On Tuesday I got the call from my mortgage broker where she was supposed to give me a closing date. Instead she told me that the bank rejected the mortgage. She cited a list of things noted wrong in the appraisal report that included peeling wallpaper. I couldn't even talk to her about it at that point. She wasn't making any sense. We told her from the beginning that this house was a fixer- upper. I haven't even noticed the peeling wallpaper, but if I had, my reaction would be one of gladness since it it is hideous and would be easier to remove. I asked her to fax the letter from the bank to my attorney and I haven't spoken to her since.

You would think all hope would be lost at this point but a miracle occured: the sellers extended the mortgage contingency date another month. I am working now with a local mortgage company that both my attorney and realtor recommended. There is still a lot of doubt about whether or not this will happen, but I feel like a million bucks now that I don't have to deal with the old broker. Her daily demonstrations of incompetence were making me crazy - and that's not really an exaggeration. I was shaking all the time and depressed.

So instead of reading every stupid detail of the appraisal to me, super broker gets right to the point. The house was given a "good - fair" rating. "Fair" being one step above "poor". Banks don't want "fair", they want nothing short of "good". So even before explaining this to me, super broker calls the appraiser and asks her what would have to be done to get a "good" rating. Appraiser says its the roof. This is a line of logic I can follow. Peeling wallpaper ... give me a break.

Now I want to know if this would be an issue for any homebuyer, or is it just an issue for us because of our credit rating. Super broker says it would be an issue for anyone, but a bank might be more flexible for someone with better credit. They look at four things: credit, equity, condition of the house, and income. In this scenario we only have one thing going for us.

So the next step is to see if we would qualify for a mortgage if the roof were fixed. Super broker says she should know sometime tomorrow. It's too late in the year to replace the roof now though, so if the answer is yes we would have to 1) wait to buy the house until the roof can be replaced in the spring OR 2)owner financing for six months during which time we can fix up the roof and more and get a bank mortgage.

There is also the possibility that Steve could just patch the roof in the next week while we alternante between snow and 50 degree weather. We'd have to find out if patching the roof would raise the house's rating though. It might not.

Here's our snowman today. The right side of him is the south side. It looks like the sun took bites out of him.