Filling in the Blanks

Time keeps on tickin’ tickin’ into the future (meanwhile, we dwell upon the past.)

So… there’s a rather large gap between the December 3rd post and the February 9th post. There’s also quite a lot that took place within those couple of months. Here’s a wee summary:

(Actually, it’s not so “wee,” so feel free to skip over the boring bits.)

The City of Beacon finally delivered the building permit on December 19th, 2003, or roughly a month after we were granted the variance. It seems long, but I guess this is pretty standard. By way of comparison, a woman who works at my office had a house fire that left her essentially homeless and living at a neighbor’s house. Once she got through all the insurance hoohaw—another fairly horrible story all by itself—it took the building department in her little burgh about a month-and-a-half to deliver an EMERGENCY permit. it was over seven months from fire to final permit. And now she still has to wait for the house to be rebuilt. Absolutely insane. Needless to say, a permit delivered one month after a Zoning Board Hearing seems like small change compared to what it could be.

Once we had the permit in our hot little hands we collected the final documents we needed to finalize the construction loan—site survey, building permit, plans, yadda—and then, the following Monday, we delivered them to Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. That was December 22nd. We were leaving to spend Christmas with my family in California on the 24th and spending the night in a hotel at the airport on the 23rd. So the next day I made a quick call to Wells Fargo to make sure everything was in order. I had to leave a message and I took no call back as a good sign. But then… it was the Christmas holidays.

We returned from California on the 2nd of January and I put a call into Wells Fargo on the 5th to see what the progress was and ended up leaving a message again. The next day I learned that there was one more piece of paperwork that needed to be filled out before the final processing could begin. It was a small detail—essentially, because we’re general contracting this job ourselves, the bank wanted us to give them details as to how the monies were going to be distributed during the construction process. It was all information that I had. Actually, I had it while I was in California and could easily have gotten the information back to the bank if I’d known they needed it. But… ’twas the season.

Once the document was processed everything was sent to Wants to remain unnamed Mortgage, which is the company that handles owner/contractor mortgages for Wells Fargo in our neck of the woods. Normandy processed the information and sent us a preliminary draw schedule, which simply details how much money will be given to us at specific points during the construction process. The dollar amounts were a bit slim up front, although they did give us a fair amount at closing to cover the cost of our existing mortgage and to give us money to cover some of the architect costs. We negotiated with them a bit to try to ease the pain at the beginning of the process—they were kind enough to oblige—and we also worked out a way to create our own temporary “slush fund” so we are able to pay all of the sub-contractors in a timely fashion.

As of today we’re quite near the final part of the process. We’ve received a preliminary approval from The Mortgage Company that prefers to remain unnamed, they just need to come down and see the property, which should happen sometime within the next week or so. They’re in Rochester, New York—think Kodak!, or better yet, think Ambrosia Software—which is a ways upstate and we’re just an hour-long train ride from New York City. But once they get here, our ducks should finally be all in a row.

Quack!