lots and lots of things to mow around.

We put in an offer on the one house. We'll hear back by 8 o'clock tonight.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Posted by: Jim at 11:13 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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I was watching "Humanimals: Wild Makeovers" on Discovery Health over the weekend. This is a show about extreme body modification. Things like facial tattoos, implants, split tongues and other such things. They profiled several people who've gone to various levels of body modification. Two were relatively minor - the reptile man has the tattoo of lizard scales all over his body (face and head included) plus a split tongue. The cat girl was similarly adorned with tiger stripe tattoos.

The other two were quite a bit more severe. Cat man had the tattoos as well as a surgically cleft lip (yeah, the thing that people pay money to fix in their kids so they can talk normally), sharpened teeth, whisker implants, cheek implants, 4 inch long finger nails and cat eye contacts. Enigma has the tattoo of a jigsaw puzzle over his entire body with blue tattooed over his face and hands. Oh, he has horns implanted too. more...

Posted by: Jim at 10:54 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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