One thing I haven't mentioned is that we're on a tight time line with this house. John leaves for his one week of job training in California around the 7th of September. Immediately after his training he will start working - not a 9-5 day job here in town but rather 4 nights a week teaching LSAT classes wherever they need him to. So basically he'll be home Friday through Sunday every week for this job.
All that to say.....we're trying to get most of the work done before he leaves for training or it will be forever before we finish this piece. When all of this first started we asked if the sellers would be ok with us going in before closing to start working. We even offered a big deposit check in case we messed stuff up and then backed out of the deal. They said we could start working once our financing was sure and they declined our deposit offer.
John went over yesterday to see if he could get in and start working. He found the back door unlocked so he went in. Soon our contractor showed up and surprised us by having his crew with him to start the scraping process. John let them start and he went about tearing out bookcases and stuff. Before long, the owner's brother came by and was quite taken back by lots of construction work going on. John explained everything though so the brother handed him his set of keys to the house.
Upon leaving, the brother called the owners and told them we were in there working and they called their agent freaking out that we were in there. Did we miss something here??? Apparently they are older people and now they're scared we're going to sue them if we get hurt while we're in their house. It's so annoying because from the beginning we told them it could be a deal-breaker if we couldn't get in early. Now they're saying no?
Our agent and their agent are now drawing up a paper that releases them from all liability so we can start working over the weekend. The weekend. Bleh. So in the meantime we're supposed to stay out of the house. John's been over there just working outside anyway. We brought a man from Dallas here to do the fence and sprinkler system because we were told it would be ok. Arghhh. Closing is set for Tuesday still.