How Not To Buy A House: a lesson in comedy, futility, and madness (part 4)

I'm sorry I made you wait so many days for the next part of the tale documenting our exercise in futility. I didn't really intend to make you wait this long. I really did mean to write more the next day but remember how my life went to hell in a handbasket. Hehehe, see what I did right here. Not only did I cover my ass for the long delay but I gave you a taste of what the whole house buying fiasco was like for us...promises and hope with no fucking follow through.

When y'all last read the story, we were desperately hoping the house would be set up and closed on before the end of the year and I think that was the biggest joke we ran into. Despite everything we said, despite everything we did, the house did NOT get delivered and set up before the end of the year. We did NOT close before the end of the calendar year. And, all that meant we lost the $10,000 tax credit for first time home buyers that was expiring that year and we got bitch slapped by the tax man when he assessed taxes and penalties on the money we withdrew from Vic's 401K....taxes and penalties we wouldn't have had to pay if we had closed before Dec. 31 of that year.

Even once B's supposed crack set up crew delivered the house in the following year, things did NOT move quickly. In these situations, a crew usually has about one work week that they dedicate to setting up a house. They place the house on the foundation, permanently set the tie downs, permanently join the two halves and the pipes and the ductwork, and have specialists check electrical and water connections. 9 times out of 10, modular or mobile homes pass their inspection and get their certificate of occupancy on the first try...but not us.  It took multiple months, numerous long and mostly unexplained absences, and innumerable hounding phone calls until B's Crack crew finished the job that should have taken a week, 2 weeks if they were having a tough time. After all that, it took not 1, not 2, not even 3, inspections to get the certificate of occupancy. It took at least 4 inspections before we were cleared to move in.

This was when we got the next fun and special surprise from B. Do you remember the furniture that had been torched and supposedly reordered? Well, we remembered it too. That's all we could do because even though there was a certificate of occupancy, the furniture was still nowhere to be found. B swore up and down that he had reordered or furniture and this time it's absence was the fault of the manufacturer. See, this time, the manufacturer just didn't deliver it to B on time and then, in the interim, the manufacturer cancelled that line o furniture. It was gone,over, finished, kaput. My carefully selected, lovingly picked out furniture was DBA - dead before arrival. Yet again, we had to search through the books and make a new furniture selection. We got that done, went shopping for a new mattress, and tried to schedule or closing date. We waited and waited and waited some more to actually have a closing date set...and, that's when something snapped.

We decided at this point that we didn't give a damn if it was legal or not. We had a certificate of occupancy. We were moving in on x date whether we had closed or not. We were moving in on x date whether we had living room furniture or not. We were tired of being screwed around.

So, as the x date approached and we still hadn't closed, we rented a truck and started packing our apartment. We moved in with bare bones bedroom furniture for us and NO living room furniture at all. We moved in and filled cabinets and dressers but signed no papers making it ours. We moved in just in time to have our families over after Joey's baptism but we had to bring the bench seats in from our van for them to have anything to sit on. It was chaos but it still felt good to be there.

I guess our move in kicked B's ass into gear and he scheduled our closing date for less than a month after we moved in (even when he was in gear, he was a seriously slow assed mother). When we got the news that a closing date had been set, Vic and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. We beat B. We beat that sorry assed son-of-a bitch and the house was going to be ours. Surely we had finally mastered all of his surprises? Surely the closing was going to be uneventful? Bwahahahahahahaha. B had one more surprise for us and it was a doozy.

When we picked out the house, we picked carefully. A huge consideration in our decision was the total cost of the house and the land and what sort of payment that worked out to be with the interest rate we had pre-qualified for. Back then, we had an awesome credit rating. Well, maybe not awesome but it was good enough to qualify for an FHA loan with very low interest rate. We did not get the interest rate we pre-qualitied for. We didn't get our cherry interest rate because the company B had handling the construction loan on our house, the very construction loan that would roll into our mortgage, never received a single payment on that construction loan. The lack of payment on the construction loan was the first nail in our credit rating and it cost us about 1 1/2 % points interest and over $200 dollars a month in payments. It SUCKED.

And, to add a lovely garnish to the top of this fucked up house buying tale. We closed on the house, made one payment,yes, just one payment, and my husband blew his knee out while he was at work. One fucking house payment and we follow it up with a career ending injury. I sometimes think that house was never meant to be ours.

