OUR FIRST NEW HOUSE THAT WE ALMOST BOUGHT….

We drove through in 2007 and looked at some of the houses we lived in…in 1959-60.  This is the house we almost bought in 1959.  I would have flowers and shorter plants there where all the greenery is…too many snakes in the panhandle area. 

In 1959 lots of veterans in Texas were taking advantage of the GI bill to build a house.  A contractor in our town was building a lot of them.  You could sign up for an FHA or a GI bill house.  We signed up for a GI bill one.  When the inspectors came to inspect it the contractor had them to inspect it for FHA.   We checked on the FHA loan and it was 500 dollars more down payment and the payments monthly were much higher.  So Bobby told him to re-inspect it GI.  He said ok.  They re-inspected it FHA again!!!!!  

We were urged by the contractor to move into the house but we had not signed the papers yet.  We knew later that he was hoping that after we lived in it a while we would not want to move and would accept it FHA. Utility payments, were paid by the contractor until our loan was finalized.  Six months went by and he still had not inspected it GI.

One day the contractor came by where Bobby worked and told him to sign the papers that week.  Bobby told him he would when he got the GI papers finalized. 

He asked Bobby if he would move out of the house, so he could sell it FHA.  We knew then that he didn’t plan to ever have it inspected GI.  We were really tired of fooling with him so Bobby told him yes, we’d move out that weekend…but only under one condition.  That he would sign a paper that we would owe him nothing on the utilities, because it is a lot of expense to move, since we didn’t have a pickup and had to rent a truck for a couple of days.  He said “Fine, he would do that.” 

Two weeks went by…no signed paper from him. We didn’t move out.  He came by Bobby’s business again and said, “I thought you were going to move out of the house.”  He actually thought we’d be dumb enough to do that!  Bobby said, “I thought you were going to sign the paper stating that we didn’t owe you anything.” 

The guy was really angry…he knew he was not going to get anything on Bobby, like he had done on some others. He got out a piece of paper and wrote some stuff down and showed it to Bobby and asked him if that suited him.  

Bobby read it and said, “Well it looks okay to me.  I will go show it to my attorney and see what he says.”  The contractor was super angry then. We knew an attorney in the church we were members of and Bobby showed it to him.  He thought it was fine and would stand up in court, if need be.

We moved the very next weekend.  We don’t know how many owners the house has had, but someone lives there now.  I hope they didn’t see us taking this picture. LOL

So please be careful when you buy a house on a GI bill.  If they were doing crooked things like that in the 50’s you can be assured some are even more so now.  The VA really wants to help our military who have sacrificed so much to give us freedom, but some contractors will take advantage of you if you let them.  We think that would be extremely sad now, when a lot of our future veterans are serving at a dangerous time for our country.

 This house below is where we lived before we moved to the new one in the above picture.  We drove by in ’07 and took this picture too.  It still looks as good as when we lived there in 1959.  Some houses were just built well (and also taken care of.)