Homeowners

I was working on my third cup of coffee, mostly out of boredom. I drummed my fingers on the table repeatedly, glanced up at the clock again, and then grinned at J.

"I'm feeling very awake," I said "I will definitely not be asleep for this. In fact, I'll have all my best jokes ready."

She grinned back weakly. "How long do you think it will take again?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe an hour? James will be fine, I'm sure"

"Yeah, I'm starting to wish we'd just gotten a babysitter."

It had all started about three months ago when J came into the living room one morning and said "You know, I started to think last night about where we're going to put this new baby when he comes, and I realized that we have absolutely no more room in this apartment. I mean, there's no room for a bassinet in James' room...there's just no space for it. And where would we even put him in our room? Or even let's say he was going to sleep in the living room..look at this!"

The living room was in a state of semi-disaster. The "clean corner" was currently a stack of trumpet cases, and everywhere else was covered in James' mega-blocks.

"It's no big deal," I said, "The baby can sleep down in the storage unit. We'll just use a baby monitor."
"No really, what are we going to do? Should we start looking at larger apartments?"

We did. We were appalled.

"For that much money, we ought to just buy our own place."
We looked at each other.

That conversation had taken place many times before. Our current rent payment was already about what we'd expect to pay for a mortgage and other home-ownership expenses. We'd talked about the benefits of buying a place, and even did some preliminary looking. The first time we visited our bank we got laughed out when I tried to explain what my "primary" job was. ("Well, I don't really have a primary source of income, per se...")

"You know, I'm sure that our total income qualifies for a reasonable interest rate, and it's been consistent for a few years now."
"We could leave town at any time though, if you win an audition somewhere else."
"That's true, but that's just going to be the way it is until I either win one or we get some job here that rules out looking elsewhere."
"I sure wish we hadn't just spent (obscenely large amount of money) buying two cars...but we might be able to scrape together a down payment."
"It couldn't hurt to ask, right?"

So we asked.

"Yes, with your current income you would qualify. Now, tell me what you do for work?"

"Sure, I play second trumpet with the S Orchestra."
"Okay, anything else."
"Yes, I also play with the R Orchestra and the B Orchestra. And I teach at a local Christian school. And I teach at the local community music school. And I teach at H college. And I have a church job."
"....oh. And do you have paystubs from the last 60 days for all these jobs?"
"Not at all."

And so began our education of the mortgage process. I checked out a bunch of books from the local library with titles like "Mortgages for Dummies" and "How to Buy Your First Home" and "The Cambridge History of the Ancient World, Volume III: The Assyrian Empire." We also talked to lots of our similar-aged friends who had recently gone through the process, and some of our older friends who had been telling us to save our paystubs for years. We learned the meanings of words like "escrow" (somebody takes your money) and "PMI" (an insurance company takes your money) and "title insurance" (a different insurance company takes more of your money) and "origination fees" (a guy at a desk with a calculator takes your money) and "closing costs." (the bank takes whatever is left of your money.)

We sort of accidentally stumbled onto our Realtor in the early part of the process. J found a program online that offered rebates to teachers who are looking to buy houses ("I teach sometimes, if it's not an orchestra week and my students haven't cancelled!") and we were connected to a local Realtor who I will not name. She did not make a favorable impression. She had a distinctly unrefined manner. She showed up to viewings in flip flops and an oversized bermuda shirt with her tiny dog yapping in the back of her SUV. She didn't take particularly special care to pronounce her consonants, and we both had some serious doubts about whether she'd be able to decipher the enormous stacks of legal documents that were puzzling us at the first paragraph.

She was great. She brutally honest with us and with everyone we interacted with, and she asked all the rude questions to selling and listing agents that we would have been to polite to raise. She gave us candid evaluations of what she thought each place was worth when we finished looking at them, and she put us in touch with a good lawyer and a good inspector.

There were a lot of dud houses in between, though. We didn't exactly know what we were looking for, so when someone would ask us what we thought of the house we'd just visited, we'd stammer out something along the lines of. "Well, it definitely had walls...and a ceiling. I think there was a basement...funny smell...green paint?"

J found our house late one night while the baby was kicking her and keeping her awake. It was a brand new listing, and she loved the hardwood floors and the bright photos of the inside. She immediately emailed it to our Realtor. An hour later, when she still hadn't fallen asleep, she emailed her again. "We really REALLY want to look at this one as soon as possible."

12 hours later we made an offer, which was accepted later that night.

It was about here that we switched over from our bank to an independent mortgage broker. It was a good move. The bank was slow and unhelpful. Our agent at the broker was great...he worked a couple of long nights at the end to get everything ready, and he was always on top of getting us in. It was the end of August when we had our big first meeting with him.

