Homecomings.... and goings....

[captainsblog]

It is nearing the end of the crazy busy real estate season here, which I have relatively little to do with it at work. I finally extracted myself from the one case that was marginally related to real estate practice, but I am mostly hearing about other peoples' tales away from the office.

One involves a musician friend of ours, who is buying a home in the city here, or at least she thinks she is. She’s been under contract since April, was supposed to close at the beginning of July, but it’s been subjected to delay after delay from her seller, who has been held up in buying the place she wants to move to and has passed the delays onto our friend. She could cancel, get her deposit back and start over, but she just loves the place so much that she has put up with it. She had to move all of her stuff out of her previous apartment into storage, has been renting an Airbnb ever since, and every day just seems to bring another delay.

Meanwhile, further from home, but closer to heart, is another story of some anxious buyers. They have been under contract almost as long, and were supposed to close at the beginning of August.  Where they live, there are no attorneys involved, just realtors and title companies handling the transactions. Of all the things that could’ve come up to slow down their progress, their sellers had a pending bankruptcy on their title report that had to be cleared. Although it is in a different state where I cannot practice, bankruptcy is bankruptcy wherever you go in the US,  

I have real-time access to court docket and documents anywhere from Georgia to Guam, so I’ve been watching the situation. It’s a routine procedure among bankruptcy attorneys and trustees to get the issue cleared, but it takes time. In this case, we thought at first, it would take until earlier this week, when a court order came down, allowing the sale and allocating the proceeds. Before I saw that order, the buyers had been told they would have to wait two weeks after it was entered, but when I saw the order, I saw that it had a specific provision in it that waived the 14 day stay period.

Yay! That meant they could get on with their closing as soon as their bank is ready!

Or not. Apparently, the title insurer believes they still have to wait 14 days because there is a separate bankruptcy rule allowing an “aggrieved party” to appeal a bankruptcy order. That is some bullshit, because every law schoolboy and girl knows that you can’t be "aggrieved" enough to appeal an order if you didn’t oppose it in the first place. Unfortunately, because the point is so obvious, I can’t find any authority that clearly says that:P So in the end, they have reached a level of acceptance and are just waiting until the end of the month for the (non)appeal period  to pass and then they'll get it done.

----

Meanwhile, closer to home, we’ve made a decision to offload a piece of family history.

Before Eleanor began working on the floor over the past several weeks, she’s single-handedly moved this beast out to the garage so she could work on the floor under it. The other morning, she asked how I felt about offloading it rather than bringing it back in.  It’s a piece that her father rescued from out in front of a farm when she was a little girl, and he did the work to make it functional. Yet it is far more associated with how her mother finished it, restored it, used it for display, and finally gifted it to us. It’s been used for display of tsotchkes on the outside and mostly as a crap catcher on the inside, and once we lived without it for a week or so, it became more and more obvious how it was just taking up too much space in a too small kitchen.

Eleanor initially talked about selling it, but I suggested we check with the kids to see if they could use it in the house they were about to move into. Emily seemed very enthused by the idea, and had actually been looking for a piece something like it for their home. We will store it until they are up here, or possibly a friend of theirs will be visiting who can take it to them. Meanwhile, that space has been turned into something much homier and a lot more pretty with the addition of one of Eleanor’s art pieces from a few years back:



----

And speaking of a few years back, how about 30?

On the day itself, I was aware of, but chose not to post about, August 15th being my annual Independence Day observance of beginning to live on my own on that day in 1978.  I've written about it so many times here that you can pretty much pick any year of the archive that has an entry that day-

go on, pick one!

- and if that year has an August 15 entry on it, you'll see something about toilet paper and/or a cabbage.

Yet that's way beyond 30 years!, I hear you cry. That is true; but it is also true that this month, this year, also marks three decades since we moved to and closed on this house. It was a very different place then: barer grounds, funkier mechanicals, and a lot of promise of the new life we'd begun here after my decade in Rochester. That promise turned out to be quite different than what we then expected, but even in hindsight I wouldn't change being here for anything- and probably won't as long as I have mind, memory and muscle to stay.