Let the baby invasion begin!
Today we acquired our first batch of baby gear (if you hadn't heard, we're expecting in December : ). A good friend's sister-in-law was getting rid of all her baby stuff that is only a year old & very gently used. We scored a major deal!! I'm preparing for this tiny person and all the "stuff" that comes with him/her to takeover our house, but for now this gear is in the basement so that we can enjoy our grown-up house for a little while longer.
In other news, we (and by "we" I mean Pete & my dad, as I have taken up permanent residence on the couch) have begun work on the deck.
The railing came off pretty easily...let's just say that it wasn't attached very well.
The "addition" part of the deck also came down pretty quickly. It was basically a master class in how not to build a deck.
We'll be putting a patio in the area where the deck "addition" was.
We left up the original deck framing and will be putting new timbertech boards on it.
Dad & Pete extended the original framing by about 4 feet.
In other, other news, we are still waiting to finish our refinance that we started about six weeks ago. We were sailing to close after our stellar appraisal when the brakes were put on in a rather scary way. Here's the thumbnail sketch of what went/is going down: Turns out our house was foreclosed by MERS (mortgage electronic registration system), which is basically a service company that banks use to manage their mortgages. A lawsuit was filed in November against MERS alleging that they are not legally allowed to foreclose on properties because they don't hold title, and a bunch of other legally stuff. This spring, the Michigan State Supreme Court ruled against MERS, saying that they are no longer allowed to foreclose by advertisement, which is basically the most common type of foreclosure (this was how our house was foreclosed). So, when the bank went to get title work and title insurance done for our refi, their title company saw MERS in the title history and freaked out. We are one of the first post-MERS owners to attempt to refi, because you have to wait 6 months after a purchase to refi, and we started the refi process at right around 6 months. Literally, no one in the "business" has had to deal with this situation before. We were waiting for a while, but were getting concerned with the lack of answers to our questions, so we decided to consult a real estate attorney that my good friend put us in touch with. He said we had "reason to be concerned"...yikes!! We were stressing for a couple of days, planning on what improvement items we could rip out and take with us if we lost the house, and basically losing sleep over all kinds of other "worse case" scenarios. After a couple of days of sorting out paperwork, the attorney got back to us and suggested that we contact the original title company/insurer who did the work when we bought the property and ask them to write the new policy since their necks are on the line from the first sale anyway. Pete called them and they said they'd be willing to do that, but that this shouldn't be a problem for any other title company to do either. Because we purchased the house before the lawsuit and the ruling, and after the house had been foreclosed (legally at the time), the ruling doesn't apply to us. This is what we've been saying all along!! Now we're just waiting for title work to be completed again...where we were three weeks ago before this hoopla got going.
Stay tuned, faithful followers, for an open house invite! We're hoping to host a little party here once we have a deck... : )
