From House to Home: The Purchase Process

From House to Home is a series where I share all the details behind our home purchase and making this house ours, from the search and through all our renovations.

Read part one: Finding the Right Home For Us

Before buying a house I’d always hear about the nightmare of closing. About the stack of paperwork to sign. About how your hand feels like it’s about to fall off because of all the times you have to put your signature to paper. Turns out that to close on a home is so much more than that, with so many more things to be approved and looked at and fixed before you even glance at that mound of paperwork. Who knew. Purchasing a home is not only expensive, it’s a process.

Getting Pre-Approved

The easiest part of the home buying process was actually getting the pre-approval. It just required verbal information to our lender who was all type type on the computer, let me get some figures. Okay, cool, you’re good. Our finances are pretty straightforward and we both have a top-tier credit rating. It seemed like this whole process would be a very simple one.

The Approval

The approval process took so much longer than I ever anticipated. We had to send over bank statements, pay stubs, IRA statements, proof of cleared escrow check, W-2 and 1099 paperwork from the past two years, and so much more. The requests for paperwork came one by one and every day it felt like we needed to provide something new. Throughout this time we also had the appraisal and inspection done. About two weeks before our scheduled closing our loan moved from the conditional approval stage to underwriting, and then even more was required of us. Lemme tell you, with my husband working the nightshift and me being with these kids all the time, it was very difficult to get everything together to send to our lender.

We ended up having just a couple very simple conditions where we needed to provide underwriting with proof of this or that, and then we eagerly waited for the final word. In the meantime, we just started wiring money to the title company who would be doing our closing. We knew the approval was coming and we didn’t want to wait to actually hear we were approved before working on our downpayment. If we had waited we wouldn’t have closed on time because the wires could take 1-2 days, depending on the time of day you submit them.

The Inspection + Conditions

I was very nervous about the inspection (cost: $350.00) because you never know what could come up. The inspection wasn’t perfect, and I didn’t expect it to be, but hearing things “wrong” with the house was still disappointing. Couple things that were found:

• Very small hole in roof. Roof was replaced in 2016 and there was a part of it that wasn’t sealed correctly (or whatever, I’m no expert)
• HVAC wasn’t cooling the house by 20 degrees in 20 minutes (something the inspectors look at to mark as ‘working’)
• Water filtration wasn’t filtering properly (we have well water)
• Water heater too hot
• Sediment in water
• Fireplace had crack in brick

All of these things are now resolved, so that’s good! The seller had the roof fixed and the HVAC serviced (it just needed to be cleaned and have freon added). The sediment in water and the water heater getting too hot can be resolved by flushing the hot water heater. The seller also had the fireplace fixed and cleaned out for us.

The water filtration unit had to be replaced though. We got the water tested and found way more in it than I would even be close to being okay with. Thanks to our new system, our water is so pure. It cost $3,300 but it’s money well spent to make sure we aren’t consuming something harmful. Also, we received quotes from multiple companies, with the first quoting us over $8,000, so trust me that you shouldn’t have to pay that much (it was a Culligan water rep, by the way).

Side note: We also have septic and we got a septic inspection which turned out just fine. Septic inspection cost was $425.00.

Survey + Title Issues

As our luck would have it, things just kept cropping up. When the title company got involved they noticed an issue with the legal description of the property. On one of the sides of the property, the legal description was off by 10 degrees, which could be a big deal because it’s about 300 feet and in case you didn’t know, you never want to have anything incorrect on your legal description. Always get it corrected!

Most of the time a correction is fairly easy: surveyor goes out to look at property (cost: $525.00), compares property to legal descriptions, signs surveyor’s affidavit saying the incorrect part of the description is clearly a typo, and we move on. It wasn’t so simple. To be able to sign the surveyor’s affidavit, they have to see the legal description from the city or county that shows the original property lines. The error in the legal description went back two purchases ago, to the mid-90’s, and the city and county couldn’t locate the original (correct) paperwork.

At this point we had two options: either take an exception to title insurance for those 10 degrees or move forward with next steps to get the legal description corrected. Taking an exception to title is not something I’d consider so our next step was to get a corrective deed filed. The problem with that is we had to get in touch with the original owners and get signatures from them – oy vey.

We were now just two days away from closing, and because finding original owners can delay closing, our wonderful title company (I cannot recommend Compass Land & Title enough!) tried for a work around. They first contacted the property appraisal’s office to see if they had original records but when nobody called them back, they had a courier travel to the county courthouse to retrieve a section map that referenced the legal description. If the underwriter approves of that document, we could move forward, but with the underwriter for the title insurance being from a separate company and the courier not getting back with the document until after 5pm, we were officially on standby for closing.

The day of closing we just waited to hear from the title company on the underwriter’s decision. Finally at 2:30pm we got a call that we were cleared, we could get title insurance, the underwriter was very okay with the section map and surveyor’s affidavit, and we were told to be at the closing office at 4pm! Yippee!

The Closing

Because Tampa traffic is insane, we arrived about 20 minutes late to closing, and with our kids in tow. We didn’t have anyone to watch them and we even had to wake them up from their naps, but the closing had to happen that day because of the logistics behind delaying it until after the weekend. I’m here and alive to tell you that they were a dream. Both of the kids were so well behaved and we were fast signers because everything was very straightforward. The closing company was so professional and understood our situation both before closing and how when you bring kids to anything like this, you’re just crossing your fingers and hoping you avoid a meltdown.

We got champagne and a very thick folder with all of our documents, and just like that the excruciating home buying process was over.

We celebrated by going to Floor & Decor to look at tile! #adulting