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Assessor Tuesday
Tuesday, November 21st, 2023 10:15 am |
41F and gloomy this morning. It rained pretty hard last night, for several hours, and everything's soaked out there, including the leaves on the ground.
The appraiser's due here in about 45 minutes.
I may not get a chance to write about how it went until after I'm back from work tonight.
I've never done this before, so I have no idea what to expect.
But whatever his assesment is, I'm assuming I'll hear about it by Friday... with how quickly AmeriSave wants this deal done.
It's also payday and garbage night, and nobody will be in the building tonight at Cloud.
So that means a slow night at work, Uber Eats for dinner, and I'll take out the bins when I get home at 9:45.
Wow!.. it's not even eleven o'clock yet, and the inspections's over!
He rang the doorbell about 10:35, and by then he'd already been outside measuring the dimensions and taking pictures for a while.
Nice guy, about my age.
Inside we just chatted and walked around while he snapped photos and did some kind of laser measurements.
Didn't take long!
And he never even went into the basement.
My gut impression was that all they're concerned with is... four bedrooms, two bathrooms with showers, side porch, shed, and... the overall dimensions.
There's some minimum value for the house, below which this deal cannot fly... so the question is really... will it be appraised at or above that bar?
The loan is for 100K, and it's not a home equity loan, so I would assume that if the house is above, say, 120K then I'm fine?
The lowest AVM had it at 180K, with no appraisal... so... a quicky appraisal like this?.. I would hazzard a guess, put's it at... 140K?
But what do I know about real estate?
Tomorrow is still a normal business day, so I suppose it's possible I hear back from Ben about the final verdict before Thanksgiving hits.
If not, then certainly next week I'll know my fate; Either this deal tanks and I'm gonna struggle for a few years, with BMO on my back about the balloon... or it goes through and I have an easier time living within my means, and a lot more peace of mind.
Either way, the improvements from here on out are gonna be out of pocket.
No more magic loan money to throw at stuff.
But that's fine.
The back yard was an emergent situation, with a hard deadline of October, to transform everything.
I needed a pile of cash to get everything done as fast as possible.
But from here on out I can take the time to stockpile materials one paycheck at a time before starting a given project.
With this home loan, that goes faster, because I'll have more disposeable cash every month.
But without this loan, it's still doable. It'll just take longer.
Not a bad night! I stayed busy, but still had time to chill in the empty building.
Back at home I took the bins out, then ordered an InstaCart delivery for the morning, and then went over to the AmeriSave portal.
Around 8:30PM I'd gotten an email from them asking me to sign another disclosure.
Was this good news?
What I found was just a single disclosure to esign, which I thought I'd already signed... but then I remembered that when I went to sign them on Friday night, this one didn't let me sign it.
Nothing would happen when I clicked the blue boxes.
Now, however, it WAS letting me sign it.
So... was that just a glitch last Friday, that they fixed today?
Or did this have something to do with the appraisal?.. like... maybe I wasn't allowed to sign it unless the appraisal came back good???
I honestly don't know.
However, it was signed here on Tuesday night, so tomorrow is a normal business day...
So, if this deal is still gonna go through, then it won't have been slowed down by me.
But... let's not get our hopes up, just yet!
I could very well receive a call from Ben tomorrow saying, Pat, I'm sorry, but the appraiser spotted some foundation damage, along with other stuff, and... the darn house just isn't worth 100K! I'm so sorry, but it's only worth 50K! We just can't do this! It's been declined.
There actually was some serious foundation damage at the northwest corner of the kitchen.
However, I repaired that from inside the crawl space, back in 2021.
It's a limestone foundation, so it's possible to simply remortar it, which I did.
But from the outside, on the west side, under the big kitchen window... because it's coated with cement, it still looks damaged... with two long cracks that had been spray foamed a while back.
So it IS possible, that this was clocked by the assessor, and it WOULD tank the deal.
Because the only way to prove it had been repaired would be to have an inspector down in the crawl space.
And then he'd see that the entire kitchen floor is supported by little vertical boards sitting on flagstones in the dirt!
And if he REALLY looked around, he might conclude that the mortar in other areas is turning to dust, and the foundation is just being held together by friction and gravity.
And I don't want anybody seeing that!
Well, anyway, we'll see if I hear from Ben in the morning.
Ball's in his court now.
As for that foundation damage... it was the result of ignorance, by not only Mom & Dad, but Dad's parents before them... in three key areas.
- No eve on the back room, where it connects to the kitchen, when that vestibule was enclosed, around 1930.
- The trap door in the kitchen, to the crawl space, was covered by a base cabinet and forgotten about... also in the early 1930s.
- Mom & Dad never screened the gutters.
Point 1 set it up for rain to just cascade down the face of the wall right into the foundation, in that corner beneath the big kitchen window.
Point 2 made it so that nobody could get into the crawl space for about 80 years!.. to see if there was any damage, or repair it.
There was also a supply pipe leak under there, from a corroded galvanized line that had been slow-dripping for decades... right onto the foundation!
Point 3 meant that even where there was a gutter, along the north wall of the kitchen, the water just spilled right out, because it was clogged.
What little made it down the downspout, spilled right out by the base of the foundation.
So... a triple water threat to the foundation in that northwest corner of the kitchen, for many many decades!.. and I was the first person to see it, and do something!
I had the gutters cleaned and screened in 2019, and I also hooked up long flex drains to the ends of the downspouts to carry it away from the foundations, all around the house.
In 2020, I cut a new trap door in the kitchen floor, to access the crawl space.
I replaced the bad water line with new copper, and then I mortared the hell out of the limestone in the worst spots.
On the north foundation, there was a huge area that was ready to just cave in, so I mortared that on the outside and the inside.
But on that west face, I mortared it only on the inside, and used some spray foam to fill the gaps on the outside, which was still skim coated with concrete.
All of this work did put a stop to any further damage, and stabilized the foundation.
But it ain't too pretty!
And like I said, down in that crawlspace, I see a lot of sand sitting at the base of the foundation everywhere... which might just be sand or dirt that was already there?..
But it could also mean that the mortar everywhere under the south wing is just so old... 137 years old... that it's turning to sand and sifting out!
That's definitely something to take a closer look at, but the south wing seems sound for the moment. There's no signs that it's shifting, or listing.
Still, given how much punishment the entire foundation had to endure for so many decades, with the clogged gutters... and how bad the doors and windows were, everywhere in the house... It's a miracle the house was even inhabitable over the last decade of Dad's life!
Meanwhile, more than half the house is still 100 year old knob & tube wiring, with a fuse box downstairs that Dad had several 20A fuses in, and one 30A!
And a bunch of ancient switches and receptacles that were only rated for 10 to 15 amps when they were new!
So it's a miracle the house also didn't burn down at some point in the last 20 years!
But somehow the old girl's still standing.
And now that I'm on watch, she's on the mend!
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