The Appraisal and Moving Forward

 

Today we finally received the report from the appraisal company.  The report brought great news, confirming that the house is worth the price we are paying for it.  In fact, the price we are paying is slightly lower than nearby comparable sales, so that's good news for us!  This is also good news because we can now be confident going forward that we really are getting a new house!



We've been hesitant to do too much packing or planning before the appraisal because if the report had for some reason come back bad the bank would have been unwilling to finance the house.  We're not sure what would have happened then, but it looks like we're not going to have to worry about that! 

So what's next?  Now we just have to wait for our official loan approval.  Yesterday we sent in the 40-something page loan application, signed and dated in about a hundred different places along with pretty much every financial document possible.  The bank will re-verify everything from our job statuses to our credit reports before issuing the loan.  Assuming all that goes as planned, shortly before closing we will go to the title company to sign all of the final paperwork and pay our down-payment and all of the closing costs.  Bye-bye savings.  But within a few days of that we will have the keys to our new house!  The lease on our apartment runs out at the end of June so we will have about two weeks of overlap when we can work on the house while still living in our apartment.

So for the time being there's just a lot of waiting and packing to be done.  We want to be basically done with packing by the time we close (under two weeks away!) so that we can spend the last two weeks before our lease runs out preparing the house.  We will of course clean everything really well and we want to get some of the wallpaper and carpet removal done before we start moving our stuff in.  Our first project will most likely be the kitchen so that we can have it all cleaned up and ready to use before we start bringing in dishes and food.  Other than that there are lots of little boring things to do like setting up cable and garbage service and getting our mail forwarded.  The list keeps growing.  But for now, packing!