Trudging Along

In the last installment, we were in the middle of arguing about the appraisal as we were seeking a refinance. What a joke that was. I talked and/or emailed with the lender at least six times, spent countless hours finding comps and researching adjustments to bring the prices in line, and came to the conclusion that the appraiser only looked at the HUD sales, since out of four HUD homes sold within a 15-mile radius in the last 12 months, one was our house and three were his comps.After all that effort, one of the seven people we had contact with at the lender made a throwaway comment that "we'd use the selling price anyway".

Wait. Back the truck up. What?

Yeah. Turns out that Quicken has a policy in place that within 12 months of a cash purchase, they will only fund loans for 80% of the lower of the appraised value or the purchase price. Which means -- and the Quicken chick confirmed it -- that even if the appraisal came back at $500,000, they'd only give us a loan for $28,000.

I'm a patient person and I rarely get mad, but I was pretty livid when I heard that little tidbit. If we'd known about it going in, we would have never bothered trying to refinance at this point -- the whole point was to get a loan for more than the purchase price, not less. (To their credit, Quicken admitted it was their error and did fully refund our $500 application fee, but what a phenomenal waste of our time!)

So we're in a holding pattern, as far as a mortgage goes, until at least the end of March. (Which isn't so far away now!) We did get a small loan to do some renos, and the new floors are in! I love, love, love them. We ended up just ripping out what was in the kitchen and hallway -- it was cheap and buckling anyway, and since there's no real divider between the family room and kitchen I just didn't want to deal with two different woods on adjacent floors.

Kitchen, before

Family room into kitchen, after

I think it kind of looks the same in these pictures, but it's definitely not!

Hallway, before

Hallway, after

The difference is much more obvious here. Wider planks, and a richer, deeper color. Love it!

Family room, before

Family room, after

Bedroom, before

Bedroom, after

Master bath, before

Master bath, after

The bathrooms actually have different flooring; we went with a vinyl 'snap-together' floor for greater water resistance. Pretty good match, though!

The next step is painting. It would have been preferable to get that done before the floors, but for a variety of reasons it just didn't work out that way. We'll have lots and lots of dropcloths when we do paint! I'm going with a medium gray (I've almost decided on Gateway Gray from the Behr Marquee collection, but 25% lighter. There are tons of grays out there and I've made myself crazy looking at them all, but then Behr Marquee came out. One-coat coverage? Sign me up! I ended up doing three coats at our current house the last time I painted, so even the extra price per gallon of the Marquee will save money in the long run.)

S is heading down on Easter weekend to install new toilets and vanities and hook up the water heater, and then my mom and I are going down for Memorial Day weekend to paint. (We'll be able to stay at the house, since there are now floors and water, yay!) I'm not looking forward to painting an entire house in a weekend, but hopefully with two of us (and one-coat coverage, I'm really banking on that claim being true!) it won't be too bad. Plus Mom needs to see exactly what (and where) she helped us buy, and meet the Walnut Grove clan, especially if she thinks she's ever going to go down there on her own.

S will be back down again in June for his annual ride and the family reunion, and assuming the painting goes well he'll visit with the local credit union to find out about a refi. We should get a much better appraisal, and so we can hopefully get that all settled and start working on some of the many other items on our "Money Pit To Do List". (A fence is my next priority, so that we can start bringing some of the critters with us when we go down there.)