This post is LONG overdue...

Boy do I have news to FINALLY share.  Remember how I was all excited about buying our first house and all that jazz?  For those of you that know, we were supposed to close on August 1st-but we didn't.  Until now, I haven't been able to say anything because we have been in the middle of a bitter potential lawsuit over the house were trying to buy.  So here goes nothing...

Before I start to go on and on about the house and the issues that come up, let me preface this by saying that we had a BIG, NASTY storm destroy Knoxville in April-this would be the same storm that caused the massive tornado in Tuscaloosa and Burmingham as well.  Due to this storm over 80,000 houses were in need of some drastic repairs.  Seeing as the area that was hit the hardest is our prime living location, we knew that buying a house might take longer due to repairs that needed to be made.  We weren't too worried about this because we knew we would put it in the contract as a stipulation.  Fast forward...we went to the house to do our final walk through a couple of days before our closing, as stipulated in our contract, and found the repairs that had been made far below what is or should be acceptable.  Being first timers, we decided to get our contractor friend out there to make sure we should continue with buying the house.  Boy we are sure glad we did.  Upon further inspection, he pointed out all the corners that were cut to make the repairs to a subpar standard, and told us that if we bought the house, we would have to spend money to CORRECT the job that the homeowner and the contractor he hired did.  After pulling out our contract, reading over the stipulations-which said the repairs had to be made to 'a normal standard', we decided that we had every right to walk away from the property due to the sellers failure to execute the contract.

Well, apparently the seller thought differently.  He hired a lawyer, shot us a nasty letter saying that he would sue us if we didn't buy the house, and needless to say, things got heated.  Long story short, we eneded up having to get a lawyer oursleves so that we could fight this battle.  Obviously the guy was just in a hard place and really needed to sell his house, but the drawn out threatening of lawsuits could've been avoided by all parties had people read the contract and done what they agreed to do.  After our lawyer sent over a 20 page document with a picture CD enclosed of the reasoning behind us walking away, we didn't hear anything for a while.  I'm talking 2 weeks.  After the seller refused to give back our earnest money and sign the mutual release form, we realized that if we let him keep the money, he probably would.  So...that is what we did.  He kept the earnest money but realeased us from the property-meaning, he can't sue us.  Thank goodness

So...after all that, we are still in our current house, still looking for a house.  Our house remains full of boxes, and we have literally 1 pot unpacked in the kitchen, but I refuse to unpack until we are in another house!