Well friends, this update has been a long time coming (strap in, it's a long one). I last posted that we had a clean title. Honestly, that was a great news. However, we were a little doubtful as to what would come next (you could probably round that up to a lot doubtful). We pretty much told no one what we were working on because having to follow-up with bad news was something we just couldn't go through again.
The biggest hurdle has been the money piece. Over the year, we have talked to 13 banks. Yes, you read that right, THIRTEEN. We had a new bank in place for the construction loan. When things fell apart at Bell Mortgage last spring, Dave Hill (who I still highly recommend to anyone buying a traditional home or just looking to access your situation for future buying) reached out to his contact at Star Bank in Eden Prairie. They said they would be willing to do our construction loan if we could find an end loan provider. If only we knew then what we know now, we might have realized that what we were asked to do was NOT an easy task. This is where the 13 banks come in.
Each of those 13 banks was unwilling to sign the end loan on our tiny house because it "wouldn't hold it's value on the secondary market." That's code for when you two (who have excellent credit) default on your loan and foreclose on your house, we won't be able to resell it. Don't even get me started on this - why do we even HAVE credit then?! I digress.
We were ready to quit. We emailed our fabulous contractor and architect team and broke the bad news. We had run out of options and were pushing pause on the project, maybe indefinitely. But John replied and asked if we had tried Stonebridge Bank. That was, miraculously, not one of the banks we had contacted so he provided a name, and I sent an email. I'll admit, we weren't optimistic. We maybe weren't even that nice to the person who emailed us back. We didn't want to fill out yet another credit application (and get yet another notice in the mail saying that we had too may credit inquiries over the last 18 months) unless we knew that the type of house we were building was an option for their underwriters. Eventually, we received a pre-approval letter from them stating they would take over our loan once construction was finished. To say we were filled with disbelief may be an understatement, but after a little bit more back and forth and some work to get last year's appraisal re-assigned, there we were - ready to set a closing date for the construction loan. Then the date was set for April 18th. April 18th arrived, no emails about pushing it back. Felt unreal. We were waiting for the bottom to fall out...again. It didn't. We signed the loan one week ago today, which if you follow either of us on Twitter, you may have known already.
So today we gathered our fearless team together again. Contractor and his Project Manager, Architect and us. Talking about our plan but for real this time. I feel as though the next few weeks will seem slow as we wait for the permit process to be completed (because let's be real, anytime this house has needed someone else's approval there has been a hang up), but then all of a sudden we'll be picking out windows and doors and all those other things.
Now I guess you could call us cautiously optimistic because we really are. It's been a long, long road but perhaps this story will actually have a happy ending after all. Thanks for sticking with us!
