February 2014

We’re supposed to be closing tomorrow, but we’ve had some setbacks. We had to add my dad as a cosigner, so now we have 2 cosigners and me on there, but we had to wait until my dad got his taxes done, which he did last week and the bank got all the paperwork this week, but now it looks like we’ll get the loan, but we will need to postpone closing for a few days or possibly weeks. This whole process is stressful and I hope we never have to go through this again. They want to know everything, they question every little thing, they even question your paychecks. Some of the stuff is common sense, but they want to be able to have a paper trail to see where all your money comes from. I guess the housing market fallout a few years ago caused the banks to be so thorough, but it just seems a bit overboard and unnecessary. In theory we should have a solid answer from the bank regarding a new closing date later today. Once I have that I can get insurance and be in the final stage of this thing.

Other than the house, I’ve been doing some stuff here and there on the site. You can now submit jokes, riddles, and recipes and I am working on a few other things. With these bumps in the road with the house I haven’t really been motivated to do much besides work and play video games. My Xbox 360 died so I decided to get a newer one, I had the day 1 edition, so a 20 gigabyte hard drive with no HDMI port. My new one has a 250 gigabyte hard drive and HDMI. It’s also black. I can’t really record from it the way I used to, but maybe once this house stuff is settled I’ll pick up an HD recorder to record from Xbox One and the 360. I already have to pick up a new HDMI cable for my PS3, I haven’t really used that much.

There’s a lot of things we need to buy, couches, wood, tools, cleaning supplies, lawn mower, cookware, etc, but we can’t begin buying it until we know without a doubt we have the house. We were under contract for another house back in October that we were all set to get, but the complex and the bank had a falling out and we bought some things for it, like a coffee table and some other things, then the deal fell through. We still have that stuff which will go into the new house, but we won’t be buying anything else until we know for sure. In theory everything looks good, we just need the underwriters to say we’re good to go for some date and then the price we will need at closing and then we will be set and we may go out and start purchasing this stuff, but not before then.

We have the mortgage papers, they just need to be signed. We got them on Friday and then had some confusion with the cost, but we went over things with the broker and our real estate agent, so we will be signing them on Sunday. Hopefully we can get to UPS to send them back on Monday. After that, it is just a waiting game.

Looking over everything, we never got this far in the process. We were under contract with three houses before this, one we couldn’t be approved for, one was a terrible house and should be condemned, and then this one. I guess they really mean it when they say third time’s the charm. I can’t wait to have my office/mancave/studio.

I plan on doing videos in between work and gaming, maybe even some more gaming videos if and when Microsoft can get Twitch Streaming up for the Xbox One. Lack of space and privacy has been the main issue I haven’t done more videos in the past. I may eventually purchase a green screen to make things more interesting, but we all have plans and dreams to do things.

Lately I have been getting a lot done on my site. Jokes, Riddles, and Recipes are all working much better with a new rating system. Eventually members will be able to post their own content and have it show up on their profile. I’d like to also get a new design up, with a different theme for each section. Also get more content up that is better organized. It’s a lot, but I have been doing pretty well lately with balancing everything out. I plan on being on my laptop more in the new house so working from the living room or any other change of scenery, should provide even an ounce of inspiration to work on things. I have a lot of ideas that I want to implement, but the first one is a new newsletter format.

I do feel more inspired just buying the house, which is why I have been blogging more, commenting on blogs, working on SEO, working on new content, etc. I felt stuck for a while, but things are finally falling into place and moving forward. It will finally be nice to have our own place that we can do what we want with it. I don’t think that we will move in and have all this money to play with, we might have some, but really I know it will be tight at first, but you make it work, do the work yourself, save up, then you can get it all sorted out. Just having this house opens up a whole new world of possibilities. I’m excited.