We’re going to the farm tomorrow.

We’re going to get an inspection done. It’s a little cart before the horse, but the deal is, we’ve raised a certain amount of money and it’s not quite enough for a reasonable cash offer. Now, we can start taking out loans and such, but that has a certain cost and effort. We’ve decided to risk the $250 for a home inspection BEFORE we make an offer to make sure there are no deal-breakers involved in this low cost property.

As I see it, there’s about a 30% chance we’ll loose that money. Three scenarios will lay before us. First, the house comes up with some major deal breaker flaw and we walk away, and essentially loose our $250. Second, we have the inspection and it comes up with some fairly major but not-so-bad-to-be-deal-breaker issues and then we can go in with our laundry list and offer quite low. And third, the house passes inspection wonderfully, and we just have to raise more money. Either way, we were going to have the house inspected ANYWAY, so this just saves us from getting personal loans and then finding out the house has some major flaw.

We have also found out that the house has been put into the auction pool and is waiting it’s turn to get a set date and auction. That’s awful, in my mind. Good and bad, really. Our realtor says it’s good that they are really getting ready to dump the property because they probably have had no one interested. Good that they haven’t yet picked a date and put any effort into the process. They might be ready to deal really low just to be done with it. They clearly are not going to make a fortune off this property. If someone really wanted it, they would have gotten it, most likely at this low rate of under $17,000 List.

However if they start the auction process and start investing money into advertising it and all that, then they might not appreciate a super low offer and just decide to take their chances that the advertising will stir up interest. They don’t even have a sign out front, they’ve done absolutely no marketing of this property.

So… I know it’s going to be hard to sleep tonight. The girls and I have been talking and wishing and hoping and are excited to go back to the property and see how it did over the ice storm. We’re taking cameras and some note pads and the measuring tape to get measurements of the rooms inside and to just spend some quality time with the place we’re dreaming about. We’ll be there for several hours while this is all going on. I hope it’s not too cold tomorrow! The high is to be 39 degrees… Not too bad, we’ll dress warmly and hopefully inside it won’t be super cold.

We have a rural inspector from that area, and he sounds very professional and confident on his skills. We’ll get a nice report with photos and all, so that will be nice to have a laundry list of priorities as to repairs and fixes first up. We’re ready on Friday to start the personal loan and credit card advances based on the preliminary findings. It’s a big day for us and it will be so cool to know that we have all our friends, family and blog fans behind us, helping us to claim the homestead as ours in thoughts and prayers. All the lovely emails and posts and comments have really helped to spur us on!

Our plan at the moment is that hopefully they will accept our offer, wherever it comes in at. Or that we may have to dicker a bit, but not too much. If they won’t and we can’t raise enough, then we’ll have to wait until the auction comes and just keep saving. I will admit that scares me some, to be at such a point that we might be bidding against some one for our dream little farm. We won’t have a huge reserve and it could easily go too high in a heartbeat. However, since no one has made an offer on it yet, we might be the only ones interested. But it’s such a gamble. I just hope and pray that we’ll find enough little stuff to add up, to present to the bank and they just decide to dump it with our low, but reasonable offer. That to me would be a great middle ground.

At the very least, we’ll have a bunch of photos and video!

Like we said, we’re not giving up. We’re going to stay into this until the bitter end. Who knows… it could easily go to auction and we get it for under ten grand! Wouldn’t that be an amazing blessing? Of course, it would probably be a good idea to have some nice firemen from the town there with those shocking paddles because it’s going to be a really stressful day for me!!! HAHA… What a nice way to meet the village firemen and local EMS… they are only a half mile down the street.

Well, it will be nice too, to be able to confidently rule out any major issues that would cause us to get in over our heads at a later date. The nice thing is that we have the Moby and we can live in her for a year while we make repairs to the homestead. We can most certainly “camp” at the farm, and go out several times a week if we want. That will be a nice thing. We don’t have to move or ditch the Moby any time soon after closing on the farm. Many people have a ‘vacation’ home that they are not at all the time, or a project home that takes several months to get ready, if not even years. We’re prepared to tackle just about any issue, we’ve gone through a lot here at the Moby and we’re not scared. The inspection is going to really be an eye opener and a good thing, well worth the “risk” of the $250. It will give us leverage as we know that the home has not been inspected by the bank yet, so they don’t even know the full condition of the property. Like I said, moderate issues, will help us, hopefully soften up the offer process and give us a lot of busy work for the next year!

Which is fine… we need a new project!

So wish us luck!!! We’re still in the running and positive this is going to work out!!!