AJ Henderson AJ's Blog

Well, the day is finally here.  We bought our first home today.  We’ll be moving in over the next few days with the majority of the move occurring on Saturday.  Our new address will be 14 Massachusetts Ave, Rensselaer, NY 12144.

It’s been a long road to get here.  We weren’t actually looking for a house all that long.  We started looking shortly before Declan was born and continued a few weeks after when things settled down a bit.  Most properties we saw near work were too in need of repair or too expensive of both and most of the good properties we were seeing were out in Niskayuna, far too far away to have a manageable daily commute.  Finally, we saw a nice little new construction go on the market in Hampton Manner in Rensselaer.  It’s an older development, but our street has lots of remodeled houses and a fair number of lot sub-divisions with new constructions on them.  (Ours is one such sub-divided lot.)

We knew pretty much immediately that it was the right house for us.  It is literally down the street from Red Mill Elementary, which is East Greenbush’s top ranked elementary school.  It had a two car garage, was large enough for our needs, small lot in a quiet neighborhood.  It had decent enough sized bedrooms with large open areas for the main rooms and a gigantic garage that can double as a workshop.  As an added bonus, we have a shed in the back.  So, with our hearts set on buying the property, we began what turned out to be a rather long process.

For the most part things went smoothly, so at the end of November, it looked like we should be good for an early December close date, so we let the apartment complex know we’d be moving out for the new year.  Then we hit the snag on the next to last step of the process.  The mortgage insurance company wanted proof of employment from Danielle.  This should have been a minor issue, but when they sent over the paperwork to Albany Med to get confirmation, it got lost somewhere and they didn’t hear back for over a week.  Nobody bothered letting us know or following up until I started asking about status since we hadn’t heard anything in a while.  They then submitted it again with some facilitation from Danielle and got a response fairly quickly, however Albany Med HR still thought Danielle was on FMLA leave (which she had come back from a week and a half earlier at that point, as had been scheduled on her original FMLA paperwork).  Some quick back and forth was supposed to have worked it out, however HR still had the wrong data the next time they tried a few days later.  Finally the paper work managed to make it through and we got a valid confirmation, but all in all, it took almost 3 weeks just to get that one confirmation done on the next to last step.

Finally, with the last hurdles cleared, we were able to move forward and get a closing date set for Christmas Eve at 9am.  We got there with only a few days left that we could move on to get the closing done and while things mostly went smooth, again there was a big issue (which luckily turned out to be an easy fix).  Our lawyer’s office had given us the wrong name for the cashier’s check to be made out to, so we had to quickly run across the street (thankfully there was an open Trustco across the street) and have them re-cut the check to the correct name.  We also almost forgot to get the keys to the house, but Danielle checked our packet and realized they weren’t there.

It looks like we should make it in time, but it’s certainly a lot more under the wire than we had wanted it to be.  We’ll be moving boxes out of the way over the next few days and then getting a truck to move on Saturday at 9am if anyone wants to help with moving the big stuff.  We’ll also still have some little things that need packing inside that we were living off of.  I’ll try to get some photos posted after the move.