Sarah and I did the final two steps in concluding our home purchase today. We did the final walk through and then had a closing. The walk through was simple enough as we wandered the house looking for some kind of horrible thing that might have appeared between the last time we saw the house and the walk through. We spent some time with me, Sarah, and the seller’s agent’s top boss trying to figure out how to open the child proof cabinets all failing until we realized the magnet needed to be turned facing towards the magnetic latch rather than away.

The only thing I could notice was that the door in the back of the house was scraping against the wood kitchen floor leaving a mark. I figured that they had taken the door off to facilitate the move and when it was re-attached to the hinges it was lower to the ground. But since the sellers had left a bottle of champagne in the fridge to congratulate me I decided to ask the crew we had hired to move a giant swing set from one of the seller’s broker’s other clients to plane down the bottom of the door. I spent a chunk of the closing chatting with my Redfin broker about the future of the real estate industry and how Redfin is rapidly growing to take over lots of the market in the Seattle area with a likely growth in places like Boston and San Francisco. Since they have a volume business model they can do things other firms can’t – like offer rates to a large institution like Microsoft for all their employees. Seems like a great idea so it’s good to see they are thinking of building new barriers beyond the rebate component.

During the walkthrough I stopped to check some things I never had checked before looking more carefully into the insides of the closets, seeing if the refrigerator had ice in the automatic ice maker, and shaking loose bolts like the railing on the back. We then were hanging out in the yard and met our new neighbor who let us know which of our trees were slowly leaning into our fence that would eventually break into her yard. But more importantly we bonded on some common topics like how Sarah is involved in early intervention and generally what life is like with kids. I think we’ll need to resolve the falling trees problem. I hadn’t thought of that so it may cause some loss of sleep.

Among our challenges in switching our services for gas and electric was that the house is like a criminal. It has an a.k.a. (also known as). Apparently the house is a subdivision of the great Leeson estate. The other neighbor who drove past us on her way out and said hi as we stacked many cars in a disruptive formation blocking the lane lives in what appears to be the original Leeson home. The rest of the houses on the block apparently grew as subdivisions of what might have been a horse farm with acres of land and a stable, probably a garage turned small brick rental apartment next to our new house. The lane was just the access road or driveway from the street on Glenn Ave. to the main house. But as the new houses appeared they got addresses that the city recognized like 80 Glenn Ave. which is the official address recognized by the city of Newton. Since the house faces out onto the old driveway rather than Glenn Avenue it seemed odd to have a street address of Glenn Avenue. But since the city of Newton doesn’t recognize this winding driveway that runs through the sub-divided former Leeson estate as Leeson Lane. It is just some thing that they don’t want to plow. So the postal service made some form of exception for the house to be called 80 Leeson Lane so that if you saw a sign for Leeson Lane you would know to turn and could find the house. So when calling for a service like electric or gas the right address is to call it 80 Glenn Ave. For mail or giving directions it is to be called 80 Leeson Lane. I haven’t figured out how to make headway of this but hopefully I can use the a.k.a. to my advantage to avoid the paparazzi when they finally figure out that I am someone who In Touch magazine needs to know more about.

I had envisioned the closing itself as being a room full of people with us and the sellers discussing something then all sitting together to sign, with sweaty brows, the final agreement where we pay lots of money and they relinquish their beloved house. That wasn’t the real scenario. Instead the sellers were represented by their attorney who had the power to sign for them and our attorney walked us through about 50 documents about the purchase, the mortgage, the title, the government, the revolution, whatever. We even had to sign our middle initials on one document. We were useful at one point when I noticed that the document which was to set-up notification from the mortgage company to the government of what payments had been received so that we could deduct them from our tax returns had some bizarre social security number that was definitely not mine. I gave my real one and we initialed the change in 20 places then proceeded. Among the annoying thing was that the only important document to keep, the one with all the real terms and hidden costs that could be removed from the final sale for tax purposes was not on 8.5 X 11 paper. So it’s some long thing that will never fit in any file cabinet. Why is all this stuff not electronic?? Our lawyer also mentioned how he found a problem in the title where someone had gone bankrupt who owned the place and there was no closure on the issue in the records and it looked like a headache for the selller's lawyer who was going to have to use the title insurance to pay for resolving the documentation to close out that hole in the records. I suppose I didn't need to know about it but it was odd that a previous transaction hadn't uncovered this information and it made me think that I had gotten a good lawyer as a recommendation from my dad.

Anyways. My favorite document that I signed today was an affidavit that essentially said that I was who I said I was. Given that if I wasn’t I would still sign such a thing since I was already pretending to be someone else for trying to steal a house or set-up a mortgage falsely the document seemed entirely silly and useless. Our lawyer pointed out that he thought so before I could mention it and I decided that the purpose of such a document was to add humor to an otherwise tense situation.

As I was driving home I got a call to tell me that the registry of deeds had closed before the deed could be processed and that we couldn’t go into the house until tomorrow morning. So technically the deed isn’t done yet. But it will be done at about the same time the HVAC folks start tearing holes in closets to install our central air tomorrow morning.

This weekend we begin the fun stuff… figuring out a plan to fix everything and make everything work the way that we need it to.