lol - wouldn't that be interesting.

The saga continues...

Tonight I got an email from my realtor with documents attached.

WATER DAMAGE, TOXIC MOLD & ENVIRONMENTAL DISCLOSURE, RELEASE AND INDEMNIFICATION AGREEMENT

The undersigned parties to a purchase contract dated _________________ __, for the purchase of the property and the improvements commonly known as ___________________________________________________ (the “Property”) between ______________________________________ (“Buyer”) and Countrywide Home Loans Servicing LP (“Seller”), acknowledge and agree as follows:

Seller hereby advises Buyer that the Property (including, but not limited to, the basement) is or may be affected by water or moisture damage, toxic mold, and/or other environmental hazards or conditions. Seller further advises Buyer that as a consequence of possible water damage and/or excessive moisture, the Property may be or has been irrevocably contaminated with mildew, mold,and/or other microscopic organisms. Buyer is being advised that exposure to certain species of mold may pose serious health risks, and that individuals with immune system deficiencies, infants, children, the elderly, individuals with allergies or respiratory problems, and pets are particularly susceptible to experiencing adverse health effects from mold exposure.

Buyer acknowledges that Seller has advised Buyer to make his/her own evaluation of the Property and to have the Property thoroughly inspected. Buyer has been further advised by Seller that all areas contaminated with mold, and/or other environmental hazards or conditions, should be properly and thoroughly remediated. Additionally, Buyer has been advised by Sellers that habitation of the Property without complete remediation may subject the inhabitants to potentially serious health risks and/or bodily injury. Buyer acknowledges that it is the sole responsibility of Buyer to conduct any remediation on the Property.

Buyer also acknowledges that Buyer is buying the Property AS-IS. Buyer represents and warrants to Seller that Buyer has made (or will make before closing on the purchase of the Property) his/her own inspection and evaluation of the Property to Buyer’s complete satisfaction, and Buyer accepts the Property AS-IS at the time of closing. Buyer is electing to purchase the Property from Seller in an AS-IS condition with full knowledge of the potential condition of the Property,the potentially serious health risks, and the potential liability that Buyer could incur as the owner of the Property for claims,losses, and damages arising out of any toxic mold contamination, and/or other environmental hazards or conditions on the Property. Buyer agrees that the purchase price of the Property reflects the agreed upon value of the Property AS-IS taking into account the aforementioned disclosures.

Buyer understands and acknowledges that the Property was acquired by Seller through foreclosure, deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, or similar process,that Seller has never occupied the Property, and that Seller has little or no direct knowledge regarding the condition of the Property. Buyer further acknowledges that Seller has not made and does not make any express or implied representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the environmental condition of the Property or whether the Property is in compliance with applicable local, state, or federal environmental or other laws,statutes,regulations, rules, ordinances, codes, or standards (“Laws”). Buyer hereby agrees not to pursue any claims, losses, or damages,against Seller, or Seller’s parent company, subsidiaries, affiliates, directors, officers, employees, partners, shareholders, representatives, agents, brokers, predecessors, successors, or assigns, arising out of or relating in any way to any violations of Laws, or for costs, fees, or expenses incurred in conducting investigations relating to Laws or the Property. In addition, to the fullest extent permitted by law, Buyer, for himself/herself, and for all Buyer’s invitees, agents, heirs, executors, devisees, and assigns hereby forever waives and fully releases Seller,and Seller’s parent company, subsidiaries, affiliates, directors, officers, employees, partners, shareholders, representatives, agents, brokers, predecessors, successors, and assigns (the “Released Parties”) from and against any and all claims, causes of action, whether administrative or judicial, losses, costs (including any and all reasonable attorneys' fees, court costs, and reasonable costs of investigation, litigation, and settlement), expenses, sanctions, curtailments, interest, liabilities, penalties, fines, demands, liens, judgments, compensation, fees, loss of profits, injuries, death, and/or damages, of any kind whatsoever, whether known or unknown, fixed or contingent, joint or several, criminal or civil, or in law or in equity arising from, in connection with, or in any way relating to any known or unknown conditions of the Property, including but not limited to, the existence of toxic mold, and/or any other environmental hazards or conditions on the Property (“Claims”).