So, there you have it...betrayal, lying, piss poor customer service, more lying, a comedy of errors, and the ever encroaching madness thrust on us by a family member who was suppose to be looking out for us.

Have you ever gone through such a comedy of errors? Can you top my house buying tale of horror? Share your story with us...pretty please.

How Not To Buy A House: a lesson in comedy, futility, and madness (part 3)

We left off our house buying saga with the land cleared and prepped. You'd think it would be a fairly short time from that stage until the house was delivered. In our case, you would be very, very wrong. Shortly after all the prep work was done, we started having a fair amount of rain again. B kept using the wet ground as an excuse for why his people didn't show up to deliver and set up our home week after week after week. The problem was that B's dealership was over an hour away (close to 2 hours away) and he never bothered to check what the weather was like up where we lived. There were many days when the ground had dried out up here but it might (may I stress the might) be wet where B worked. My normally trusting mind started to wonder if B hadn't used our down payment for personal gain instead of placing the factory order for our house.

We hit the end of October...still no house on the land.

We hit the 7th of November...still no house.

We made it to the 14th of November, just under 4 weeks from my due date with Joey...still no house on the land.

On November 15th, Joey decided to hell with waiting for the house. He was coming out then. This was the one and only moment I was glad we weren't in our house yet. Our apartment was much closer to the hospital than our new house was going to be and Joey's delivery was fraught with possible complications because I was bleeding a lot and no one knew why. Luckily, Joey's early delivery wasn't a huge issue for him. At almost 4 weeks early, Joey was 7 lbs and 20 inches. We both got to leave the hospital when Joey was 4 days old but I landed my ass back in the hospital for a 5 day stay when Joey was only 8 days old. Yup, I went back into the hospital on the night of Thanksgiving.

While B's continual fuck ups were a small blessing the night I actually delivered, the House Follies caused major problems when I went back into the hospital. There my poor husband was with an (almost) 4 yr old, a newborn, a dog, a cat, and no place for anyone to stay with him to help. But, thanks to the stellar coping abilities of my husband, he and the munchkins made it through my now house having, stuck in the apartment, hospital stay intact. Once I was home (in that piece of shit, hole in the wall apartment), we were able to go back to trying to get our house finished before the end of the year.  Oh yeah, we also had to plan for Christmas when we didn't know where we would be.

By December 15th, we had concluded (quite correctly) that we wouldn't be in the house before Christmas. While that wasn't a great tragedy, the proposal of not only not being in our house but not closing before the end of the year had us in a near panic state. See, we had taken money from Vic's 401K to make the down payment on our house. If we closed before the end of the year, that withdrawal wouldn't count as income. If we didn't close before the end of the year, we would get screwed hugely on the taxes because all that money would count as income and because the $10,000 tax credit for first time home owners that was being offered by the IRS would expire.

So, do you think we got screwed on our taxes or do you think B finally got his ass in gear and squeaked our house in under the wire?

Come back tomorrow to find out.

How Not To Buy A House: a lesson in comedy, futility, and madness (part 2)

When I left off the tales of our house buying adventure, we had found the names of people to clear the land, pour the foundation, and dig the well. After a few weeks, B finally got off his ass and had scheduled these jobs and work was just barely starting to happen. Things were looking up. Then, we got the next set back call.

When you buy a mobile or modular home, many dealerships offer the option to buy furniture and have the cost rolled into your mortgage. We had taken advantage of that option and had ordered a living room suite. That set back call I mentioned, it had to do with our furniture. According to B, the furniture had come in quickly and was placed it in a storage shed on the dealership property...a storage shed that was torched by an arsonist...an arsonist that was never caught. So, we told B to reorder the same furniture and thought that was taken care of. Mistake #4...

• Don't believe a bullshit story about a mysterious arsonist without seeing the police report.

Though we were frustrated by the latest setback, we were also excited because things were starting to happen out on our property. With things starting to happen, we were making trips out to our, OUR property. Marty, my friend Kristi, and I all went out there and checkout the area they had cleared for the house and our yard. The weather was working against us though. We had hit the early fall and it rained and rained and rained. The rain turned our newly cleared land into a mud pit and made it impossible for the heavy machinery to move around and be able to pour the foundation and dig the well. We had to wait for it to dry. But, I was still clinging to hope that we could be in the house before Joey was born. There was a whole month and a half left until my due date and I still thought I'd go late because I did with Marty. If B had done his job, it would have been possible. By this point, I should have known better but it was simply beyond my comprehension to think a family member would screw us over so royally. Mistake #5...

