Another Bump in the Road

Hard to keep up with the posts, but we got some news today.

After talking to our attorney, we found out that the president of the BWA in fact cannot sign our plat as a representative of the water association. We would have to get each one of our neighbors (6 of them) to sign our plat drawing. In addition to this, we will need each one of them to sign a letter of intent saying that they will sign in order for the City Planner to schedule our public hearing.

A bummer, but not the end of the world. All of our neighbors agreed to sign a letter stating that they would allow us to remove the note from our original plat drawing in the county. This signature signifies much less. We are not proposing any changes to the ditch, meaning the water won't change, the flow won't change, etc. So, much less material than the plat note that was on the original drawing. The only difficult one would be the family that live in GA, but we've spoken to them before and they've been agreeable.

I sent a letter to them (because I don't know their phone number), giving them the details and asking them to sign our letter of intent. We got a note back from them yesterday simply stating that they do NOT intend to sign. No explanation, just 'no'.

I'm going through all sorts of emotions on this. Part of me wonders if they just don't understand and we should just call them. Part of me thinks that since they are trying to sell their property, that they just don't want to upset the apple cart, part of me thinks that they are pompous jerks and don't want someone else's plan mingling or possibly diminishing their opportunity to sell. I don't think it will, but they must perceive it that way, otherwise I don't see any reason why they wouldn't sign.

I am so bummed right now. This isn't going to stop us, but it will certainly slow us down and it will certainly end up costing us more money. I am so bummed that one person could do that to us! Our dream house! But, I don't think they can stop us. There must be some other recourse or path we can pursue.

So, since I'm still traveling, Miles will have to call our attorney on Monday and see what our plan B is going to be. What a drag.

Finally, Some Progress

We finally have some progress to report. This was a busy day on the project front. Wow.

After receiving the paperwork from our lien holder regarding how to release a lien, I was bummed. Not only would the process take 4-6 weeks, not including our time to get everything arranged, but also cost us $500 for the processing and who knows how much in appraisals, etc. So, I called the mortgage broker who will be doing our new loan and she advised me that the current lien holder only needed to sign to acknowledge that they owned a lien on the property. In addition to that, she advised that we talk to someone in the local office. I called our lien holder's local office and the VP there will be able to sign - yea!!!

Miles also FINALLY got ahold of the President of the BWA. He signed our letter of intent with no problems or questions whatsoever.

Monday I will call our attorney and just verify that the President can sign and that the lien holder simply needs to state that they hold a current lien on the property. After that, I'll take the LOI over to the city and we should be good to go to hearing.

We have a meeting with the city on Tuesday where they are reviewing with all the property owners all the development opportunities and challenges along Kechter, Timberline and Trilby Roads who all face similar challenges. I really need to set up a consulting business for this! It is an all day workshop with the city. I'll be interested to see who shows up.

Miles also met with our builder today to discuss exactly where we want to put the house and find out what options we have with the ground water being so high. We may be OK, but we have some research to do. The builder is waiting for the plans, so I called our designer to see what was up. Turns out, he was waiting for us to give him the go ahead. Everything looked great, so we're good to go. He'll finalize plans and get them to the builder.

We met with the kitchen designer this week too. He showed us 3D models of his design. We made some minor tweaks and I think we like what we're seeing. He's going to make our suggested changes. We also made some changes to bathroom cabinets as well.

We think we want to go to another cabinet maker to see what kind of design they'll come up with. We might do that a little later, but we needed to get something in the works so that our builder had an idea of cost.

On Bluestem news, we had the inspector, staging consultant and appraiser all come today. Pretty extensive comments from the staging consultant, but nothing different than what I was thinking anyway, so I think we're on the same page. We do have a lot of work to do, but we'll just take one room at a time. It will be at least 3-4 weeks before we can get the house on the market anyway, so we've got a little time. We will have lots of packing and throwing to go.

The inspector came up with very little to do, so that was good. We also think the appraiser may come in with a higher square footage than what was disclosed when we bought the house, so that should be good.

Progress is good! Now I won't be able to sleep tonight because I'm excited that we are making some progress. At least that's better than not being able to sleep because we've got a long drawn out process with our neighbors and with our lien holder. That was the best news of the day!

City Process Update

Here's the last message we got from the city engineer:

Just to make sure you have the info you need, Paul Eckman (city attorney) stated in his last email that your attorney would have to be the one to decide who needs to sign the plat since he is the one that has to certify your plat. If he says that only you need to sign, then your project is good to go to hearing. If he determines that others need to sign, then we will need letters of intent from those affected property owners prior to scheduling the hearing.

I talked to our attorney and he did determine that the easements on our property are owned by the Blehm Water Association (BWA). So, all property owners will need to sign. We're trying to get ahold of the President of the BWA to determine if he alone can sign, or if we've got to get everyone to sign. That would be problematic since many of the property owners don't even live on their properties - one is located in GA. We've been trying for a week to get ahold of the BWA President, but he hasn't called back. Once we get his opinion, I can go back to our attorney to make sure he's ok with the President signing. If he is, then we're likely good to go on that front. The BWA President would need to sign a letter of intent for the city so that they know he'll review and sign the final plat drawing.

Our attorney also determined that our lienholder will need to sign the plat. OMG!!! So, I've got a call into them. It didn't sound like that big of a deal. They talked about a lien release, so that might be all there is to do on that. I remember our new loan provider (we will re-finance when everything goes through) and she mentioned that if we re-finance then we likely won't have to get a lien release from our current provider. But, the attorney said that if the lien is on the current property as-is, then he wanted the lien holder to sign. We'll see how that goes.

So for now, just waiting (again)... It will be exactly a year since our first conceptual review with the city on June 11.