Devils in the Details

I didn’t think I was going to blog at all today, due to the closing on the new house scheduled for the afternoon and the ultra-rare free morning to spend with my wife while our son was in daycare. Yet somehow, instead of sitting on the couch having a second cup of coffee and planning out the next few hours with the love of my life, I am at work, so why the hell not update for today.


I say “yet somehow” but it’s not that inexplicable. Our mortgage is through a large bank and their underwriting department has about as much responsiveness to the individual circumstances of real live human beings as you would expect from a looming, faceless monolith. Yesterday, barely twenty-four hours before the scheduled closing, the underwriters saw fit to inform our broker that there were a couple of title details that needed to be changed, oh and by the way they needed a copy of the relocation agreement the sellers have. Why did this come up only at the last possible freaking second? How much longer will it take to finish the underwriting process and have everything in place for closing? These are koans I choose not to meditate upon. The fact is that somewhere between our realtor and our broker (who are really cool and kind and helpful) and the finish line for this process of borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars, we’ve run aground on indifferent machinery that will sort things out at its own damn pace, with no regard for the special arrangements we had made with work and daycare and whatnot because we thought (with a month’s notice and planning) we’d actually be signing final paperwork today.

So this leaves me feeling rather cranky, evident by my reckless mixing of nautical and heavy-industrial metaphors, but so far I’m fighting off brutal despair. Maybe we’ll benefit from some miraculously speedy corrections and still get to close today, or maybe it will have to wait until Friday (which would be the next time work schedules could possibly align) but it’s not as if the whole deal is in jeopardy of falling apart. It has simply become less than ideally smooth, and left me unexpectedly be-cubicled and frantically checking Gmail every two minutes for the latest mortgage update.

More (hopefully of the “all is well” variety) later.