• Clinging to delusional hope we would be in our house on time.

By the middle of October, the absolutely fabulous local companies had cleared the land, poured a perfect foundation, and had the well dug. With mobile or modular homes, this is the difficult part. If you have a good set up crew, you can have one of those bitches in place and ready for occupancy within a couple of weeks after all the prep work is done. A really kick ass crew could possibly do it all in a week and then leave you the next week for the inspections. B did NOT have a kick ass crew. B also wasn't a kick ass boss who could motivate a half assed crew. Getting in the house before the baby was born was a god damned lost cause.

Come on back tomorrow to read the next segment of the House Buying Follies .

How Not To Buy A House: a lesson in comedy, futility, and madness (part 1)

When I was about 2 months pregnant with Joey, Vic and I were living in a little bitty apartment with one dog, 2 cats, and a toddler. This apartment had delusions of grandeur and claimed to be 1000 sq ft...and, if you went by external wall measurements it might have made that size. But, this apartment was in a real brick building and that meant walls that were between 18 and 24 inches deep. That meant some serious square footage lost to the walls. During one of my stir crazy pregnant days, when I was tired and hormonal and more than a little pissed off we weren't in our house yet, I calculated the square footage we actually had and it was a lot closer to only 750 sq ft...not enough room.

Even back in the day, we lived on a budget. So, money was a concern when we started talking about buying a house. We wanted the most house and land we could get for our money. We did a quite a bit of research and found out a bunch of the mobile home companies made houses that were pretty phenomenal buys and, in NC, they had to be built to higher standards than site built homes. They may not have been our dream house but they were structurally sound, had lots of square footage, and the monetary outlay was minimal. And, if you had land lined up, the turn around time from purchase to move in time could be as little as 2 to 3 months. Our course was set. I was so excited. We would be in our new home before our second baby was born...or so I thought.

Vic and I went looking for land and found a fabulous piece of land out in the country. It was 5 acres, backed onto protected forest (owned by a local university), and had a stream running through it.  We were sold. The price was right and the owner only required $100 earnest money. One contract and $100 later, we were set and ready to pick our home. Here was mistake number 1...my brother-in-law (now ex-bil) happened to manage a mobile home dealership and promised us the BEST DEAL POSSIBLE. What a fucking joke.

• Never, ever make a deal with a family member...especially if it's a family member you aren't sure you like.

B's (now ex-bil) dealership was a couple of counties away but he assured us it would be NO problem to get the home delivered to our land and his crew would have no trouble getting it set up. We thought we had done due diligence and asked him all the questions you're suppose to ask going into a deal like this. Our mistake was believing his answers. Now, when you get a home through a modular or mobile home dealership, you often arrange the financing through them since you have to get a loan that will roll from a construction loan into a mortgage. They handle the payments on the land and once the house is set on the land it all rolls into the mortgage. B got us all set and we were excited because our credit was good enough to qualify for an FHA loan.

We visited the dealership, picked out our house (2200 glorious sq ft), picked all the colors and counters for the inside, and paid our down payment. It was less than a month after we started and we felt that left us plenty of time to get moved in before I delivered. After all, I would probably deliver late since I had delivered my first baby a full 9 days late...mistake #2.

• Never, ever think you know how a pregnancy will go. Just because one baby is late doesn't mean another will. Thinking you can count on ANYTHING while pregnant is pure comedy.

Now the real problems began. It took over a month for B to get the land deal closed. Then he started throwing excuse after excuse about not being able to find local people to clear the land and pour the foundation and drill the well. Well, fuck me...these were questions we had asked and he had sworn it wouldn't be a problem. We begged, we pleaded, we called weekly and then daily. It got to the point where my sister thought we were persecuting her husband (she knows better now). Things finally got going when we contacted a friend who knows everybody and she was able to put us in contact with local companies who could complete all these tasks that had to be done before the house was delivered. We passed on the info to B and it still took a couple of weeks to get things moving. Mistake #3...

• If this ever happens to you, kiss your $100 earnest money (on the land) goodbye, demand your down payment back, and run far, far away.

Join us tomorrow to find out what happened when they finally started doing work on our land.