Why do you park on a driveway...

...and drive on a parkway?! Haha...I bet you've never heard that one before!!

It's been a whirlwind of crazyness this week!! And when I say whirlwind, I mean hurricane.

We met with the CTX Mortgage guy on Monday (remember, the one with the awesome deal to put 7% down?)

Lies.

We get there and go through all the motions and get to the point where we're signing paperwork and we get to the part about "Cash to bring to closing." And the amount is $2,000 above what we budgeted and what he quoted us. So, he starts reviewing his numbers and we're looking over the numbers and then the mortgage guy is like, "Oh, I know what it is..." So Brian and I are like, "what?" So, basically, here's the deal: with Centex, you have to put money in escrow when you sign the contract. You have to put $2000 down and then an amount equal to half the price of your total upgrades. So for us, that was a total of $6000. So the mortgage guy is like, it looks like I credited you for your $6000 and then an additional $2000 by accident. And then he says, "could you just bring an extra $2000?"

Oops.

How about....no.

So Brian and I are like, "we need to conference outside, we'll be back." And when we get outside we're both pretty livid. Before we stepped out, the mortgage guy is running mad calculations and is telling us that we could put like 5.5% down and then make a little larger monthly payment because, evidently, the fact that we have a budget is of no consequence.

We talked it over for about 3 minutes and decided that we were out (we really didn't even need to talk it out). Neither of us wanted to make the committment and the monthly payments were going to be like $50 more than he originally quoted. We also felt like if he made a mistake with that, there's no telling what other things were screwed up and we didn't want to take the chance.

So, we walked.

Fortunately, we never cancelled anything with USAA, so we were in good shape there. On Tuesday, the mortgage rates dipped a bit and Brian and I took it as our sign and we locked in. So we're set at 5.75% and we paid 0.75% in points. We were pretty happy with that and much happer when they jumped back up today (5.75% became 1.125% in points). We also spent a lot of time on Tuesday making sure that USAA had everything they needed. We had to do some searching for paperwork, but we got that all squared away and submitted.

We are so relieved. The whole "lock" process has stressed us the hell out and we are happy to be done!!!

Now for the happy stuff...

We have inside doors, a poured driveway, vinyl floors (in the correct rooms), and inside molding. It all looks so awesome (and we're much more excited about it now that the mortgage is squared away)!

Brian also spoke to Chris today and we confirmed our walkthrough with him for May 22 (this is the one where we get to go nitpick the whole house and make them fix anything we don't like--we've both taken the day off from work!!)

He also said that painting and cabinets are forthcoming pretty soon (either the end of this week or the beginning of next).

A few pictures of the progress (more on Facebook Album 4):

Newly poured driveway:


Vinyl floor in kitchen:


Kitchen with pantry door:


Chair molding in office:


Stair rail:


I'm also really excited because all my days off from work have been confirmed! I'm off May 26 for Memorial Day, I'm going into the office May 27, and then I'm off May 28-30 and June 2!! I would have loved to take May 27 off too for the whole week, but I decided that I should probably go in because we have a bajillion publications to edit that week... Regardless, I'm still pumped for the extra time off--I know I'll need it! Brian is also taking May 29-30.