When I last left you, I was discussing buying a new home, and we had just had our offer accepted. You, as I recall, thought that the process was complete, and I laughed at you like a rabid hyena. The process continues! Here are the remaining steps to owning your own home:
- Schedule a home inspection. This is where you take a few hours out of your busy workday and tour the house with a professional home inspector, who is clearly the type of guy that knows what a “mitre joint” is and built his own refrigerator out of an old intake manifold, using his own frigid breath as the freon substitute. He will get out a large checklist of things to examine, and will reveal to you things like “Hey, the spokes on that bannister are too far apart, a kid could get his head caught in ’em,” or “You may notice that your kitchen appears to be missing a floor.”
Luckily, the only serious issue that we found in our future home was discovered by me; when we entered the room with the furnace and water heater, I said I smelled gas. The home inspector didn’t smell it, but sure enough when he held his little detector up to the pipes by my head, it screamed like an unanesthetized appendectomy patient. Of course, by this time, I had inhaled enough natural gas that I believed I could fix the problem by coating the affected pipe joint with my own saliva, but luckily Sarah and Melissa (our realtor) got me outside before I developed any kind of cancer.
- Get your mortgage locked in. You may recall having gotten pre-approved for a mortgage before you began househunting. This is not the same thing. To get final approval for your mortgage, you will need to fill out approximately 3,874 pages of forms, in triplicate, and send them back to the lender. He will then send them back to you with a list of corrections that have to be made (“You forgot to initial here,” “I don’t think your truck is really worth $173,000,” “I wasn’t aware that your name was spelled with that many K’s,” etc.). Later, a woman from the mortgage company will call and request even more information to be faxed to her, and will probably question your ability to pay a $1450/month mortgage AND maintain your “toupee of the month” membership.
In the end, you will get locked in at a rate; this rate will be higher than anybody else who has bought a home recently has paid, but you will be able to justify it when your parents mention that the rate they got on their first home in 1983 was 47.2%.
- Contact a lawyer. Having the lawyer serves two purposes: first, they will represent you at settlement, and will be able to tell you exactly how much money you have to pay to everyone that shows up with their hand open. Secondly, after you have to begin robbing convenience stores to pay your mortgage, they will be able to represent you at trial.
- Arrange for home insurance. I haven’t gotten around to this one yet, because I’m lazy, but I imagine it will involve giving someone a massive check and praying that I hit the lottery.
- Pack up all your stuff. Although honestly it would be simpler, and probably more cost-effective, to just throw it out and buy all new stuff, the wife is rather attached to some of the things her grandmother left her. The next easiest thing would be to hire a professional moving company to handle this, that costs money, and you’re probably broke. So just throw all your crap into boxes and hope it doesn’t break too much.
- Go to settlement. This is where you sit down, sign a bunch of papers, have a bunch of things explained to you that you don’t care about, hand over a lot of money, and get the keys to your new crib. This will take an hour or two, during which your thought processes will alternate from “I’m buying a new house! Wheeeee!” to “Holy crap, I’m absolutely mind-numbingly broke!” I recommend grinding up some prozac to snort every few minutes to try and keep yourself balanced.
- Prepare the house. This means painting, fixing any simple stuff that might need it, etc. In our case, it turns out our new place has some aluminum wiring, so I’m going to have to go through it and make sure none of the wires are loose. We also intend to paint, and build a massive wet bar in the basement.
- Move. This will require lots of friends, lots of pizza, and lots of beer. If you’re lucky, nothing will get broken. If you’re REALLY lucky, you’ll take the week off and move all the little stuff so that when your friends show up, all they have to do is move furniture and get drunk. Be prepared for having most of your furniture badly scraped up.
- Sit down with a beer and relax. You now own your own home!
You’ll want to be sure to pick up plenty of dog food. It’s all you can really afford to eat now.
