This week or two has been a stressful whirl wind! Today marked the day we officially made the move from Red Deer to Leduc, which in itself can be stressful. Add to that a malfunctioning water cooler and damaged floors, a moronic realtor, greedy buyers and an incompatent law firm, and well you get a good blog I guess!
Last Week:
We had two different law firms for dealing with our purchasing and selling. We had a law firm in Red Deer to deal with the sale our house as recommended by our realtor. Then, when we purchased the Leduc house through Comfree.com, it came with a recommended law firm and a special price ($596 vs $1200) so we opted to use them for the purchase. Well the Edmonton law firm we used left me feeling less than confident. I called at the beginning of this week to make arrangements to come do the closing papers (which I misunderstood to be done the day before the sale but actually needed to be completed a week before by us and “closed” by the lawyers on the day before, due to our closing day being a Saturday). It was a good thing I called when I did because we were very limited in available appointments that didn’t cause Tyler to miss work. Then, the lawyers couldn’t our mortgage documents. In a panic I called my Mortgage Broker (Nicki Pike who was a SuperStar throughout this whole process), who happened to be on holidays. Nicki said the documents were sent weeks ago & she had confirmation of it, but that she’d be happy to follow up (again on her holidays) if the lawyers truly couldn’t find them. So a few hours later the lawyers found them.
Friday the 5th:
We have a professional and smooth experience with the Red Deer lawyers. She even gives us tips on what she’ll need from the edmonton lawyers and what their job is to take care of. We drive to Edmonton to see our lawyer there, finally arriving after navigating contruction and blocked parking lots (that we weren’t given warning about). At the appointment:
-the lawyer seems unaware of the line of credit he has to pay off for us (using our money), as a stipulation of our new mortgage. despite there being instructions in the mortgage documents.
-the paperwork has the wrong purchase price on it, thus all the calculations are wrong. i mention that i had emailed him an ammendment with the right price and he says “oh yeah, i must have forgotten to give it to my assistant.” awesome.
-the lawyer informs us that he’s not sure he will get the paperwork done on time as we need the money from the sale of our house. he advises us to get interim financing which costs about $200 flat fee plus $40/day. we don’t want to get interim financing (and waste our money), just cuz he doesn’t want to be busy that day. it’s common to buy/sell on the same day and many other lawyers get it done.
- many of the dates were wrong in the paperwork so we had to change them.
-they forget to get us to sign a paper regarding the money the red deer lawyers have to send them on our behalf, so that gets sent later the next week.
-the total funds they request is “rounded up” a few thousand so we should be getting a refund check when all is said and done.
Monday:
Came downstairs to find a river of water from my water cooler to my kitchen island. Judging from the emptiness of the brand new water jug I just bought, I’d say there was about ten liters of water on the floor. I decided that my first order of business was to get the offending cooler outside. I attempted to move the large and heavy item outside (in the rain) while my screaming son decided he needed to be with Mommy so he made a mad dash/crawl towards me…through the river of cold water, and managed to sleep and fall onto his back, completely soaking himself in the water. Did I mention it was freezing cold? So now I have a large water mess as well as a wet, cold and screaming baby. Eventually,w ith much higher blood pressure, I had the mess cleaned up though the few towels I had left out for showers were ton dirty and wet LOL Sometime during the day I realized that the laminate floor boards were lifiting a bit and warped from the water. I began to panick as the damage was right in the middle of the floor which makes repair or camoflauge difficult. By the end of the evening we figured out we’d better look into doing an insurance claim on the floor so that we don’t screw up the sale of our house and thus the purchase of our new house.
Wednesday:
A flooring guy came to estimate what it would cost to replace the floor. Since the same flooring is used on the entire main floor and there are no natural breaks in the floor (and the flooring is no longer available) the quote was to replace the whole floor in a equal value flooring. Since it would be near impossible to have the flooring replaced by the new owners possession date we figured we’d at least have all the info in place so we could let them know what was going on. I then found out that the flooring guy was going on holidays the week after so the floor would definitely not be done within the next 10 days.
-buyer’s wife/girlfriend/baby mama calls me to ask about our washer and dryer. i start filling her in, when she announces that they are going to sell the washer and dryer as they have a brand new set they’re bringing with them. wow, that’s nice. usually you just take them out of the contract when you’re making the offer so that maybe we could take them with us or sell them. that rubbed me the wrong way. especially now as i’m moved into this place and the washer and dryer are older than the set we left behind
Also, my insurance guy for my new house calls to tell me he needs info from my lawyer and my lawyer had not returned his calls since Monday. I put in a call to the lawyer.
