If you've ever gone through the home-buying process, you can relate to the story you're about to read. And if you've ever bought a home, moved, celebrated the holidays with family out of town, gone on a Maui honeymoon, had your car transmission go kaput, and discovered your new home sits on a tree-root-rotting mess - all in about a month's time - then you can really relate to this story.
Lauren and Aaron are a newly married couple whose optimism was put to the test during their home buying and moving adventure. Fortunately, they passed the test with flying colors and can now laugh about their experience.
And you all know how I feel about finding humor in even the worst situations! Here's Lauren and Aaron's story, as told by Lauren, a now-experienced home buyer.
My husband Aaron and I recently bought our first house together! This was icing on the cake after our May 2013 wedding and our scheduled 10-day honeymoon in Maui, which was planned for Dec. 6. We were moving from Seattle to Gig Harbor, Washington, which is only about an hour drive away and we hired a professional moving company to pack and move our things.
It began with a 30-day escrow from us securing the purchase of the house on Nov. 5 at 11 p.m. with a set closing date of Dec. 5, because on Dec. 6 we were already booked to go on our honeymoon to Maui. We asked the sellers if we could close on the house upon our return and they said no, it needed to be done before we left. The sellers were professional flippers and they had taken our 1980s built house and made it look all pretty and brand new on the inside in a matter of three months and couldn't wait to get it off their books and move onto the next flip.
Up until 6 p.m. on Dec. 4 we had no idea if the bank was going to approve our loan in time. They had promised they could meet the steep timeline at the beginning of the process, however it required a ridiculous invasion of our financial records, which we have found out is going to now be par for the course when securing a home loan because of the recent changes to the government regulations.
At 9 a.m. Dec. 5 we drove to Bellevue, Washington, on the east side of Seattle, to the title company to sign the papers. I was excited, this being my first home purchase! Aaron was stressed as all get-out and was "done with the whole process" because of all the back and forth with securing the loan. It seriously started to become a full-time job for him, our financial advisors, bank and Realtor. We sat down in a conference room and were rushed through signing the title documents so they could get it to a courier to drive it down to the county we were moving to in order to file the papers that same day. We kept getting interrupted by a women telling us we needed to hurry up and sign everything, which was super annoying. At the end of the paper signing there was no "congratulations" or hand shake or giving us the keys, just that someone should call us around 5 or 6 p.m. that evening confirming that everything was filed.
As we got in the elevator I started to tear up and was attempting to have my tear ducts re-absorb my tears back into my eyes, but it wasn't working. Aaron hugged me and apologized that the whole process was so stressful. Tears streaming down my face the elevator door opened on the first floor to some huge company having their Christmas party in the lobby with caterers and a barista (Hello - it is Seattle) and there were tons of people looking at me with my puffy, red eyes as Aaron held my hand as walked through the parking lot to the truck. We sat in Aaron's truck and I was able to catch my breath and my sadness turned to frustration at the title document lady for not being more hospitable. Aaron started the truck and put it into reverse to back out of the parking space and nothing happened....the truck went nowhere. Side note: If you know Aaron you know that he knows the tire pressure in all of his tires at all times and takes AMAZING care of his truck. Confused, he put it back in park and then in reverse again and pressed on the gas and the truck didn't move, it was as if he had put it in neutral. I could actually hear the sound of his blood pressure rising by the millisecond, as he turned the car off and tried the sequence again. We both could clearly hear that the transmission was not turning over into reverse, it would go into drive, park and neutral but not reverse. He immediately cut the steering wheel, told me to stay in the car, and began pushing his truck out of the parking spot.
Meanwhile I am trying to be positive and attempting to make up some car malfunction that would be cheaper to fix than needing a new transmission, and that clearly was NOT helping. He jumped back into the car and I immediately pulled out my iPhone looking for the nearest Chevy dealership. As luck would have it there was one less than a mile away so we drove in silence as the automated voice told us to make a few turns and we pulled into the dealership . We walked into the service center at which point the service guy asked us "how are you doing today?" to which Aaron said, "Not great, I just bought a house 5 minutes ago, my wife is upset by the process, and I think my transmission just went out." They were able to look at his truck that day and they called Enterprise Rent-a-Car for us and roughly 20 minutes later we found ourselves driving a Ford Focus to Denny's of Bellevue to get something to eat and have a chance to sit down and comprehend the morning. We needed to go home to finish packing for our honeymoon for which our flight took off at 8 the next morning.
Around 2 they called and said the best thing would be to get a new transmission. He would have a 100,000 mile warranty on it, and at $3,500 vs $2,900 it was a better value that just trying to fix part of the transmission. At this point we are like "OF COURSE THIS WOULD HAPPEN!" The Chevy dealership said it was fine if we picked up the truck when we got back from Maui in 10 days and we left it at that.
We had an amazing honeymoon in which we didn't think about our upcoming move, the truck or anything else. We enjoyed going whale watching, sitting by the pool and beach, attending luaus and enjoying $5 Bloody Mary happy hours at the pool every day.
After getting back from Maui we had planned two days later to drive the 10 hours to Montana to spend the holidays with Aaron's parents and so we unpacked our bathing suits and shorts and repacked, including things like long-underwear and multiple pairs of gloves and scarfs.
In January we were extremely excited to move out of Seattle and into the 'burbs' where we could have 2,400 square feet of house, beautiful tall fur trees and be able to have a conversation without our neighbors hearing us and inserting their opinions like they were included in the convo. The town of Gig Harbor is an old-timey fishing village that is surrounded by Puget Sound on almost every side. We are not beachfront by any means but we enjoy a nice ocean breeze from time to time and a peek-a-boo water view from our bedroom.
