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May 19, 2006
Things You Don't Want to Hear the Week Before Your Closing
The phone rang yesterday afternoon, and the caller ID said "City of Valparaiso." Hmm. OK. It was the water department. Calling about our new house; I had just called a few days ago to schedule having the utilities transferred into our name as of the closing date. The water department was calling to inform me that they had shut off the water at our new residence due to a high meter reading. How high? 135,000 gallons in the reading period. Whaaaa?!?!?!? I freaked out. That's like three swimming pools worth of water. I called our realtor in a panic, and we went over there expecting to find the house floating down the street. There was no sign of water anywhere. Not inside, not on the exterior, not in the crawl space. The listing realtor inspected it today, with much the same result. The seller is going to go over there with an inspector on Monday, and the water department is going to turn the water back on and monitor the situation for a couple of days. We are really hoping that the meter is broken or something, because if we can't figure out what's wrong, it's really going to complicate this whole thing and possibly delay the closing. Well, better to have this happen BEFORE the closing, rather than having a thousand dollar water bill after we move in.