UGH

Moving sucks. Every aspect of it sucks. Looking at houses, selling a house, buying a house, signing contracts, doing inspections. It's a pain in the fucking arse long before one even has to endure the actual physical move itself.

All systems were go for our move this week until late Friday, at which point our title company found a ground rent lease attached to the home we're buying. This was not disclosed by the seller, who had claimed it was a fee simple property on their listing, and our contract of sale was written and accepted with this understanding. (A ground rent indicates that somebody owns the lot upon which your house sits and that instead of owning the ground you lease it. There has been much scandal of late in Baltimore over this practice, with good reason. Fee simple designates the more traditional whole-kit-and-caboodle, lot and house included in the sale.)

The sellers, notified of the problem, said that the property is indeed fee simple and that they would resolve this easily.

Now our mortgage underwriter wants to delay settlement because they are suspicious of such a title discovery this late in the process. ANY delay in settlement on the new house could fuck us, because we have to move out by the end of this week, and settlement is scheduled for Wednesday. If settlement got pushed back to next week we'd have to put our stuff in storage, settle on the new house, and then move again. That's assuming the ground rent/fee-simple issue is easily resolved, and doesn't result in lawsuits and breach of contract claims, which could result in us starting the house search over again, this time based out of a studio apartment or--worse yet--based out of the in-laws' basement.

I can't do anything but wait for the hired guns to wrangle over this. I'm not sure if that's good or bad for my mental health.