Thursday:
as per my realtor’s insistance, I ask the insurance to rush their decision and info finding. My realtor tells me that the buyers could “holdback” funds from the sale of the house to ensure that we don’t take the insurance money and run (&/or not take care of it). Now I’m very stressed about this of course. A holdback could really have a domino effect on our Leduc home. And in my opinion the floor damage isn’t horrible so much as inconvenient. Yes it was a bit warped, but if we were going to continue living in the home, I wouldn’t even have thought of putting in an insurance claim. So for the buyers to holdback funds over something so minor, well that would have sucked. My realtor advises me to go to AMA (my insurance company) first thing in the morning and pay our $500 deductible so that we have a paper trail in case the buyers lawyers start harassing us. Did I mention that all the buying/selling paperwork needed to be complete by noon the next day?
-my mom, dad and brother arrive with my dad’s trailer to help us move.
Friday: we get up at the butt crack of down (aka 8am) and go to ama. they are closed until 9am. wish i had thought to call to find out their hours. finally get in to talk to the adjuster and she has the quote, it’s about $9000. we can’t pay our deductible through ama as it has to be paid directly to the flooring people. we take the quote and a letter from ama to our lawyers office. the assistant takes a copy and faxes a copy to my realtor. meanwhile, around 11am, the money comes through for the sale of the house so the buyers obviously didn’t talk to their lawyer about doing a holdback. yay! now the edmonton lawyers should have no excuse not to get our paperwork done in time right? wrong, now apparently they didn’t get the part of the money from the mortgage company. i call SuperStar Nicki again and she says the money has been sent. so the lawyers have to “find it” again. if they can’t find it, then our option is to do this tenancy agreement with the sellers so that we can still move in on saturday and pay them a rental fee/interest of $40/day (again wasted money).
we finish packing my dad’s trailer up with most of our boxes but figure out that the uhaul we reserved for the next day probably won’t be big enough. i call them to see if we can get a 24′ instead of the 14′ truck. we’re finally in luck! they didn’t have any 14′ trucks available so we got a free upgrade to 26′! instead of paying $260 for the bigger truck we got our orignal quote of $180. and we were able to go get it at 4pm and get a head start on packing it up as we have to be out of the house by noon on saturday.
my realtor calls me and says that as per my insurance letter, it says our options are to get the floor fixed for $9000 (paid directly to the flooring company) or opt for a cash payment less depreciation. he wants me to find out what the cash option is, as the buyers might be interested in that. okay fine, but realistically if they aren’t going to fix the floor then we shouldn’t have to put a claim in on our insurance? so i call ama and ask, at which point the adjusting superviser tells me “as far as we’re conerned this is your claim not the buyers so you can do whichever option you want, you could even take the cash, sign off on the floor and leave it”. to be curtious, i ask for the cash amount. he calculates it to $3780 as it would basically be the value of the floor only, not installation. i report this to my realtor, who passes it on to the buyers and then calls me back saying that now the buyers want to submit a quote with their own name as a floor installer so they can get the full $9000 made out to them…um, that sounds a)like insurance fraud, b) like they’re trying to take advantage of the situation and make money off of the floor rather than just setting it back to the way it was when they made the offer to buy and c) like bullshit frankly. It really pissed/pisses me off that they are being so greedy about it, especially as we feel like we sold our house for a low price (subjective). But on another level, we were honest and reported the situation to them and were doing our due diligence to get it righted for them and they are trying to take it for all it’s worth. i understand them wanting the nine grand, but hey we’d have liked to see that money too and we won’t be.
the facts of the matter are that they didn’t make any legal changes or ammendments before they officially purchased the house so legally we don’t have to fix this problem for them. morally i think it would be wrong of us not to complete the insurance claim for them to fix the floor but at this point i am sorely tempted to just to spite them. especially as by completing the insurance claim costs us $500 our of pocket for the deductible as well as we’ll now have a “claim” on our insurance rather than being claim free (which can affect your rates).
after not hearing from the edmonton lawyers by 1pm (the extended deadline), i called and left a message at about 2pm. by 3:30 i still hadn’t heard back so i called again and the assistant answered. she informed me that they “just” completed the sale and everything was fine. PHEW! problem number 2 off my shoulders. we then went to pick up the uhaul which was all good. then my mom & i went to bed, bath & beyond and i got a new bedding set courtesy of my mom and i passed on my old bedding set to my good friend megan.
(if you want a preview of my bedding set go to www.bedbathandbeyond.com and search Tempo Blue Bed)
My dad, brother and tyler got a good chuck of stuff packed into the uhaul before and in between the rain, leaving about 2 hours work for the next morning.
Saturday:
We were up at about 8am or so and started moving on the move. It was raining off and on during the morning so we were happy that so much was done the night before. We finished loading the u-haul and Tyler grabbed a padlock to secure our belongings. He locked it, then uttered many many curse words. Turns out he locked the keys to the lock inside the uhaul. Pretty funny for us bystanders but frustrating for him. He then had to borrow a tool from our neighbors to get the lock off. At least he figured it out right away instead of in Leduc!
We were up at about 8am or so and started moving on the move. It was raining off and on during the morning so we were happy that so much was done the night before. We finished loading the u-haul and Tyler grabbed a padlock to secure our belongings. He locked it, then uttered many many curse words. Turns out he locked the keys to the lock inside the uhaul. Pretty funny for us bystanders but frustrating for him. He then had to borrow a tool from our neighbors to get the lock off. At least he figured it out right away instead of in Leduc!
