Closing Day Nightmare

I think I mentioned before that me and my husband were supposed to be closing Friday on our first mortgage. The details are that we are buying a townhouse from my brother in law. The problem is that he was using it as a rental property and the people he was renting it to are still living there. However, they are in the process of moving out right now. Their lease ends at the end of May anyway, so it was all supposed to work out like that. Me and my husband walked through the place about a month ago, right before we started the whole applying for a mortgage process. I know we shouldn’t close before these people move out but the thing is, my brother in law has been married to my sister for about 13 years now. He’s the nicest guy in the world and we really do trust him. Plus we had to put in 60 days notice at our apartment so we don’t have to move out officially until the end of June. My brother in law wanted to get the renters out and then go behind them and do a deep clean etc allowing us to move in around a week or so from now. And we were fine with that. I had planned to go sign closing papers Friday after work because our interest rate is only locked until the end of the day tomorrow (Tuesday).

Then came Friday morning.

I get to work and suddenly my mom is blowing up my phone. She tells me that she drove by the townhouse the previous night and that there was bags of trash all over the front lawn as well as what looked like some sort of dead animal that she could smell all the way from the parking lot behind the townhouse. Suddenly she’s urging me to back out of the sale completely and talking all kinds of trash about my brother in law, including insinuating that my 10 year old nephew was possibly punched in the mouth by his father. My nephew jumped off a floating device in their pool last week and hit his upper front teeth on the cement edge of the pool, breaking them. My sister sent us pictures in a group text talking about having to get them fixed etc… and I would NEVER EVER believe that he broke his teeth any other way. My sister and her husband are great parents and neither of them has ever shown any violent tendencies. Hell my nephew is so innocent that he still believes in Santa Claus.

I left work early, and drove to the townhouse with my husband. We drove around the place, around the neighborhood with nice houses behind it etc and found nothing. There wasn’t even any bad smells anywhere. Then we went to the sheriffs office nearby and asked about any calls they may get about that place. They told us that there is nothing more than the occasional minor disturbance call out there and that there is actually a sheriffs officer that lives there in another townhouse.

So I did what I had to do. I called my sister and asked if my mom had found out. And what I mean by that is that going back to my other sister Lauren’s birthday party the week before, I found out from her that my stepfather, her father, has been shooting up Oxycontin that he is prescribed for his back. My mom caught him and told only their shared daughter Lauren about it, telling her not to tell anyone else, especially my other sister, Beth, who has her only two grandchildren. But Lauren decided it was something Beth needed to know about prompting Beth to decide that her children would no longer be allowed to spend the night with their grandparents. See, my mother literally just got out of rehab for the third time for abusing opiates, and now this. However, Beth did not want our mother to find out that she knew, to protect Lauren, so she simply made an excuse as to why the kids didn’t come to Lauren’s birthday party. She knew if she brought them, they’d ask to go home with their grandparents and she wouldn’t have a reason to say no. So now, back to Friday, I ask Beth if mom found out she knew and was retaliating against her and her husband. She says no. She still hasn’t told her she knows.

So ultimately, we did not end up closing Friday. We will wait for the current tenants to finish moving out, take another walk-through and then deal with the possibility of having a slightly higher interest rate than before. But the question is, did my mom make up what she saw and smelled or not? She’s usually very crazy. Starting out with one opinion and then changing it and claiming she never had the original opinion, thereby gaslighting me for bringing up said original opinion. She actually originally was really excited by the possibility of us buying this townhouse from my brother in law, trying to push us into it, and even going so far as to say she may buy one herself. Now she claims she never tried to push us one way or the other. But I’m not sure what reason she would have to lie now to keep us from buying it if not for retaliation against my sister and brother in law. Even Lauren says she hasn’t told her that she told Beth. So there’s no way she knows.