The movers came on Jan. 9 to pack all our things and stack our boxes to the ceiling and returned on Jan 10 to load the truck and follow me to the new house. Aaron had to be at one of his facilities that day. We parked our cars out of the way of the moving truck so they could pull right up and connect their ramp to the front porch of the house. The movers got all our boxes into the house and beds set up by around 4 p.m., with somewhat minimal scratching of our newly painted walls.
At this time we took a deep breath and looked at the large tasks in front of us of UNPACKING, ugh! We both realized there was so much work to be done and we had no food in the house. Since Aaron works from home 50 percent of the time, his priority was getting his home office set up ASAP. I had no energy to get back in the car and go to the grocery store for the basic staples but with encouragement from my husband and minor amount of whining on my part I took my car and went to Safeway to get Chinese food from the prepared food section, bread, milk, flour tortillas and shredded taco cheese because those are our staples. When I returned from the store it was pouring rain and windy so I pulled all the way into the driveway and as close to the front door as I could get so as not to get wet. Even though the Seattle/Tacoma area is known for rain, it rarely rains hard enough that requires a raincoat or umbrella. Since I had no idea which box my additional sweatshirts were in and the suitcase I had packed with a few days of necessities was blocked by the MANY boxes just unloaded by the movers. I unloaded the groceries, organized the Chinese food at the coffee table in the living room, we ate, and then continued to unpack until roughly 11. As we went to bed I noticed how nice it was to hear the patter of rain on the roof and the breeze in the trees. In our old house our bedroom was in the basement and it was like being in a room on a cruise ship with no port-hole and if you didn't have a clock next to your bed you would have no idea what time of day it was.
We slept great that night and Aaron woke up like clockwork at 7:30 on Saturday morning. The wind and rain had stopped and I was lying in bed enjoying my view of the beautiful green trees surrounding our house. From all of the windows in our house you look out and all you see is green - it's awesome. It was so quiet in the house until I heard "HOLY S&#%!"and "F*#% Me!" coming from just outside our bedroom door. To be quite honest this didn't even startle me because of the other profanities that had been yelled over the last few days. Aaron ran back into our bedroom yelling that there was a tree laying across our driveway and he immediately picked up his cell phone and ran outside. This made sense since it was windy and there were little tiny trees and brush all over our yard. I got up and looked out the window and was completely blown away with what I saw.
This was not just "a tree." This was one of the largest trees on our property. I went outside to see this massive tree laying next to my car, Aaron's truck, our 19-foot camping trailer, the beautiful rhododendrons lining the inside of our driveway, and the house, all of which had escaped without a scratch. Aaron was already on the phone calling tree removal people as it had blocked both our cars in, making it impossible for us to leave. I grabbed my camera and started clicking away. Aaron was able to reach one tree removal company on a Saturday morning. The owner, Brett, said his crew was on another job that day in Tacoma, but said he would come over himself, so we could at least get our cars out of the driveway. He arrived within a few hours and we ran outside to greet him. (Also, before he arrived we had Home Depot delivering out new washing and dryer). Brett took one step out of his Jeep Liberty and had a huge smile on his face. He was like "this was not at all I was expecting when you said you had a single tree laying across your driveway." He observed the relation to our cars, our new house and camping trailer at which point he said "MAN, you hit the jackpot!!!" He apologized for only bringing one chainsaw with him and that his crew wasn't available today and he immediately got to work cutting up the large rounds in the pouring rain while Megan, his girlfriend and business partner, was keeping the car warm.
We unpacked and watched over the next 2-3 hours while he cut up this 105-foot fur tree. All of a sudden we heard the doorbell ring and it was Megan saying that Brett had taken a wood chip to the eye and had scratched his eye pretty bad and she was going to take him to urgent care and have his crew come back from their other job to finish up at our house. I already felt bad that he was out there in the pouring rain cutting up and hauling heavy logs, missing watching one of the Seahawks play-off games on TV, and now I felt even worse. We said "don't worry about it, just take care of yourself!" and they pulled out of the driveway. We again said "OF COURSE" this would happen!
Fifteen minutes later another ring at the doorbell and it was Brett. He had removed the wood chip himself as they pulled into the urgent care parking lot and was OK to finish the job. We smiled and were overly appreciative of his help, kindness, and only charging us $100 to clear the driveway and cut up the tree. We had already established a relationship with this company before we even moved because we had already observed at least 5 trees on our property that were leaving on or near the house that we wanted to have cut down. If you had given me 10 guesses as to which trees would have fallen in a wind storm the tree that fell would not have been on that list so we got incredibly lucky. Bret finished clearing the driveway and we made an appointment for them to come back the next day to give us a quote on the other trees we wanted removed.
The next morning Brett and Megan showed up and all four of us walked around the property and they educated us about the trees native to this area and what we actually had sitting on our property. I forgot to mention that the home owner before the flippers was a guy who walked away from the house and let it go to hell in a hand basket and apparently used to just throw trash in the back yard because it quote "made the animals happy" despite MANY of the neighbors complaining. The brush is so overgrown that the ground can never dry out and the tree roots get so saturated they just breakdown. Apparently the roots of 100-foot fur trees do not spread out at all and are not very wide so can easily be compromised in a wind and rain storm, especially when there is a lot of brush and smaller trees compromising the root structure and hogging all the nutrients. A positive outcome of this is that Bret and Megan are so nice, around our age, and only live about 15 minutes away and through talking with them we have found we have a lot in common. Brett and Aaron have already bonded over hunting and outdoor stories to which Brett responded "oh darn, I guess we are going to have to be friends."
