The Condo - 1

We signed the papers Thursday, the week after Thanksgiving. Brandi and can now call ourselves homeowners, landed gentry, barons (but not robber barons, that comes later). Mostly everything went right, as right as the process ever goes, everyone else around the table assured us. We met at Ticor, a TItle CORporation downtown, and in fact shared the elevator down from the parking garage, walked through the lobby, then rode in the elevator up to the office where we signed with our attorney before we even realized she was our attorney. Brandi had her suspicions, but I kept wondering, "Who is this woman smiling at us?" I thought she looked too young. I hope she reads this post; maybe she'll give us a discount on future legal expenses. It wasn't until we got off at the proper floor - one floor below the floor we thought we were going to - that she turned to us and asked us who we were. Then the truth came out. We met our lender, Britt, our lawyer, Catherine, the sellers' lawyer, Holliday/Holly, the Ticor agent whose name escapes me and our realtor, Iliana, who arrived a little sleepy because she had gotten roped into a "Lost" marathon the night before and, really, once you start with that show it is dreadfully hard to stop. She had a big mug of coffee and slumped a little. Compare her to Brandi. My adorable wife had woken up at three in the morning, seven and a half hours before our closing, posted a blog update, written a website, and called the title company to make sure our check cleared and we were coming in for a smooth landing. As we sat in the Ticor office, Brandi practically vibrated herself to invisibility, she was so excited.

As it turns out, the bank check was one of the few bumps in the road to closing. The title company had not received word of its clearing and the deal would not go through without that word. We owed a certain amount for closing and had overpaid, and so would receive money back... if the check cleared. If not, we would have to get a certified check from the bank, eating up more time for the closing, return, then cancel the old check we had written. Probably it would have tacked on another hour to the closing, which bothered us not very much because we had both taken the day off of work to see to it this property came into our hands. Our attorney, however, who by this time we recognized, had another closing a little after noon and another closing after that. Her Blackberry went off about twenty times as she sat there, talking us through the legalese. We knew we chose right when we went with her for our attorney, since, every time her phone went off she would pull it out of its cradle, glance at it or send the caller to voice mail, then stick it back on her belt without breaking stride. She just kept on talking. I'd like to know where they teach people to multitask like that. "Busy day," she muttered, each of the twenty times. Do you think?

At any rate, using the Ticorp agent's Internet connection, Brandi accessed our bank records to prove that, yes, the check cleared, after having been deposited Monday. Monday? We wrote it the Wednesday before... but, because of the Thanksgiving holiday, of course, it had not been fully processed until after the weekend. Stupid banks and lenders... though we adore them as well and will for the next thirty years or more.

Speaking of lenders, Britt was incredibly sweet and patient, watching over the transfer process. At one point, she asked if Brandi had received her email. We thought it an odd question until we realized that she had taken a picture of us signing and emailed it to us from her phone. Technology is great.

As far as the signing itself, I have few complaints. The monetary amounts being so large, the lenders, sellers, city, county and state all not only want you to know the rules and what it takes to break them and default on your loan, they want you to acknowledge you've read them and sign in triplicate that you understand. Unfortunately, the process is so choked with these documents that by the end you're barely glancing at the paper, so if a bunch of guys in scrubs come to my new condo to take one or both of my kidneys, we'll all know why.

We had an additional speed bump at "Avenue" versus "Street". The lender played it smart and just put the street name on all the lending documents. Not so the title company. Rather than wait to reprint every changed page, our attorney added a third task to her multitasking and crossed out every instance of "street" and put in "avenue". She said the word started to lose meaning after a while. We initialed at every change, effectively doubling our signing burden. At the end of the signing, we had to sign a sheet of just signatures to give the title company, lender and anyone else who now owns a piece of us something to compare to in case someone comes to them with a legal document claiming something outrageous like, "I hearby stake the next round of poker on my condo... signed, M. K. L." Now they have the MKL to prove it was me and, yes, I was both drunk and stupid.

Signing complete, we all shook hands and Brandi and I thanked everyone. It was during the thanking that the sellers' lawyer finally said the two words she was ever going to say to us, "You're welcome." I think she also commented about the weather to our lawyer in a snarky way, as in, "It looks like snow. Good luck getting to your other closings...", but that may have been my imagination.

We had plans for the rest of the day and I believe we got about a third of it done. Prior to the signing I had wavered between inordinate optimism and an indifferent pessimism, as in, "They need, what, like five signatures?" to "Shane and Clair spent all day and cried four times before they were even allowed to THINK they could own a house!" so just to be safe we packed in about four weekends' worth of events. We have a lovely problem with our new home that not a lot of first-time homebuyers face: what to do with all the space. Before the villagers start chasing us down with burning torches and pitchforks, I should amend that we are sacrificing a lot of closet space, which we hope to amend through wardrobes, but more on that in a moment. The first place either of us think to go when dire furniture need is Schaumburg... to the great, towering three story blue and yellow anti-zombie fortress and Swedish meatball source that is IKEA. So, after downing a meal at McDonald's (note to Brandi from Brandi: never again with the Chicken McNuggets) and dropping off our four packed bins of cleaning supplies and painting gear, we headed northwest.