"It looks like you should be able to hit the number that we're going to need for closing" he said "but you may need to eat peanut butter and jelly for a while. You're going to need X amount of dollars by Y date."

Thus began the daily process of checking our bank account, watching the expenses trickle out through the week, and then the paychecks replenishing on Friday. Then there were the big expenses at the beginning of the month, and we'd be two thousand short again...and then it would go back up.

There were some tense moments. The selling agent pulled some dirty tricks to try to get the process moving faster, and the date (Y) by which we needed to have X dollars got moved up by a few weeks. We saved harder. I took some extra gigs. Then we found out that the X dollars would actually need to be a higher number than we thought. So we saved even harder. Then we found out that out of my seven jobs and J's three, only five would count. This made our monthly debt to income ratio slightly outside the acceptable margin. So we called in a favor (which we won't name, but which was very generous) and we wiped out one of our small debts with a gift.

There was so much paperwork. There were paystubs to be tracked down, tax forms to be printed, waivers to be signed, inspections to be approved, and all of it had to be scanned and sent back into the office as soon as possible. I don't know how this process worked before iPhones, but the scanner feature on my phone was a life saver. There were a few times when J found something in the mail and scanned something while I was in rehearsal. We ended up making five trips to the bank to print out copies of ATM deposits we'd made over the last two months to prove that our gig checks weren't for drug money. All of the sorts of tasks that I'd have put off until an evening off were rushed through breathlessly between lessons and before dinner so we could get them in on time.

And then there were the temptations. We've never been really big spenders, as a family, but I think we all felt the belt tighten as we cut down on any frivolous expense. There was no ordering out a pizza when we were too tired to cook. We stopped buying at Wegmans what we could get at Aldi's. The iPhone 6 came out, and I could have traded mine in if I fronted $200, but I chose not to. We packed peanut butter and jelly for lunch

And then, we were down to the wire and we were cleared to close. We waited to hear from our attorney about what the closing date might be. I got a voicemail on Wednesday from him: "Hi Mr. Smith, this is John Staples from the law office of Mitch Vericello. We've set a closing date for Friday, October 17th, and Mr. Vericello himself is going to be present for your closing paperwork. You'll need a cashier's check in the amount of X dollars."

At 1:00 today I drove to the bank and got a cashier's check drawn up in the largest amount of money that's ever been in my hands. We drove (with James, and fully caffeinated) to the law offices of Mitch Vericello, where Mr. Vericello himself gave us a terse greeting and escorted us back into a non-child-friendly room and gave us a mountain of papers to sign. His shirt was tucked into his underwear.

And then, an hour later, we emerged as homeowners. The sellers are still in the property for the next two days, and then I have a week of Die Fledermaus in Syracuse with rehearsals every single night...we're hoping we can scrounge together enough of a crew to move on Saturday. The new place still smells like the seller's cats, but we're hoping that the removal of their junk will help with that a good deal. Either way, we'll be over there during the days this week unloading books and scrubbing.

At this point, I feel surprisingly calm about the whole thing. There were some really tense moments in there. Last Friday was the day that we needed to hit our minimum amount in the account to get cleared to close, and it was a lot closer than I'd care to admit. That whole day I walked around looking worried and checking my phone every five minutes. But today, as it all wraps up, I just feel happy and relaxed. J is going to have her very own house, in which she can decorate it as she sees fit, so long as it costs less than $10. James is going to have a backyard, which is basically the best thing an almost-three-year old could ask for.

And the new baby won't have to sleep in the storage unit.

Coda: James spent most of this evening dragging his most valuable possessions (George, Steven, his toy vacuum, and a large stick) to the front door and informing us that he was ready to move to the new house. This is significant progress from the child who refused to let George and Steven leave the apartment all week after seeing the new house for the first time. We're pretty sure he was convinced that as long as they were in the apartment we couldn't move anywhere. We've had several chats since about how Mommy and Daddy and George and Steven and all of our toys are going to the new house together. This seems to have helped.

The process of getting to closing this afternoon was a roller coaster unlike anything I'd previously experienced. If we hadn't put down $X in earnest money at the very beginning I'm not sure we would have held out to the end. But hold out we did, and major kudos to our realtor, who ended up not being nearly as scary as her SUV dog would have indicated, our family, and friends who helped educate us in the process. And to the author of this blog, who truly shouldered the vast majority of the paperwork/scanning/phone calling/money making burden himself--may this house be a sweet haven of rest and provide you with a dwelling to practice in without serving as the inspiration for new apartment-complex noise regulations.