Tag Archives: buying a home

Burned Out

You may have noticed a lack of posts the last few days. This is because I’m a bit burned out. Doing the things that need to be done for buying the house got a bit stressful at the end of last week. Getting people to understand what I needed (which meant first understanding what I was being told I needed), dealing with technical issues, and one hiccup with the deal itself just all coalesced into a major stress cookie (my least favorite kind of cookie, maybe second only to oatmeal raisin) for me.

And then on top of that, we had the fun of trying to get a week or two worth of groceries in a store with many bare shelves and quantity limits on just about everything. I hope stores are able to get restocked soon, because right now, trying to get enough food for any serious length of time (that is, more than a day or two) in order to practice social distancing and/or sheltering in place is a real challenge.

So it may be a few more days before I get back on schedule. Please bear with me.

Working from home while working to obtain the new home

Monday morning, members of the leadership team at work walked around the building and told everyone that they should go home immediately if they did not have to work in the lab. Apparently, they decided that the coronavirus situation here in Rochester merited that kind of action. For at least the next two weeks, we are supposed to work from home as much as our duties allow us. We should only go in to work — and we should get approval from the director “on duty” that day — is when we need to do something in the lab or generally access equipment beyond our work laptops.

Heck, my boss even sent out an email telling us that we should feel free to grab our monitors and bring them home if we feel it will help. I’d do that, but I don’t really have any place to set up another monitor here at the house. Now, if we were int he new house, i’d have some options.

That brings me to the home-buying update. The owner of the house I mentioned in my previous post on the topic accepted our offer. Well, our adjusted offer. We had to go up little bit to edge out the other offer(s). This past Monday, we also did the home inspection. It was an interesting experience. The inspector took us through the whole house and around the grounds. In addition to pointing out things we might want to ask the owner to either fix or give us a credit on — we decided only two rose to that level — he pointed out other, more minor things we might want to take care of ourselves as time and money permits. Lots of preventive maintenance/improvement things. Today, we sent the owner our requests of what we’d like fixed or credit to cover our costs of fixing ourselves. We now have to wait for her agreement or counter-proposal, which would mean further negotiations. But overall things look good and we feel like we’re one more step closer to having our very own place.

Of course, next comes the fun part: Pulling the trigger on the actual mortgage application and going from being pre-approved to being fully approved. After that, it should just be signing a butt-load of checks.