5th Anniversary! Christmas! (and the House!)

Christmas here was a rather more subdued affair than it usually is. Seth and I really missed being up in Ironwood or PA with the rest of our families though at least we got to celebrate with his family a couple weeks ago. Still, it just wasn't quite the same. I'm looking forward to next year when we actually have a real house and get get a real tree instead of using the fake one we have now. Hey, we'll even have a fireplace mantle for hanging stockings on! Kat enjoyed the fake tree though and he looked pretty cute wearing a red bow too, even if he did crawl out of it by the time he finished exploring the presents.





Christmas morning we drove up to visit Seth's mom. It was good to see her and chat for a while, and we even got to see one of Seth's uncles he never gets to see when they came to pick her up to go visit the rest of their family. We came home, opened presents, and then came another episode of Marianne vs. Kitchen. Unfortunately the kitchen won in the rack of lamb rib challenge though my cranberry sauce wasn't bad if I do say so myself. Thankfully, Seth saved the day by beating the kitchen into submission by whipping up some eatable pasta. I think this was one of the weirdest Christmases we've ever had.

This year was also our 5th Anniversary! Talk about time flying. It feels like it's been so much longer and yet only a few days at the same time. Buying the house put a damper on the anniversary plans I'd been making since July, though I'll put those in a pocket and maybe bust them out next year if it's still viable. Buying the house put a damper on a lot of spending this year, but it was still fun. We went out to dinner at a really nice restaurant. We'd gone there for my birthday and even had a card for a free appetizer. :) And their bruschetta are to die for. It was seriously a great night and a much needed break from the house-buying stress we've had over the holidays.

And stress there has been. The appraisal on the house worked out, but the same lack of service and basic understanding on how this process should work from the Bank of America has given us more problems. The seller is a developer and bought our house out of foreclosure and then redid everything. They're apparently trying to do something tricky (but legal!) in order only pay the (high) transfer tax that gets slapped on people buying and selling houses in Maryland once. This means (as far as I understand it) that their title on the property is not clear yet though it would become clear when we go to the settlement table and in all one transaction they pay the transfer tax for buying and selling the house and the title immediately comes to us. This, however, has confused BoA and they've denied our loan application because of it. Seth, our agent, and the seller's agent practically stormed their offices to convince them not to close the loan application. If they close it, the nice 4.375% rate we still have locked in for another two weeks or something would disappear. What's the point of a rate lock if they won't even give us that time to fix whatever problems they have with our application? The loan officer even said that Seth and I were the most qualified buyers that they've seen in years. They seem pretty intent on driving our business away, however, and though they agreed to keep the application open and we're working on trying to get them to understand the title issue, we're not terribly hopeful.

Contrast that experience with what happened when Seth called up Suntrust and explained the situation with the the title. The loan officer there had no problem working with us. He couldn't give us the awesome rate we have there and we'll be at a 4.9ish% instead even after discount points (ie. the loan officer paying a point for us out of his commission) and paying a point to bring it down. But that loan officer put in a request for an appraiser to come out to look at the house yesterday and guess who's going there today? Yep. He even said we can probably close on the house next week.

So unless BoA has an unexpected bout of competency and decent customer service we'll be going with the higher (though still pretty low) loan rate and Suntrust's service.