I've been waiting to write the blog post for the better part of a month, but I wanted to make sure everything worked out with the house before posting. Call it superstition or whatever, but it's a pretty good story that I've been itching to share.
Around the beginning of September, Rachel and I were talking about how our house was starting to get a little cramped with the kids getting older and the inevitable accumulation of "stuff" that occurs as you get older and occupy the same home for over seven years. After the kids went to bed, we spent a little time browsing houses in the area online. No more than an hour later, I got an email from my cousin letting me know that they were moving and wondering if we'd be interested in buying their house. As they say in France, "Quelle chance!" However, after looking at home values, we determined that my cousin's house was outside of our price range. I said thanks but no thanks and thought that was the end of it.
If it had been though, this would be a pretty boring blog.
I received an email back from cousin saying that she'd figure out a way to make the sale work based on what we felt comfortable paying. Hooray for generous cousins! Rachel and I talked it over, toured her house (which is less than a mile from my office I might add) and decided that, yes, this was something we were interested in pursuing.
We went ahead and put our house on the market via a realtor who Rachel knew through work, and started mentally preparing to move to Corvallis in early 2014, when my cousin was planning on vacating her house for her new one (which, incidentally, she bought from my aunt and uncle.) Everything seemed like it was working out so much better than we could have ever expected.
Again, if it had gone that smoothly, this would be a post I'd never written.
As the whole thing progressed, my cousin had an appraisal done on her home, and it appraised at a value higher than she expected. At this point, Rachel and I sat down and decided that while we were overwhelmed with the willingness and thoughfullness and generosity my cousin was showing us, we just didn't feel comfortable accepting that much help, especially when we were fortunate enough to have enough money to buy a house that would fit our needs on our own. We decided that it would be best not to accept that generosity, knowing that there may come a point when we actually would need help from family and/or friends somewhere in the future.
Now, we had an entirely new problem. Our house was on the market, and we really had no plan of where we were going to go if it sold. Sure enough, it wasn't more than a week after we had made this decision that we received an offer on our house. We countered that offer, and they came back with a second offer that was a little lower than what we needed to break even on our mortgage, and gave us basically six hours to make a decision. This was on Halloween evening - Jonah's birthday. Granted, they didn't know that it was our son's birthday, but we were a little annoyed at the tight window they had left us to decide. However, now armed with the knowledge that we didn't have a place to live lined up gave us the advantage of not being in a rush to sell, so we rejected their offer, figuring that perhaps the market would continue to improve and maybe another offer a few months down the road would be a little higher.
Two days later, our realtor called and let us know that they had reconsidered, and bumped up their offer by a few thousand dollars, getting us to a level that would allow us to essentially pay off our mortgage outright. Getting out of this mortgage was a big deal to us, as we were paying over 7% interest on it (2006 seems so long ago, doesn't it? Barack Obama was still a relatively anonymous Senator from Illinois and all you needed to get a bank loan was a driver's license and a pulse.) We decided that this had been our goal all along, so we accepted it.
That decision accelerated our house hunting into overdrive. With us both being relatively happy with our jobs and Jonah really enjoying his kindergarten class, we had a pretty narrow search area that we wanted to focus on. That next weekend, I think we toured almost a dozen houses in the North Albany area. Some were still being built, some were definitely what I'd deem "fixer-uppers." One house reminded Rachel and I of an assisted living facility. In the end, we whittled it down to two homes we really liked - One was a house built in 1999 with a huge backyard, the other a brand new house with very little yard, but a fantastic floor plan and a massive "bonus room" that the kids would be able to take advantage of.
Over the next week, we looked at both houses again, and decided that the backyard trumped everything else. We talked it over with our realtor and decided to make an offer. It wasn't more than a day later that our offer was accepted without a counter-offer or anything. We were thrilled! We were able to negotiate closing dates on both houses to coincide so that we could move directly from one house to the other without having to rent a storage unit or apartment for a few weeks. Everything seemed like it was going smoothly.
A little too smoothly, it would turn out.
A little while later, I realized that I'd never looked at the google maps street view of our new house. So, on a break at work, I took a peek:
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Aww, how cute! A little girl out front drawing in chalk on the driveway. Exactly the kind of thing I picture Jocelyn doing in a few years at the house. Being the curious guy I am, I zoomed in on the driveway to see what she was drawing. It turns out she'd written the names of all her family members on the driveway. Somewhat surprisingly to me, Google hadn't blurred out this information, despite blurring out the license plate of the car in the garage and apparently the top of the garbage can to the right of the house for some reason. As I looked at the names, one of them looked familiar to me. I couldn't place it though, so I googled the name. That's when I found this:
Yep. That's a bunch of bomb technicians testing devices on our new front porch. We had bought the house that until recently belonged to the family of a kid who was arrested last May for allegedly plotting to bomb West Albany High School. Talk about a buzzkill. He'd been hiding homemade explosive devices under the floorboards of what we were going to make our playroom for the kids. My first thought was "how in the heck am I going to tell Rachel this?" I slammed my head on my desk wondering why we hadn't been told this earlier in the process, and how it took me zooming in on a driveway to put all this together. One of my coworkers suggested I not tell Rachel until after we'd moved in. I suggested that I'd like to stay married, so I'd be telling her as soon as possible. That was not a fun phone call to make, let me tell you.
Rachel and I had a tough decision to make - do we walk away from a house that, up until this point, we were thrilled with? Rachel was having a harder time with it than I was. She actually had nightmares that involved the walls of the house bleeding. I thought for sure she was going to want to back out of the deal - which would be understandable. You shouldn't have any cause to feel uneasy in your own home. However, after talking it over with our realtor, doing some cursory research online, and talking to friends and coworkers in the area who had more knowledge of the situation than we did, she ultimately decided that the house was not to blame for the unfortunate circumstances that surrounded it. So we signed all the final paperwork on December 5th, fully planning to start moving in the next day, knowing we had to be out of our house by 4:00pm on December 8th.
Oh, but this little saga isn't over yet. Friday, December 6th we woke up to this:
The most significant snow event in the mid-valley in the last ten years had to hit on the day we planned on moving. Later on in the day, we received word that the seller hadn't signed the closing papers on the house, due to an unpaid debt and the fact that the lady at the title company had made the decision to leave early because of the snow - despite knowing that we needed this deal done that day because we had to be out of our old house by that Sunday. At this point we had to negotiate with the seller on an agreement to let us occupy the house prior to closing. Usually in these instances, the buyer pays the seller a per diem to occupy the house. However, we didn't feel like we should be paying rent because the only reason we weren't already closed was because the seller hadn't handled her business in a timely manner (and the title company lady was afraid of snow). We were concerned that if we agreed to pay rent, that didn't give the seller much incentive to close the house in a timely manner, as she could just stall for a week or two and collect a couple hundred dollars off of us before signing the house over to us. We negotiated this point through our respective realtors for HOURS Friday evening while my poor dad, who had driven a trailer down from Portland to help us move, sat around in our kitchen twiddling his thumbs. The snow had impacted his travel down I-5 - it took him 3 hours to get to Albany, and once in town, another driver had lost control of his vehicle and slammed into the trailer, damaging the fender above one of the wheels.
Finally around 8pm we reached an agreement to move in - rent free - with assurances that the deal would close first thing on Monday. With the help from some very thoughtful friends watching our kids and helping us move the heavy stuff, we were able to get everything moved by Saturday night, despite the sub-freezing temperatures and icy roads. The end result:
A very happy Lasselle family eating dinner at our kitchen counter amid boxes and boxes of our stuff waiting to be unpacked, with a heck of a story to tell!