Buyer also agrees to fully indemnify,protect, defend,and hold the Released Parties harmless from and against any and all Claims.

Of course I won't be signing this document and probably won't be buying the house. I'll check it out tomorrow, but I'm scared as hell now. I applied for this house and they took my offer the next day. I knew it was too fast. There had to be a reason.


Man, I'm pissed. How dare they ask for $345k for a house with water damage or toxic mold?!? When a house get's that kind of mold, they should just destroy it.

It's very possible that the mold isn't a problem and they are just trying to cover their ass just in case.

The seller got the house in a foreclosure and saw evidence of a water leak and possible mold. That's all you know. It could be a problem. It could be no problem. A home inspection by an excellent home inspector will tell you if there is an actual problem. I'd shop around for a real nit-picking home inspector. Someone who takes their time.

Radar, I can't pretend to understand what the above means, but Glatt does and that's good enough for me.

The house my ex husband and I bought had any number of things discovered at survey stage. From the creaking third step, to the possibility that the bedroom ceiling might fall down at any point. We took a gamble (the ceiling had held for over 3 centuries, we figured it would outlast us - it certainly did our marriage) and bought it.

Good luck to you and yours regardless.

If it's got mold, I'm not going to buy it even if I love it. I have an infant daughter, and I won't risk her health for anything.

Yeah, but you are breathing in mold spores as you read this. Mold is EVERYWHERE. The question is, what kind of mold, and how much?

I grew up in the desert. No mold. At least no living mold.

Obviously, it's your decision, but if it's a house you like, you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand because of this statement until you know more.

get your own bonded inspector.

Radar, that's a standard form - it doesn't mean the house DOES have mold, it means you can't come back and sue the seller IF the house has mold. Every house that you try to buy in CA will come with a piece of paper like that.

As others said, you'll find out more during the inspection, and if you find mold, bow out of the deal. You'll still be within the contingency period, and it won't cost you anything more than the price of the inspection ($350 or so).

and a well recommended one at that. DO NOT get one who will just tell you what you want to hear. I've used both kinds.

...and a well recommended one at that. DO NOT get one who will just tell you what you want to hear. I've used both kinds.

PM me if you want the name of ours. He was very thorough, even helped us get the original termite report thrown out and redone. I've called him several times since the inspection, to ask for clarification and followup on things he found, and he has always ready to help, even though we had already paid him and his work was finished.

And this is how you find a good inspector. Word of mouth.

Don't use an inspector recommended by either agent. They will tend to recommend inspectors who won't jinx the deal.

I agree with glatt and realize that my prior post may have been ambiguous.

SM is right. I've bought and sold a number of houses and I can tell you that the seller has to disclose anything that could possibly be wrong with the house just so they can't be sued later if something turns up. I saw that same disclosure for a house in phoenix that had a minor water leak that had been properly taken care of. Get a good inspection and see what it shows.

I've scheduled an inspector to come out on Monday. My father and I are going to the house today with some flashlights to look around at possible water damage.

I read this a bit too late. My agent scheduled the inspector to go in on Monday. My dad and I went in today and looked very closely at the house and we're pretty sure there's no mold, but an agent will come in on Monday.

When we checked out the house today my agent told me the bank will pay for the termite inspection and any repairs for damage caused by termites, they will install a new water heater, they had already installed a really fancy looking faucet in the kitchen with a detachable part to spray down dishes, they will install a new thermostat and test the heating and cooling. etc.

I felt a lot better.

I want to thank you guys (especially smoothmoniker) for letting me know the mold thing was standard. I was freaking out. I feel a whole lot better now, and I will be buying the house depending on what the inspector says after monday afternoon.

