We are officially, officially new home owners

On Friday, our realtor emailed us to let us know that she had received the closing papers from the seller. See the seller didn't come to our closing and also didn't provide us with the signed deed at closing. We had to "close in escrow" which means we signed all our closing papers and then had to send them off to the seller to be evaluated and signed before they would send the deed. But our mortgage company wouldn't release the money to them until they sent the deed. So the mortgage was held in an escrow account until that happened, thus it was called "closing in escrow." Our realtor said that this kind of situation is happening more and more with foreclosure homes. Now we have all the necessary paperwork signed by both parties and we are the official owners. That means I go tomorrow to file our homestead exemption paperwork with the township for our property taxes.

We have begun the long process of working on the house too. The electrician, Bro. Douglas and sons, came and fixed all the electrical work last week. He couldn't get the furnace going but thinks we can just buy new parts for it to fix it and not have to buy a whole new unit. That will have us about $1000. My brother, Kurt, and his wife, Heather, came to help begin the demo portion of the work. They came on Saturday and we were actually able to get a lot accomplished. We stripped most of the wall paper in the house. There is still that ugly floral wallpaper in the dining room left but that's about it. We also had the kids tear down some drop ceiling tiles out of all the bedrooms upstairs. They thought that was fun. We bagged it all up and took it out to the garage. There was some junk in the basement we got moved into the garage. Then today Charlie and I went back and he took out the cabinets in the kitchen and I squeegeed what was left of the water in the basement to the sump pump. We were glad Charlie took down the cabinets because we found some mold behind some of them that are located under the upstairs bathroom. That means something up there had been leaking so we will need to figure out where from. It's a good thing we were planning on pretty much gutting the upstairs bathroom anyway. We have our start, there is still a long way to go, but we've started. We hope to be able to have it all finished by the end of April. That just means Charlie will start to go over there everyday after work once wrestling is finished. I was looking forward to having him home earlier, but it looks like I'll have to wait a little longer for that (although, it's definitely worth the wait to have our house finished).