Monthly Archives: December 2010

Contract: Signed, Sealed, Delivered

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Well, not quite, but the contract to buy the house in Puerto Rico  is signed and ready to be sent off tomorrow. We were feeling some last minute cold feet, but I think we’re through it now. We got reinvigorated and are ready to do this! It is so scary because it is not exactly the most rational thing in the world, but hopefully will be one of those adventures in our lives that we will always wonder why we waited so long to do.


El contrato

From what I hear, it’s kind of like having kids. They are definitely not the rational thing to do (take a lot of work, cost a lot of money, make you worry a lot) but ultimately you couldn’t think of your life without them in it. So, hopefully that’s what this will be like to us: an irrational but fun kid. 😉

The contract was all in Spanish, so I translated it and it looks very basic. It’s just a contract to buy that sets the price we agreed upon as well as our closing date. It has all of our names and the physical description and location of the house (three bedrooms, two baths on 11.5 acres).  Interestingly, in Puerto Rico, rarely does anyone have an actual address…which is the case with this place. It’s just the km marker on the road it lies on.


The check

We also have included the earnest money check…but at least it’s only 1 %. Those are always hard to part with on all of our deals because you always wonder if something goes wrong if you’ll get that back. But it’s for good faith in the deal…keeps your feet warm I suppose.

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Christmas Cat

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There’s another cat in the neighborhood here in Greeley. It’s like Cat City here. When I first saw her I thought she was Kitty because she’s a greyish calico (Kitty’s solid grey).  She looks to be just out of kittenhood (if that’s a word). She seems to be comfortable around humans (and dogs, other cats such as Kitty and the chickens thankfully), so I think she must have come from another family, maybe another neighborhood family cat that had kittens? But, she really likes our house a lot even though we’ve tried to ignore her. She sits at the back door and the front door and just stares at us -or sometimes mews.


Mirror Cats -Kitty inside and the other one outside

“Please, please just acknowledge my presence,” she seems to plead with those eyes.

Britton put some food out even after we had some discussion about whether we wanted to encourage the behavior or have another cat to feed. We just hate to see an animal starve! But she didn’t seem too interested in the food. No, she just wanted some lovin’.

So, I finally gave in and picked her up and held her. She purred and purred as she rested in my lap.


With Christmas Cat

Maybe she just wanted out of the cold for a few minutes. I’m not sure. Callie showed up in the same sort of way, except she was a Halloween cat. She showed up in October a few years back and she had black and orange fur. This one, I think we’ll have to name Christmas Cat.

I don’t want another batch of kittens to show up in the window well of our basement again as happened with Callie, so I’m going to call a few veterinary clinics and see if any of them do free or reduced spaying for stray cats. At least we know Kitty couldn’t be the father as he’s been neutered for a long time. With Callie we waited too long thinking, well, she’s not really our cat. This little girl looks to be just entering her fertile maturity so it would be good to do that sooner than later. I’m going to ask around the neighborhood to see if she belongs to anyone first though. But take it from Bob Barker, people. Spay and neuter your animals! Please!

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Compromise Accepted

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We had asked for a closing date June 15 and the sellers came back saying that they only wanted to do 90 days (March). We responded that we could probably swing May 15. They came back wanting to know why we want to delay. This is the response Britton and I sent them:

 Well we have a few reasons.  We are trying to leave enough time to gather our financial resources, secure vacation time from our jobs to travel to PR to close as well as contact a lawyer who can verify and check the title work, surveys, and inspections for us.  We know that this takes some time because we have tried to buy a house in Puerto Rico before and we uncovered some title issues which caused the closing date to be continually pushed out. 

 We want to give ample time for this process plus we have to coordinate everything from Colorado which makes it a little more difficult.

 I want to let the sellers know that we are very serious about purchasing the property at the proposed price and time.  I hope we can come to an agreement that will please everyone involved. 

 I think we laid it out just about as clearly as possible. The only thing we didn’t suggest was that lowering the price could possibly make this happen more quickly. We didn’t want to go back two steps– to negotiating price again. So we waited…and yesterday we received the response back:

     Hi Britton,

      I spoke to the sellers, they have agreed to the terms, we will go

     thru with the deal, hope everything will go o.k..

       We will draw up the contract, please let me know if we can e-mail

     you the  contract or have it faxed.

So…it sounds like we are buying this property in May! Hooray! Well, we can’t get too excited yet. There is still a lot of work to do and as we mentioned in the email to her if any of those things goes wrong, it could push the date out. It is not exactly like buying property in the states even though I am glad this isn’t my first house-buying ‘rodeo’ or I’d be even more freaked out.  

But, this is a huge step! The compromise has been accepted!


Soon we will be hanging out in the jungle in our hammock

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Puerto Rico Property Contract Negotiations

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Well we have a price pinned down on the property in Puerto Rico. That was part 1. Now we are going back and forth on a closing date. Contract negotiations are sometimes hard to come to an agreement on.

I figured we would come up against a barrier here as I had initally put out a closing date of June 15th. Admittedly that is pretty far out. They’ve come back and said they’d only be willing to go 90 days which puts us in March. By my calculations we might be able to swing April without having to get too creative.

We still need to aquire the assitance of a lawyer to check out all the paperwork and details that Cassie and I don’t have the abilty to look at. This coupled with our jobs as well as getting all our finances in order will mean we have to come back with a date further out.

We say June 15th they say March maybe we can see if they’ll do May. Or we can go back to closer to our initial price that we offered and do it closer to their time frame…the choice is between time or money. Give us more time, we’ll give them more money. Less time, less money.

We also kind of feel like the real estate agent isn’t doing us too many favors. I think we can make this work, but we might have to talk to the owners directly to make something that works for all of us. The agent seems to like being in the position of keeping us in the dark.

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