We cleaned the last minute things, grabbed some snacks for the road and started the moving train at about 11:15am: Tyler in the uhaul with Cody, my dad driving his truck & trailer, Dexter & I in the van and my mom in my car. Later that evening Tyler and my Dad went back for Tyler’s old car to bring it to Leduc as we haven’t sold it yet.
Just a few minutes out of Red Deer the rainstorm came. It was the type of rain were the wipers can’t keep up. It was right around this time that Kevin, the realtor decided to call me. Between the cell phone connections and the heavy loud rain I could barely make out a word he was saying. After the conversation (which I had to pull over for) and some text messaging I found out that the buyers wanted to submit their own quote for the flooring in their own name (in lieu of a contractor. The buyer is an 3rd year electrician so he figures that makes him a floor installer). Kevin figured he’d be a big guy and take the quote to AMA himself. I was like “excuse me but this is my insurance and i’m not comfortable with this “quote” going in. it doesn’t seem legit and i don’t like that.” Kevin was basically telling me to just let it happen and “be done with it”. I’m sorry but I’m not cool with insurance fraud being done under my name just so that i’m done with it. Jeesh. I told Kevin that I wanted to see a copy of this quote. Just as I suspected, the quote was done on a paper that can be bought at a dollar store with no contractor name or company on it. So that cheesed me. One more struck against my realtor in my opinion. He’s suppose to be looking after our interests and instead he seems a lot more involved in his own interests.
We arrived at the new place and the sellers weren’t quite there yet and it started to rain again. My brother decided to check the mailbox and there was a key there so we started unloading. It was quickly apparent that I had a LOT of kitchen boxes and perhaps not enough storage space for it. I had a corner pantry in the house in Red Deer and that holds a lot of stuff I guess.
The Shaw guy came to hook up our TV and internet as planned but he had a lot of problems with it and decided that the main line was busted. He said he would put in an order to have a new line brought in and a temporary one strung in a couple days. So that sucked as I’m a major TV addict: Big Brother, Hell’s Kitchen, So You Think You Can Dance, True Blood…
Generally the move went good but it was stressful, emotional and I felt both sad and overwhelmed by everything. Mary, Tyrone and my Mom and Dad unpacked the majority of the kitchen for us. And we got a lot of stuff in place: furniture, beds, dining table, etc. It was amazing how quickly we had the big stuff settled.
Sunday:
Our telephone still wasn’t connected so I called Telus to find out that the number I gave everyone (utilities, friends, family) was double booked so we got a new number and it wouldn’t be activated until Monday (it’s not 780.980.6288 if you’re wondering). It’s so frustrating that I called the companies about 4 weeks in advance and yet I still didn’t have my phone, TV and internet hooked up when they should have been.
Our telephone still wasn’t connected so I called Telus to find out that the number I gave everyone (utilities, friends, family) was double booked so we got a new number and it wouldn’t be activated until Monday (it’s not 780.980.6288 if you’re wondering). It’s so frustrating that I called the companies about 4 weeks in advance and yet I still didn’t have my phone, TV and internet hooked up when they should have been.
My family went home but Mary & Tyrone came over again. They helped us unpack some more and we played some games that night. It was a pretty good day.
This past week:
I get a text that the buyers have opted for the cash payment of $3780 from the insurance. The bonus with this option is that our deductible is factored into that number so we are not out $500 from pocket. That’s the “good news”. The bad news is that we intended to keep our ceiling fans but didn’t have them written into our selling contract as an exclusion (due to our crappy realtor’s advice) so we have to return them to the buyers. It’s not a huge deal as we only have room for one fan here but it was the principal of the matter. Our realtor failed us yet again. Plus we had left a ton of stuff for the buyers (extra trim, closet doors, paint, etc.) that we didn’t have to and it feels like they are nickel and diming us every chance they get.
It is now Sunday night and I am just getting around to finishing this blog. We don’t have the insurance cheque yet as AMA is super busy and the adjustor was out of the office all week. We finally got TV/internet back on Thursday @ about 2pm…much later than we anticipated. I managed to finish off Season 4 & 5 of “Weeds” on DVD which I thoroughly enjoyed though and the new season starts on Aug 16th.
The past weekw as not be as good as I had hoped. Tyler hasn’t been home earlier than about 7pm, sometimes as late as 8pm and there’s still so much to do to get caught up that neither of us has had much of a break. Dexter is cutting a couple teeth so he has been a bit more miserable than normal. The worst was yesterday when he fell down the stairs while he was home with just me. I was so freaked, guilty and upset about the whole thing. He appears to have survived with only a couple bruises, a bloody nose and a swollen lip but OMIGOD it was horrible. I just kept thinking that Dexter could have broken his neck or a leg or something. Or what if he has hidden bleeding or something. I’m not sure that I am cut out to be a full time mom…only time with tell.
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