I guess the combination of the bank accepting my offer in a single day combined with the mention of the word "mold" has freaked me out a bit. So has the fact that when I told my boss I was buying a new house, he told me "you might want to hold off on a major purchase like that".

Luckily my old boss is at a new place and he's been begging me to leave this job to work for him. I called him today and said if he can get me the same rate I'm making now, or slightly better, I'll take it. The job is closer to where I currently live, but further away from the house we're buying, and I wouldn't be in management, but as long as I can pay the mortgage payments, etc. I'll be just fine.

FWIW - you can still get an independent inspector to take a look at things for you. Just to get a 2nd opinion - can't hurt.
You can also call a mold remediation company to look into that specific issue. Remember they will WANT to find something, as thats what they do for a living and may dig a little deeper than your average inspector. Something to consider perhaps - good luck!

That's true. We had multiple specialists come out to the house, a chimney mason, an electrician, a pool guy. It helped us figure out if we wanted to buy, and also helped us start putting together a budget for repairs that will need to happen in the first few weeks.

Thanks for that advice. I'm having a general inspection done today, but I'll probably bring in a pool guy, and perhaps a couple of others come in to check things out. I don't need an electrical guy because my dad is an electrician.

Our inspection was incredibly overwhelming - the house was built in 1934, so everything was in need of repair. At the end of the inspection, I asked the inspector to organize the items into three categories:

1) must be done before move-in, for health and safety reasons
2) should be done within the first year, to avoid future long-term damage
3) would be nice to get to someday, but not urgent.

Once the items were grouped that way, I felt much better about the house, and our ability to actually get the work completed that it needed. It helped us prioritize our reserve cash, and keep from being overwhelmed by the 97 things on the big list. It turned out to be only about 5 things that were urgent and required professional contractors to do, and about 10 things that needed to be done within the first year to avoid future damage, most of which I can do.

Good luck, and keep us updated.

Someone ripped out the thermostat, so I bought one over the weekend. I'll hook it up during the inspection today so we can test the air conditioner and heater.

All thermostats are not the same - just sayin. Make sure you got one compatible with the system in the house.

I won't know if it's compatable until I hook it up. There's nothing on the wall but a bracket and some wires.

I assume the heat is gas and the air conditioner is electric. I got a 24 volt one, which seems to be standard.

I'm just trying to help you with my limited experience. I am sure there are others with much more knowledge than I here. When I replaced mine the # of wires that were there, type - either gas, oil or electric and the unit that it was going to were all important.

They are labeled with letters. I put the same wires to the same letters and it worked. At least it worked on the air conditioner. The house doesn't have the gas turned on so I can't test the heater. Though since the heater pushes the air through the house, the heater did kick on when I tested the air conditioner with the new thermostat

Good - that was fortunate.

We got an offer on our townhome on Friday, and today we found out there may be a second offer! Woot!

So, in order for the loan to fund and the mortgage to close, you have to have a termite report, and they have to fix all Level 1 damage. This is all done by the escrow company.

The escrow company has not even sent out the report to the repair company yet, and every termite company in the area has a 2 week backlog before they can come look at the property. We're supposed to close escrow on Friday.

Arrrrgh!

Great news Pie

Sorry SM - It'll all work out, I'm sure that isn't the first time they've had to deal with this. Heck, maybe there will be a cancellation or something. (keeps fingers crossed)

Well, we're not closing today, the mortgage underwriter is being completely absurd with the amount of paperwork they're requiring, springing stuff on us at the last minute, asking for huge changes on what feels like a whim to us.

Looks like next week at the earliest.

Is home-buying a lot more complicated out there? It seems like you guys are going through more hoops.

Yes it is - I have several clients in the business and they have told me they are being inundated with paperwork requests from the lenders. Much of it is at the last moment. One even speculated that its nothing more than a stall tactic of sorts. One said the redundancy is ridiculous.

