Troy Johnson

So, lets see, the last update was here on Ron's journal. He has all the other updates linked so I won't repeat that effort.

I'm supposed to be packing, but that has been surprisingly hard to get started on. I think it is both because it seems really final, and because I am not looking forward to the house being topsy-turvey again after a few months of being able to walk around the house without having to turn sideways.

Everything is on track as far as this house. We were worried about the appraisal since it took eight days for the appraiser to make his report, but it came back "full value" so everything is trucking along there.

On the house we are buying, we had the inspection and it went well. Most of the things wrong (outside of the deck which was added onto by an addled monkey with a tool belt) were easy to fix and caused by poor maintenance rather than actual flaws in the house. The only major things were the hot water heater being at the very end of its life, and the roof only having a couple of years left in it. The aforementioned deck will take some work before we will let people walk on it, but there is nothing wrong that can't be fixed by someone willing to actually -read- a how to build a deck book.

So, now though, we are stuck on the appraisal of that house. The appraiser won't appraise it till some safety issues he identified are fixed, but since it is bank-owned, we have to buy the house as-is or the deal is off. Our real estate agents is trying to find out what exactly needs to be fixed in order to make the house appraisal worthy, but the appraiser is not being forthcoming with that info. We think we just need to have the electrical inspected (our inspector thought it was a good job so I don't know what the appraisers issue is) put a railing on the section of deck that doesn't have it (there is a 7 foot section that is five feet up without a railing...this is actually the least of the decks problems, but if it makes the appraiser happy...) and the doorway into the master bathroom needs to have a threshold installed since it is a trip hazard. But we can't do any of that till the appraiser says, "yes, that will satisfy things" and he/she was supposed to get back to our agent today but didn't. And, it is a little annoying to have to do work on a house we don't own in order to make it buyable when we already signed off on the inspection and we don't actually, you know, own the house.

So, once again we just have to wait. Hopefully not until it is too late the get the house closed on before we have to move out of here so we don't end up living in a culvert.