*facepalm*

Here's the latest (and apparently, ONLY) thing holding up closing:

The seller turned the hot water heater off after my inspection in February. No big surprise; why pay to heat hot water in an empty house, right? So why do I bother mentioning it? I wouldn't...

except he didn't turn it back ON for the appraisal. The house is also unoccupied, and therefore, the appraiser dinged it as a problem, and the underwriters won't approve the mortgage until it is glaringly apparent that I do indeed, have a functioning water heater as part of the deal.

Alright, so all the seller needs to do is turn it back on, right? Right...

except the original appraiser has to come down from Rochester (two hours away) to give the official okey-dokey. And once that's done, all I can do is hope that the underwriters get on it quickly, though that word doesn't seem to be in their collective vocabulary.

Oh, and this question of the water heater came up about three and a half weeks ago. A silly mistake that will take all of five minutes to rectify will cause me to live out my suitcases and board my cat for an extra two weeks because they couldn't be bothered to mention it to us when they knew. Everything else that can approved ahead of time has been approved as of June 9th, if I read the underwriters' report correctly. So if this had been straightened out when it came up, I could have closed this week...not two weeks from now. Some folks will read this and say, what's the big deal about two weeks? Closings rarely happen on time. Please remember that I was originally supposed to close on April 3rd, so we're coming up on three extra MONTHS, not weeks.

I do have some hope, as Becky My Favorite Real Estate Assistant (and I'm not kidding at all, she has been amazing throughout this process) is even saying we should be able to close as soon as this is done. And Becky is pretty cynical about these guys right now too..she wouldn't say it if she didn't mean it.

I'd better go back and read my previous posts before my head explodes.