The bank and the underwriter have given us the go-ahead on purchasing the house! We had our inspector out to look at it a bit ago and he found some interesting stuff out with the house.

More below about the house.

Did you know it is possible for it to rain in the house, while it isn’t raining outside? Turns out that the attic isn’t in the best of shapes. And neither is the sub-floor either. The house leaks air at an astonishing rate. In fact, the inspector actually used the word “plagued” when he described the attic. Eeeep.

So raining in the attic happens when the hot air from the inside of the house leaks up into the attic and hits the cold interior wall of the roof. It condenses, and drips onto the insulation in between the rafters. That in turn causes the insulation to be less efficient, which allows more heat to leave the living area into the attic and the entire process accelerates. Normally this moisture is evacuated out of the roof by way of intake vents under the soffits under the eaves, and exhaust vents either in the gables, or directly in the crown of the roof. What we are thinking is that one of these two vent groups (either intake or exhaust) are blocked or inadequate. The insulation its self needs to be either wholly replaced, or significantly up-rated as well. There are home interior walls that have no insulation to the attic space. Humm.

The above problems are exacerbated by there not being an adequate vapor barrier in the sub-floor area, and significant air movement between there and the living area above. So the attic gets all the warm damp air from the house, and is being replaced by cold “dirty” air from the sub-floor. Oh, and there are varmints in the crawl area under there. So by dirty, I literally mean “shitty.”

So that leaves us with an interesting issue. The owners want us to have the home so they can move into their dream MacMansion. Alicia wants us to have the home because she has been working very hard on the sellers to get a good price for us. Napoleon wants us to have the home so we can start making wonderful interest payments to the bank. The VA has said that I am worth underwriting a loan for this amount of money we are going to be borrowing. The VA still needs to find out if the property is worth investing in though. Which if they are too thorough in their assessment, might turn up the stuff above with the house leaking air and heat like crazy. While we have a somewhat “gentlemen’s agreement” with the sellers that we will purchase the house as is (ie, no repairs coming out of the pocket of the sellers), the VA sees things a bit different. If the house isn’t livable at the time of purchase, it needs to be brought up to snuff before closing.

That makes us very nervous. Either we hope the VA doesn’t find out about the insulation problems and allows us to move forward to closing, or they find it and the sellers are willing to fix it. The worst case would be that the VA finds it, and the sellers push back from the table, taking all the chips with them.

I am really ready for this all to be over.