I'm not sure if it's just out here, or if it's the new wave of fear running through the mortgage market. My sense is that nobody is getting fired for NOT underwriting a loan, but you will lose your job if you underwrite a bad loan.

For about two hours today, the mortgage underwriter told us they wouldn't be funding our loan, and that we couldn't buy this house. It came down to a difference of $3k between my W2 and the verification of employment form that my university HR department filled out. Neither side would budge, so the underwriter said, "Sorry. This loan is denied."

It turned out the difference was non-taxed income that went into my retirement account. Jesus, don't these people do this shit for a living?

So, anyway, they finally agreed to insert a letter explaining the difference into the file, and long story marginally shorter, the loan underwriter signed off on the loan today. If everything moves at the speed of light, we might actually close by Friday, only one week late.

Damn it.

Delayed again. Now it's pushed back to Monday.

You'd think they'd be wanting to sell houses at this point? Hang in there.

Hang in there, I'm sure it will work out for ya.

And now Tuesday.

Are they giving you a reason?

Funding. The bank has to call my employers the day they fund to make sure that I still have a job. They have the wrong phone numbers for my employers, so rather than just asking us for the right numbers, or looking at our loan docs all of which have my employer info on them, they just decided to put a hold on the funding instead.

This bank is a fucking joke. If they weren't giving us such a stupidly low rate, we would have jumped ship a long time ago.

So, it takes 2 days to close from the day they fund, (one day to count the money, one day to send someone to the title office to switch the deed on the house) which keeps pushing everything back.

Tuesday looks pretty solid at this point. We'll see.

Loan: FUNDED!

Keys: TOMORROW!!!

Woo-hoo!

OUT standing!! !! !! Congrats

now about that visitor schedule.....

Way to go!

most excellent.

Groovy!

Visitor? I'm moving in!

congrats smooth!

Wow, the time has flown by. Here are some completely random thoughts:

I've been crawling under and over and through every inch of this house. It's our first house, my first time being the fix-it guy, learning as I go. There are 7 decades of repair work, wires and pipes going everywhere. I'm a fairly OCD guy when it comes to work-flow, so just learning where everything goes has been frustrating. Today, finally, I figured out how the sprinkler system works, where all of the control panels route to, and how the pipes are actually run.

We really love this place. We've been in apartments and condos and a small house in Burbank for our entire married lives, and none of our furniture has ever seemed to fit right (mostly wood antique stuff, lots of shaker and craftsman). We moved it in, and suddenly it was like everything in our lives had been gathering for just this house. The wood everywhere is perfect.

We've made lots of changes to our financial priorities. No home phone, just cell. No cable TV (and no reception up against the hills), so everything is streaming off of an old Dell setup with Ubuntu Linux. I've started riding my bike to the University on days when I'm there - it’s 9 miles, and it saves me about $30 a week or so in driving costs. We eat a lot of beans and rice.

I'm amazed at how cheap homeowners insurance is, compared to car insurance.

Our downstairs bathroom basically needs to be torn out and rebuilt from the studs up. Rotted wood, leaks everywhere, just a mess. Fixing everything would be about $15k. Pulling it out and putting in the dream bathroom is about $20k. Everything, everything is so damn expensive.

You know what sucks about pools? Pool pumps. They have to run for 2 hours a day, and it ends up costing over $100 per month in electricity. Just for a damn pool pump!

Our house backs up to the Angeles mountains, and we have all kinds of wildlife roaming the area. Bears, deer, big cats, coyotes, and so many birds you wouldn’t believe. They nest in the spanish tiles on the roof, and the light up at 5:30 in the morning. Day 1, it was like a Disney miracle! Day 60, I wanted to buy a shotgun. A couple nested in the beams over our back patio, and we got to show our kids the whole nature unfolding thing, from building the nest to eggs to chicks. It was pretty cool. My wife saw a bear chasing a deer down the street at 5 am a few weeks back. Crazy wildlife.

