Fall Samain Moon
Mover. Selected. Home Insurance. Selected. Appraisal. Done. Sleep. Disrupted. 58 pages of documents collated and faxed in addition to the 30+ we sent out on Monday. Done. Whole forests must shudder each time a realtor makes a deal.
A list of 25 things that need to get done between now and move in. Examples: Inside work list. Paint bid. Carpet bid. Pick a moving date. Get specific house measurements. Buy washer/dryer. Contract for perimeter fence. Estate lawyers for Colorado estate law. Medical insurance in Colorado. Medical records to Colorado. Wireless setup. Utilities transferred. And on. and on. and. on.
Due to early rising to complete more document discovery, collation and transmittal both Kate and I are a little (ok, a lot) fried. Sleep deprived and wrestling with detail overload. I don’t feel overwhelmed, but I am pretty whelmed.
This two weeks will probably be the most intense of the entire process if our mortgage application is accepted. Here’s an example from the Hadean realm of the underwriter. When I sent them a copy of our IRA holdings and our Vanguard holdings, I did not print the second page. I never do to save paper. But, if it says page 1 of 2, the underwriter has to see the second page. Even though it contains nothing. So, reprint. Resend.
How this process ever got accomplished before fax and e-mail, I’ll never know. It must have required logistical expertise of military strength. In the early 1980’s I was involved in a major settlement with the Keith Heller folks. They brought you those lovely cement slabs with swatches of colored panels on the West Bank. When the community group with which I worked finalized the deal, we faxed my signature to Washington, D.C. to HUD. This was such a big deal-the faxing-that I have a picture of myself in the act.
Now there’s fax, e-mail, scanning. Document retrieval, sharing online. And electronic signatures. Without all this there is simply no way we could have contemplated finding a house and trying to buy it in a period of three weeks. Which also means, I suppose, that we would not have had this fun, super compressed period we’re in right now. Hmmm.