topes ahead

Selling a house should not be this easy.

You know the story -- if you have been following along over the past three months.  Every character in this home sale drama has come on stage flawlessly and delivered lines as if they were Derek Jacobi.

• Tossing out 60 years of my life accretions has not been vaguely painful.  More like scraping the barnacles off of an old hull.  I suspect my four year separation from these goodies undoubtedly helped.

• The house was on the market for only one afternoon before it was snapped up by a mother and daughter who had been admiring it for a year.  They who are still in love with it after a month of closure preparations.

• I sold the piano from my childhood to an Air Force friend who, out of the blue, asked if I would be interested in selling it to her daughter.  On Sunday I stopped by to listen to the daughter's young son show what he has learned.

• My housesitter was willing to unburden me of some of my possessions -- for his prospective new apartment.

• Goodwill has happily accepted everything we have dropped off.

• The Oregon Energy Trust has taken away my freezer (and will take my refrigerator) -- saving me a trip to the dump and putting $80 in my pocket.

• The "phantom kitchen" in the basement was easily easily resolved when the freezer trundled off.

If you feel a "however" coming on, you have learned well my writing habits.  Because "however" showed up Monday afternoon with an announcement from my realtor that the bank had disapproved the buyers' loan -- unless some of the windows were replaced before closure.

Let's skip all of the finger pointing of why the bank waited this long (closing was scheduled for Thursday) to reach a conclusion that all of the parties knew about when the earnest money agreement was signed and the bank knew when it received its inspector's report. 

At this point recriminations are pointless.  There are willing buyers and willing sellers ready to close a deal.

Almost every home sale has a series of topes -- those speed bumps in Mexico that effectively control traffic speed by rendering suspensions to the consistency of slurpees.  And, for most sales, they can be expensive and frustrating.  Often because they seem to be strangers to common sense.

But the buyers and I are not going to be held hostage to the vagaries of the banking industry.  We are offering a solution to the bank later today.  To set up an escrow hold back to cover the cost of window replacement.

If the bank chooses not to do that, we will exercise our free market rights to enter into our own agreement.  After all, we don't need no stinkin' branches.

And, by this time on Friday, our little set back will be just a memory.  And I can return to Mexico to apply for a permanent residence visa -- and discover what true bureaucratic topes look like.