More Bad News

The house we were going to drive to Tampa to sign a contract on failed the building inspection, miserably. Seems the previous owner had never heard of termites or their prevention, so the place, while gorgeous from the floorboards up, is apparently damn near unsafe from bug damage underneath.

Plan B is being formulated as we speak, but at least this un-complicates travel plans for the funeral, possibly. Or at least means I can drive in a more leisurely fashion with my first carload of boxes sometime during the week, as opposed to the original "leave before dawn" sortie scheduled for tomorrow.

This sucks. *sigh*

Updates from the land that care forgot.

I am "cursed" with an irrepressibly optimistic (and bloodthirsty) realtor. She's spoken to the seller's agent several times today, and this is what I was given as the pseudo-summary:

- The seller is originally from Austria, where they ain't got termites, and he bought it from the previous owner (no realtor involved), and never inspected the place; thus, the termite problem.

- The seller has now gotten three damning evaluations, including the one from my building inspector this morning, and will be having an engineer of some sort look at the house tomorrow to make a professional determination as to the extent of the damage, and what a rough estimate would be to effect repairs. On their dime.

- The other interested buyer (who dropped out of their contract on Tuesday) has expressed renewed interest in the place, but GB has taken no prisoners. "R has a signed contract, and you can't sell this place to anyone else until he says he doesn't want it; we're still within our inspection period."

This means, essentially, that I'm holding all the cards - I can tell the seller to fix the place up before I buy it, at no additional cost to me, or I can invoke the "property did not pass inspection" clause in my purchase contract and let the other buyer have it and let -them- deal with matters.

I'm assuming that, if I do the first thing, it'll probably delay my closing and move-in dates a bit, but I'll know more about that the early part of next week.

Speaking of, I'm going to be offline. K & I are flying to Buffalo tomorrow (Sat.) at some point, and will come back Wednesday, at least per the conversation I had with her around 3 this afternoon. If anyone desperately needs to reach me, my yahoo and gmail addresses will be checked periodically from either my parents' or MBI's place. I'll also have my cell phone on hand, just in case.