Bring on the French Hens!

I am SOOOOO done with this housing experience. Seriously.

First thing this morning, I got a call from one of the moving companies that is supposed to be putting in a quote for our move. This woman, Debby, started off by calling me Christine, which isn't my name at all, and when I corrected her, proceeded to be upset because she'd been trying to get ahold of me for a few days, but my daughter kept hanging up on her. Now, that didn't sound like Josie, since she finally pretty much has the phone thing down, so I made a non-committal noise and waited for her to continue. She then said, 'what can I do for you?', like she had no idea who I was! Turns out, she had called me by accident, and it took her all that time to figure it out! Then, she stammered and stuttered when I spelled it out for her who I was and asked why she hadn't submitted her quote yet. Then she started in again with wanting to know what other companies I had talked to, who I'd spoken with, and what they had quoted me! How unprofessional can you get?!

Oh, I was about to find out.

Then it was DH, saying he'd just gotten off of the phone with our lender, and - surprise - there's a problem. It's not a problem with us personally, thankfully, but still, we're probably not going to be settling on the new house tomorrow. It seems that the lender thought that the appraisal on the house, which merely came in at what our loan is for, was too high, so they decided to get their own appraisal done, and it came in $30k lower. This is so retarded, I can't even begin to tell you. Oh, wait - I can! First of all, this is the FORECLOSURE PRICE agreed to by the seller's bank. It's rock-bottom, people, as in, I feel a little guilty paying so nothing for this house. Second, the guy the financial backers got to do it was a pencil-pusher who didn't even look at the house, but rather went off of some computer simulation program to come up with a perceived value. That's about as stupid as they come, really. Fourth, when the value was so hugely different, no one told our mortgage broker until Today, the day before we close, because they were all too busy pushing their little pencils up the pencil-pusher chain. No one thought to question why the values were so different. Fifth, it turns out that the idiot not only didn't look at the house at all, but he used the WRONG PROGRAM that had old information!!!! So, to sum up, the bank used a guy who had no idea what he was valuing come up with a loan value using an obsolete program. And we wonder why the financial markets are screwed?!

The third call was, of course, from Flo, the Shrill Realtor Freak who represents the seller. She decided that it would be a good idea to track me down, as she put it, to freak out on me about the closing probably not happening tomorrow, and threaten me that if the closing didn't happen as planned, her seller was going to yank the house off the market and let it foreclose. Now, I'm not sure what she thought I was going to say to all this, but what she got definitely wasn't what she wanted to hear, because I told her that regardless of what happened, that we would get the house anyway, because if it goes into foreclosure, we'll buy it that way (which is true, because the county will seize it and sell it to us, we checked on that at the beginning of all this mess), but that we had been trying to save him from being foreclosed on. Oohh, she was PISSED! She tried giving me more crap, including saying that he had been trying to save the house for us by making extra payments past what he should have had to make (which is crap, since our contractual closure date was today) but I interrupted her and asked her if there was something she needed, since there was obviously nothing I could do about appraisals, and she wanted me to give her our lender's cell phone number! Um, no. She already has his regular number, fine, but last I knew she had used it to call him and try to talk him into giving us a bridge loan we didn't ask for to get us into the house before our settlement date!

Now, even though this was an entirely inappropriate phone call for her to have made, and I should have brushed it off, because this guy would be an idiot to walk away from a sale over a day-late settlement and there's no way his bank would allow it, it was still incredibly stressful and obnoxious. I consoled myself by looking online at other houses. I feel like I'm cheating on my probably-new-house, but it did make me feel better knowing that there are a few other houses out there I'd like.

Call #4 was from our lender a little while ago. Turns out Freaky Realtor gave our lender's phone number to HER CLIENT and told him to call himself!!!!!! Now, I would swear that that was probably against some professional realtor code, wouldn't you? I can see how Seller might not have been able to resist calling once he had the information, since I'm pretty sure Freaky Realtor Flo probably has him spun up six ways to Tuesday about all this, but for her to give it to him is. just. obnoxious.

To wrap it all up in a nice little bow for you, that's three canceled movers, two screwy county contractors, one nutty realtor, and a freakin' partridge in a pear tree!