Home buying, the epic

I knew that buying a house would be difficult. I did not understand how I might drown in the details.

We applied for an FHA loan, which carries a much smaller required down payment but has restrictions. What restrictions, you might ask. Let me tell you.

Here’s the whirlwind courtship between us and the house. We looked at it Saturday morning. We made an offer on the house on Sunday night. By Monday night, and I mean late Monday night, we had a counter offer. One clause in the contract would cause trouble. We asked for money to be set aside to connect the house to the sewer line. The house has not one but two septic tank units. FHA requires, and someone had to come up with this, that we pay for connection to the sewer line if the cost did not exceed three percent of the home’s value.

We could only somewhat vaguely know what the value of the house was. There was the initial list price. There was the price the house is at currently. There’s the price that we asked for in our offer. And there’s the price that an appraiser will establish, after this septic sewer mess has been resolved.

We had a magic, albeit, number floating around for this price. The plumber would come by today and I left work to meet him. He arrived. He confirmed quickly that septic was the system of record. He also confirmed, as I stupidly joined him in the crawl space wearing my bidness casual clothes, that there were two pipes leading to the separate septic systems. In order to hook up to the sewer, we’d have to redirect one of the lines to the other line. There was one key item. Was there a lateral?

No, this is not a football term (if you want football, go to Zach on Sports). A lateral is kind of a widget. If it’s there, it allows us to connect our home to the county sewage system. If it’s not, we have to get one installed. Getting one installed would be the difference between above three percent and below.

This was the moment when the reality show would break for commercial. It would show me, slack jawed as usual, hoping that the news is in our favor. Due to the crazy financial setup, we actually wanted no upgrades to be necessary.

My real estate agent called the local water and sewage department. I wished that the taps poured tequila rather than water. After many minutes on hold, we got our answer. The lateral existed. The cost of the repairs was below the threshold. We’d have to ask the seller for more money.

Or not. We had an option of signing the current contract, which would mean we would foot the bill for more than half of the sewer update. We could add to the home’s purchase price and have the seller cover the sewer in cash. Or we could ask the seller for more money.

We asked. They have balked, so far. It looks like we’re going to have to wait another day, perhaps more, to have a binding agreement. The fun’s just about to start, folks.