When I started teaching at the University, one of our dreams was to open up our home to students, to have them be involved in our lives, and to form connections with them that extended beyond just the classroom. We’re only 10 minutes away now, and since we bought the house in the middle of the Spring semester, we’ve have a flood of students over, every weekend, dropping in for dinner, hanging out with my kids, staying up until 3 am talking about music, philosophy, faith, SNL skits, anything and everything. It has been a real dream come true.

It’s late, my knees hurt from crawling under the house today, and I need to get some more bourbon in me, so I’ll leave it here for now. We love this house.

Excellent, glad you found the dream instead of the nightmare. :thumb2:

...waits on pics......

Thats so great smooth. I'm very happy for you & your family, but we do need some pics or, even better, a house tour video

Sounds amazing SM! I'm glad you seem to like the fixing-up rather than just hating it. Lotso students over? Creepy to me, I'd never dream of visiting a prof, at their home nonetheless. 'Cept for my english 1301&1302 prof, but I'd known her since 2nd grade.

Pictures if you can swing it, please!

Doesn't sound like such the fixer-upper to me. It sounds really nice.

And does the bathroom really need to be gutted? Sure, there may be some rot in the walls, but is it so bad they need to be ripped apart? You don't always have to fix every defect in a house. Just stabilize things so they don't get worse, and fix things enough so that they work to your liking. If the plumbing isn't working well, focus on that. If there is a leak somewhere that's rotting out the walls, fix the leak. But if the walls still seem sturdy and support the load above, then who cares if there's a little rot? It will stop once you dry it out. Obviously, you can see it, and I can't, but it's something to consider.

I don't know anything about pools, but have heard that salt water ones are much cheaper and easier to maintain. Have you looked into that?

We never went to a professor's house, but my roommates and I routinely had professors over to dinner at our house. We were steeped in that academia culture, deep philosophical conversations over wine and whatnot. It was a lot of fun. Couldn't imagine doing it with my kids running around getting in the way, but more power to you!

My Dad is a prof (retired) and is still having students over to his house. He had one student from the 70s over this week. When I was growing up, there were always college kids around. Sometimes sleeping (passed out) on the living room floor on a Saturday morning when I was ready to watch cartoons.

The most important things I learned in school were outside of the classroom, when I was hanging out with professors in casual settings. I really want to recreate that.

I'll see if I can round up the before / after shots of the repair work we've done.

One of my Mom's profs used to babysit for me once in a while when she was teaching a recitation.

I ended up actually getting a house in Florida. It's a 3,000 square foot house, built in 1986. I paid $70,000 cash for it, but we've put about another $30,000 into upgrades...

Spanish tiles throughout the house (other than the bedrooms), hardwood floors in the bedrooms, new oak cabinets with marble counter tops, new roof, new water heater, removing wallpaper and painting the entire interior and exterior for a more modern look, mosiac tile design on the front porch, etc...

Before adding the new entertainment setup, furniture, etc. we're spending about $100k and getting WAAAAY more house than I could have gotten in California and I'll have NO HOUSE PAYMENTS!!!

After we homestead the house, our property taxes will be about $1,300 per year. This means with home insurance, property taxes, and garbage, we'll be paying under $200/month.

We don't have to pay for water because we've got our own well and it's filtered.

The house is very energy efficient. The deceased former-owners used to pay about $60/month in power bills. I suspect it will rise a bit with me since I'm such a tech head. Even so, I think with all of our utilities, food, etc. we'll be able to fully support this house and our family with $1,200 - $1,500 per month because I paid off all my credit cards, the car, student loans, etc. last year. We are debt free, including the house.

The best part is that in addition to opening the hot dog biz, I am in the running for a swing-shift IT job that will pay about what I was earning in Los Angeles. My wife's job doing nails can support us and I can save my entire salary.


Anyway, when all of the work is finished on the house, I'll post up pics.

Radar, you should post before and after, so we can appreciate the work you did.