More house updates... the radon test came back great, very encouraging, and a physical inspection by the mold guy seemed to be fine on Tuesday. We went ahead and signed the release form that would tell the selling bank that we were 100% going to buy the house as is, and were just waiting for the official mold test to come back Thursday morning before we sent the form in. Just to be safe. And then that mold test came back pretty bad, reporting 27 times the "undesirable" amount of mold, mostly in the basement, and recommending $3000-6000 worth of remediation and professional cleaning. Yowza.
So we spent most of Thursday in crisis mode, trying to really figure out what this meant and if maybe we should reconsider the whole deal. Casey and Jenny both encouraged us to try to think objectively; that regardless of how much we love THIS house, maybe all the trouble of mold cleaning and painting and fence building and carpet removal isn't worth it, and maybe we were signing up for more than we would have ever originally agreed to. Which is certainly true, we said from the beginning that we weren't fixer-upper people and didn't want a huge project house. But now that we've seen it, and pictured many years of happy life there, and gotten excited about things like red bedroom walls and screened-in porches, it all seems completely worth it.
The whole time we were having this "is it worth it?" discussion, I felt physically ill and just so confused. That awful feeling seemed familiar, and finally I figured it out: I felt exactly the way I did the day they told us Charlie Murphy had feline leukemia. The vet did the test on his first kitten visit, and very vaguely recommended that maybe we should just go ahead and put him to sleep right away, since he had this terrible and expensive disease. And we didn't even consider it, we just scooped him back up and took him home and loved the hell out of him and gave him liquid vitamins in his food and he GOT BETTER. He kicked that disease before he was even full grown, and tested negative on his next visit. Not to mention grew up to be one of the coolest cats ever. And I can't even tell you the millions of times that I have been so grateful that we didn't listen to that vet, whose job it is to give you the bad news and the worst case scenario. And that's what this mold inspector does as well. He has to tell us the most extreme possibilities so that we don't come back to him in a year and say, "You told us this was fine!" And mostly we were just overwhelmed by being told that something really bad was happening that we didn't understand, and then were being recommended the worst case scenario, passing up this house that we love.
Austin talked to Dad about it, and Dad said it was absolutely not a reason to walk away. So we went to dinner and talked it all out, and went to Home Depot and looked at paint chips and got excited again. And Friday morning we told our realtor to go ahead and send over the Inspection Contingency Form, and to tell the selling bank that we do want this house, moldy basement and all. And then yesterday at lunch we met with our lender, signed a ton of papers, gave him all of our tax documents, and had the house appraised for the lending bank. We should have the appraisal back on Monday. Everyone involved is enthusiastic and encouraging, and thinks we should be in good shape to close by Sept. 19. It all feels more real every day! I think I won't let myself get completely excited until we have a key in our hand and our names on a deed, but it just keeps getting better and better.
In the meantime, I'm starting the longest and most exhaustive To Do list ever. And I'm going to roll out on the town with my girls tonight for a little Guilty Pleasures action. And I'm sure we aren't through with crises and home-buying drama, but we're going to keep going with our guts and moving forward, because there isn't really anything else to do.
