House of Hyperbole

And I’m not even talking about the amount…

I almost don’t want to talk about the loan process because it was a pretty bad time from start to finish. I was going to do a play-by-play to really hammer home how absolutely INSANE the whole thing was, but I don’t feel like re-traumatizing myself. How about the TL;DR version instead?

We applied for a construction loan (that will roll into a mortgage once construction is complete) in late March of 2022 and we were pre-approved on April 11, 2022. We were told it would take between 40 and 60 days to close. Being generous and assuming that means business days only, we should have closed somewhere between June 7th and July 6th.

Somehow our first potential closing date was July 22nd.

Then it was August 12th.

We didn’t actually close until September 2nd.

We hit every conceivable bump in the road between approval and closing. Every weird, unlikely thing that could happen, happened. We missed deadlines due to myriad reasons: the tax documents we needed were never sent to us, the person we needed was on vacation, the committee we needed only meets once a month, and the person we needed RETIRED. I can’t make this shit up, you guys. We also got slowed down because a lot of things would just start to get rolling on Fridays. Like clockwork. We’d finally get a document or signature and then we’d have to sit on it for two days.

Also, there are so, so, so many moving parts. Way more than buying a house outright. We had to split the property into two parcels so we didn’t own one parcel with two homes on it. We had to then get updated deeds and titles for the two newly split properties (that took FOREVER). We ended up having to pay off the original mortgage on the trailer with the new loan. We had to get separate construction insurance from our homeowner’s insurance.

There are also a lot of things that seemed to be circular. The most recent being we can’t get permits until we have a house number, but we can’t get a house number until we have the front door location. So the builder is clearing the trees and marking the front door, but can’t do anything else without permits.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: The guy who can give us a house number is out of the office the week we need him. Super.