My first Closing Day

My First Closing Day

I recently closed on my first house hack. The day was November 30, 2018. This was by far one of the longest days of my life. This post won’t really teach anybody anything but I am hoping that my experience will better help the next person who reads this understand all the things that might have to get done during closing day.

I woke up at 4:30am because I had to pick up a U-Haul cargo van because I wanted to take all of my girlfriends stuff along with mine. Even though we weren’t bringing any furniture with us, I still didn’t expect us to bring this much stuff but no one ever over estimates how much stuff they have. After we loaded the van, we were off to the bank to get a certified check of about 30K (20K for down payment and 10K for closing cost) for closing. Luckily for us, in New Jersey you only have to get one check and the Escrow Company disburses all of the funds to where ever it has to go. After we picked up the check, we had to do a final walk through the property just to make sure that the house didn’t have a new problem that wasn’t there before and to make sure that the house didn’t burn down or something. After the walk through, it was time for closing. The closing process was shorter than I expected.

The closing process was basically broken down into two parts. The first part was my girlfriend and I signing a bunch of documents for our mortgage company to release the funds to seller so that they can get paid. The second part of the closing was us signing a bunch of documents transferring the property to our name. All in all the process took about an hour.

After the closing, we went straight to home depot to fix the little things I been itching to fix for a while. We also purchased new locks for all the doors. After we exchanged all the locks and fixed a couple of little things the property needed like adding a gutter extender, adding some mail boxes, insulating some parts of the house, and a couple of more things which I can’t remember right now, we then had to go pick up our appliances.

I always wondered why the sellers would have rather given me the credit for two fridges as opposed to just installing them. After I bought home the appliances I figured out why. Because the home is a bit older, the halls and doorways are a bit smaller. In order for my friends and I to get the fridges through the door, we had to remove every door in the house. We had to strip down both fridges as much as we could and we couldn’t even use a dolly to get the fridge to the kitchen. Just to give you a better picture of how hard this was, when we took one of the fridges upstairs for the second unit, the hallway was 31.5 inches and the fridges depth was 31 inches which gave us a total of .5 inches of wiggle room. And now I understood why the sellers didn’t want to deal with it.

All in all, it was a pretty fun experience. I am using this home as a learner home. I hope to make all the mistakes possible with this home so I can kill it with the next property I purchase. This is just the beginning and I hope to continue purchasing more properties with the momentum I now have from this home.