I WANT TO SCREAM!

We're in the process of refinancing our house, great time, low interest rates, save a lot of $$ over the life of the loan etc. We've been through this before so I thought it would be an easy process with few complications.

Turns out, of course it's not!

Things were floating along smoothly until, ta da, we got a call, at 4:30 last Friday of course, that the title search discovered that there were two open zoning permits. I followed up with that on Monday morning and it sounded as though it wouldn't be too much trouble to close them.

The inspector called me at 4:30 today and told me that things were fine with the zoning but they can't close it because the building permit, from when we did the addition, was still open! Yikes!

A few phone calls later, I found out that there are four open permits. In addition to the building permit, there is an open electrical permit from the addition, another from or original 1997 rewiring of the house, and a plumbing permit with the gas company for the installation of a hot water heater.

I was totally civil, and even joked with the various people I've talked to along the way but I'm livid. Why aren't these things closed out promptly? We were working with contractors in all cases and we trusted that they'd finished the jobs completely.

The contractor for our addition thinks maybe they lost the file or something because he was sure everything was closed out. I'm not surprised the 1997 one wasn't closed because that guy did things like forget how much he quoted for the work, showed up a couple weeks later than he said, scheduled electrical inspections without letting us know it so we'd be home, etc. We have no desire to ever see him again.

I'm just glad that we're refinancing instead of selling. If we can't refinance because we lose our lock in rate we'll just miss the opportunity to refinance, we aren't going to lose out on a sale.

But I'd also like to rant about the banking industry while I'm at it. We've refinanced the house on two previous occasions and they found no problem with the title search related to permits even though we did the most recent refinance since that time.

To continue with the banking rant, one thing the title searches have found is that one of the mortgage companies that of course doesn't exist any longer, never filed the proper paperwork to completely close out the loan. It's obvious based on the title that it is paid off but it isn't properly closed and the lawyers couldn't seem to figure out a way to do it. I wonder if that's going to come to bite us in the ass eventually?

I'm irked, irritated, angry, peeved, annoyed and just plain pissed off that things didn't get done properly in the first place.

But at least we discovered it now....

I think next Friday at 4:30 I'm going to ignore the phone, just to make sure I get bad news when I can do something about it.