Stuff and Things and House Headaches

Well first off, I lost my phone this weekend so if you've tried or are going to try calling me... well I hope I find it at home instead of some random person at the theater or something.

Seth and Alex and I went to see Tron Legacy on Saturday, which was a lot of fun. I hadn't watched the original Tron until earlier this year (Seth nearly fainted when he found that out) and in spite of its age, I loved it. Tron Legacy lived up to it and had some seriously [i]incredible[/i] style. The 3D was great and while I wouldn't exactly go wearing one of the skin tight body suits in public myself, the costumes and EL/CG work that went into them were pretty sweet. The soundtrack by Daft Punk was really good too.

Meanwhile, things with the house are moving along (sort of). We're currently languishing in underwriting for our loan. Here's what happened. When we applied for the loan the loan officer handling it said "Oh! Your credit is so good that we don't need to do an appraisal of the house!" To which Seth was all, "Um, can we please do one anyways?" Whereupon the loan offer said, "Well no, if we did it, it would just confuse the underwriters." "Well ok..."

However, a week later and with our appraisal contingency deadline approaching rapidly we hear back from the underwriters... since the property had been bought out of foreclosure (I think?) by the developers that we're buying the house from only aa few months before it came on the market, there were all the indicators of a common flipping and bank fraud scheme. "Developers" go in and buy a property, claim they renovated it, and immediately sell it to a straw buyer for way more than it's worth. This type of flipping scheme and shoddy underwriting practices that didn't catch it is one of the reasons the housing market went boom. Funny enough, the underwriters are a bit more attentive now. Long story short, they need the appraisal. And our contingency comes... and goes before they get it done. Now this was fairly concerning for us since if it didn't appraise well our loan could be denied and we wouldn't have any contingency left to get out of the contract and we could lose our 5K deposit. The bank took foreeeever to get the appraisal done and our realtors have been working hard to work out contract extensions with the seller.

Happily, things seem like they're starting to smooth out again. We got the appraisal in today and it came back saying the house is worth $10K more than we're paying for it. Our extensions are pushing back our signing day to January 7, however, so I guess that blows up our plan for an Empty House Party there on New Years Eve. It was going to be BYOF(urniture)!