Tortoise Hollow

On Friday, I called the Credit Union to see if there was any possibility of getting a construction loan through them. The loan officer I talked to said that she had not gotten the message I had left on Wednesday, so I am glad I called.

From what she said, it looks like the Credit Union could be a real possibility. They did not engage in predatory lending like so many of the banks did, and therefore are not having the funding problems that the banks are. I am hoping we can work something out and quickly. The only problem with that is that they are one of very few lenders in the area that are still closing loans, so they are quite busy.

We shall see what the week ahead has in store for us; hopefully it is good news.

Yesterday I went in to a local credit union to inquire about construction loans.  The girl there assured me that they do them, and that they were currently doing them.  She took all my information and said that she would have the loan officer call me.  

I was trying not to get my hopes up, but it is hard to do when there is some glimmer of a possibility.  We want so much to get started- to get anything done, after almost two and a half years.

The loan officer was supposed to call me today, and I heard nothing.  I hope that isn’t a bad sign, but I fear it is. Please God, throw us a bone, for a change.

We finally got an update this afternoon on how our mortgage underwriting was going. Even though we have lowered the amount we are asking to borrow, our lender is balking at our debt ratio, which is still fairly low even though it includes our current house along with the amount we will be paying per month on the new mortgage. We are planning to rent this house out after we move, because the housing market is crap, and we don’t want to give our house away. Renting it out for a few years will allow time for the market to recover. They had not figured in the amount we could get for rent for the house in doing the calculations, and we are not sure that they will accept that logic. We have a few more tricks up our sleeves, but the options are dwindling rapidly.

The other problem is, now that we have a lender that might be interested, our appraisal is too old, so they want it redone. I fear that it will come in even lower than before, and then we will be back to square one. The hits just keep on coming. Sometimes I really feel that we will never get this house built and that we will be stuck in our horrid neighborhood forever listening to our POS neighbors cackle into the wee hours of the morning and smelling the nasty cigar smoke that wafts over from their back porch. What a horrible thought.

It seems that lenders should change their names from “lenders” to “rejectors” because they are certainly not interested in lending to anyone right now. Our mortgage broker said that it is a very strange time- that he could turn in the paperwork for a “perfect mortgage,” one that was well within the loan to value, borrowers with excellent credit, etc. and still they would sometimes not get past underwriting. The underwriters would just never get back to him; they are all running scared. That, to me is stupid and ridiculous. How do the mortgage companies expect to stay in business if they won’t lend to ANYONE? No wonder the housing market sucks; no one can get the mortgage they need to buy anything. There is no end in sight unless things change, either.

The idiot mortgage companies and their stupid ass sub-prime loans got themselves into a huge mess, and now Andy and I, with near perfect credit, can’t seem to get a mortgage to save our lives. I don’t see what they are so worried about- they are going to be bailed out of their financial woes by the government. We, on the other hand, have no one to help us with funding, even though it was local government that put us in this predicament by costing us a small fortune and then delaying us so long that the market fell apart in the process.

I want to scream and strangle someone all at the same time. What has happened to this country and will things ever return to normal? I truly can’t see how they could at this point.

Tuesday evening I got an email from our mortgage broker. He was finally ready for us to resubmit all of our documents. It has been so long since we started to try to get financing, that we have had to submit all new pay stubs, bank statements, etc. We originally provided all of that stuff back in August, then again in November after we were delayed further. Hopefully this will be the last time we have to do so.

I sent pdf files of everything that night, and then yesterday I got an informational email from my credit monitoring that my credit report had been accessed. I looked at the report and it was the mortgage company, so that is a good sign that we are getting close- they pulled my report for underwriting the mortgage.

We worked with our builder to manipulate the numbers to make them work with only a minimum out of pocket for us. We still aren’t sure how much we will have to bring to the table, but it should be much less than we were looking at before. Cross all your fingers and toes and pray that we get to closing day soon and everything will go smoothly. We are so ready to start construction. As it is it doesn’t look good for us to be able to move in by Christmas, but it might still be possible. I sure hope so. That would be the best Christmas present ever.

We are still waiting to hear back from our mortgage broker on a 90% mortgage now that we have gone and “adjusted” some numbers with our builder in order to make things work. It seems like things take an inexplicable amount of time to get going.

We haven’t heard from him in about two weeks now, and I am starting to think that it is because he can’t even get us a 90% loan to value mortgage. I don’t know why else he would be avoiding us, and my calls and emails have gone unanswered.

This whole thing sucks. I am so sick and tired of having to worry about this shit every day of my life. I just want to start construction for fuck’s sake. *pulling out hair*

I am still working some angles on the house thing, so hopefully I will stumble upon a winner. Don’t worry too much, I am not a quitter even when I probably should be sometimes.

The house. Whenever someone asks me if we’ve started building it yet it is like opening a wound. I am so sick of dealing with the insurmountable issues. I don’t think we are ever going to start building it, really. At least not anymore. After over 25 months of waiting, we finally got the permit, but now we can’t seem to get the money to build it, due to the economy taking a dump.

We have excellent credit, but it doesn’t matter. The issue is in the loan to value, and there is no way for us to improve the ratio because houses are not selling. The house would not be worth what we would be paying for it when completed, and there is nothing we can do about it. If we cut costs any more than we already have, it will affect the final value of the house, and change the loan to value ratio and we will still not get anywhere. There is no way to get a lender to lend enough to cover the costs to build a house right now, unless you have considerable equity. We have roughly $107,000 worth of equity in our land and it still comes up short.

The only possibility is for us to make up the difference in cash. Cash that we do not have because the county and other agencies that abused us basically robbed us of it. The only option I can think of is to cash out my 401K, take a huge hit on penalties and taxes and hope that what is left is enough to cover what we would have to bring to the table in order to finally get this damn project started. I would sell a kidney, but I think that would be more difficult to arrange with taking time off work for recovery and all of that.

Whatever drastic measures we have to take, someone else may have to pay in the end- I am starting to think that suing the county to recover our losses would be a good idea. Our losses were incurred as a direct result of their incompetence, so it is only fair, right? It just isn’t right for this kind of thing to happen to anyone.

In my quest to purchase as many things for the new house in advance, I came upon a quandary. There will be several pocket doors in the house, and I don’t really care for the pocket door pulls that are available. There are some high end ones that are okay, but they are unbelievably expensive. So, I settled on some neat bronze pulls that were salvaged from old buildings. They are from the late 1800s to early 1900s, and I found them on eBay, of course. The only problem was that the bronze finish didn’t quite match that of the oil rubbed bronze of the modern door knobs I chose, and I want all of the door hardware to be the same finish.

I looked all over the internet to try to find a way to artificially age the bronze. I couldn’t find much. One forum I stumbled upon said that you could use egg yolks to tarnish silver practically over night and someone suggested that it might work on copper and bronze as well. There is something about the sulphur in the eggs that causes the chemical reaction that makes tarnish. I hard boiled some eggs, smooshed the yolks, and placed them in a Ziploc bag with one of the door pulls for a couple of days, but it didn’t seem to do much. If you ever need to tarnish some silver, this would be your best bet.

I found this stuff called Brass Darkening Solution that is supposed to age brass, bronze, or copper. I tried it out on the first door pull- it has to sit in the solution for a while. I left it in overnight and then rinsed it and put it in a bath of water and baking soda to stop the metal reaction to the acidic solution. Then I rubbed it with mineral oil to give it a nice sheen. I think it worked pretty well. Now I only have nine more to do.