Kevin's Weblog

Right. I keep meaning to update and failing. I’m closing on the house on Thursday. I’m in a sort of very low level, continuous freak-out at this point. I’m sure it’ll go fine; but the reality of moving and setting up a home, again, is sinking in. Oh, and have I mentioned that I’m leaving on a two week vacation two weeks after closing day? Some recollections of the past month:

The inspection itself was quite educational. I followed the inspector around and got quite a few pointers about maintenance and such. The big issue that came up is that the roof is close to finished. We had a tense day of negotiations, but did get the seller to agree to cover the cost of a new roof.

Settling on the mortgage was a little stressful, but only because I didn’t just trust my instincts. My feeling going in was that I wanted to use my credit union, who I have a life-long relationship with. Over the years, plenty of people have looked at me funny for continuing to do all my banking with a bank on the other side of the country, but they have never made me unhappy as a customer, which is a pretty amazing thing to say about a bank. So, I got my preapproval through them, but then I let my agent talk me into getting some mortgage quotes from a broker that she often uses. That ended up taking most of a week, due to some phone tag, and in the end the broker couldn’t beat my credit union’s rates (or their fees, or their guarantee not to resell my loan). Unfortunately, at that point when I called my credit union to finalize the application, the first person I talked to wasn’t sure they could do it, because they usually want 30 days to do an out-of-state mortgage (which would have been no problem had I not wasted a week getting quotes from other people). Then I talked to another person and said “Look, I really want to do this with you, but if you can’t hit May 1st I have to go elsewhere”, and he said he could make that happen.

Getting insurance was straightforward, although part of me really wants to know why they ask some of the questions they do and how it affects your risk (and premium). I don’t want to game them or anything, I’m genuinely curious why drywall vs. sheetrock matters to them.

Tomorrow I need to call the utility companies and take care of all that.

Okay, better post this now, or it’ll never happen before the purchase actually happens.

I’m now on Twitter. I’d been sort of contemplating it for a while, but Selena finally talked me into it while we were out #drunkgeeking last week. So far only 25% of my tweets are about what I’m eating.