We knew what we wanted. We knew where to find it, approximately. We knew the cost. So why did it take us two hours and cost so much more than we budgeted? I blame the Swedes. Their wily design and clever marketing is more captivating than QVC could hope to be. Like an expedition to the Congo, it took an extraordinary effort to find what we were looking for, and I think we lost several of our porters doing it. Since Pip - our Scion xA - despite looking a little like a mini Cooper on steroids isn't more than five feet deep and the boxes we bought topped out at nine, we opted to rent a van to get everything home. IKEA doesn't actually rent vans. Instead, IKEA has a green phone next to the furniture pick up. You take it off the cradle and it automatically dials - that night, it automatically dialed Joe, who had a cell phone and worked for Enterprise. Enterprise rents by the hour, which stinks if most of that time is transit to and from the city of Chicago. Brandi and I loaded boxes. If ever that woman proved to me she could withstand the pain and physical endurance of childbirth, it was watching her huff her way through carrying the other end of the seventy pound wardrobe boxes. That woman has stamina, especially when you realize that she was up hours before the rooster crows. Even our insomniac cat Patrick must have wondered what was up with this woman.

As soon as I got in the van, I made this noise, "Hwannnnghhhh! Hwannghhhh!" because driving it felt like piloting a cruise ship with a periscope for a windshield. Is it a law that heavy, large vehicles must use light, skinny steering wheels and a transmission the size of a popsicle stick attached to the steering column, or do they make the steering controls by ripping the elements out of cars manufactured in the seventies? And while I'm ranting, can IDOT - the Illinois Department of Transportation, but, honestly, just one letter away from IDIOT - please hammer out the lanes for tolls on I-90? As is, you can't figure out if you're in the cash or the automated IPass lane until you're practically on top of it, and I'm surprised there aren't more accidents near the toll booths as unwitting drivers cut across four lanes to pay eighty cents instead of a thirty dollar ticket for running the wrong lane. As it was pointed out to me, Illinois doesn't want you to pay cash. It costs a lot more to staff the toll booths with warm-blooded mammals than the IPass lanes with space age electronics... which is fine, except that a certain percentage of cars will never have an electronic pass, just as a certain percentage of people riding public transportation will have no need to buy an electronic card. Tourists and people with poor credit and hence no credit cards won't have an account to debit, or won't have the desire to open up a small security hole to let a city or state automatically deduct an arbitrary amount of cash from their cash flow. Finally, what ever happened to the machines into which you tossed your eighty cents? Are those gone forever or just phased out while Illinois constructs the Toll Plaza of the Future or something else that would take as many years to develop as the Apollo space program.

When we got home - new home - we unloaded, both of us fairly beat and even more so with the knowledge that, best case scenario, we still had two hours' work ahead of us dropping the van off and driving back again. Gravity had, cruelly, remained unchanged, so getting the wardrobe boxes up two flights of steps proved daunting and would have been impossible if not for IKEA's flat packing and a rather inventive method of carefully flipping the boxes end-over-end up the stairs. Snow was by this point just starting to fall. The only thing more suspenseful than whether or not we would make it to the second floor without broken bones was what was in the boxes once we finally started constructing. Would we find all of our hinges? Had the particleboard survived banging against the sheet steel floor of the van? Did the Swedish inmates who built and packed the boxes include everything or could a hex wrench tucked into the unmentionables prove useful in prison?

We drove back, and back again. The tolls got easier as the landmarks delineating them became more familiar. Two miles southeast of the enormous scrub-covered landfill, we find the southbound toll. Northbound lies not far from the Meijer exit.

Meijer: the Chicagoland WalMart substitute Brandi swears we will never again visit. We tried to take advantage of the Black Friday deal the store offered on 20" flat panel LCD TVs - $99, after $200 rebate - but if a deal sounds too good to be true, it isn't, necessarily, but at least a third of the cash-strapped families in the city will buy a minimum of one, and arrive twelve hours before it opens, effectively negating any swell plans you had to "beat the crowds". Also, the attitude of the employees there really, truly stunk. During the line-up to the $99 TV, one stressed out woman came up to our line, now so long and snaking that it wound from electronics through pharmacy, frozen foods, canned foods, checkout and the entrance, and shouted at us, "What are you thinking, people? Nobody can get into or out of the store! MOVE!" Now, I'm no mind reader, but, I believe from the Meijer Black Friday ads 90 percent of the people in line were clutching that the majority had shown up for cheap TVs and paid only secondary importance to the layout of the line. One might even suspect that that was the Meijer employee's job, but pointing it out to her would probably have gotten me peppersprayed. The second time we went back, just before our IKEA run and suffering from boundless optimism that we knew where to find it. We found it, but, had this been the Yukon, some of our sled dogs would not have made it. As we walked in, a woman, a different employee not necessarily out to prove her worth to management with her technique of Line Management Through Shame, was getting ready to get some carts from the parking lot, swearing like a sailor: "Yeah, I have to grab some f'ing carts and haul them in. F'ing F." Probably, she said more than F, but that's all my delicate ears could hear. Their TV selection was small, and overpriced, and underwhelming, and so we will not be returning to and certainly not purchasing food from (due to possible "not-clean-food" practices from disgruntled employees) this particular Meijer.

I had another adventure with the wardrobe, but that is another story and will be told another time.

We have a condo!