Is it worth it?

Some of the colors in our back yard...

We had another appraiser out to the house today. We are in the process of refinancing the house for mainly two reasons.

1. To get an even better interest rate than we had in March
2. To reassess our home value in order to gain equity for financial purposes. 

This process has been unlike anything we have ever gone through. We were originally told that we could refinance the mortgage after 3 months. There were a lot of hoops at that time that we would have to jump through, such as $X in the bank and X number of rent payments on the old house. We were diligent and followed through on everything, but when the time came to proceed, we were told the time frame was now 6 months. Great.

So, the 6 month period has come and gone. Once again, we have completed everything as asked, delivered a hundred papers to the lender, stashed money away in the bank, etc. and here we sit. We had our appraisal done weeks ago and it came in at just about where we thought it would. Hooray! But wait! The underwriter doesn't "trust" the numbers on the appraisal so they have forced us to get another appraisal. "It's no big deal.", the lender assures us. Ya sure, no big deal. Just another $350 out of our pockets, that's all. Oh, and more waiting -AND- if the second appraisal comes in higher (how nice!), the underwriter will still throw it out and use the original value. If the second appraisal comes in lower (boooo!), we throw it out and still use the original value, but with a smaller loan amount. It's not like we even had a say which appraisers were chosen, that's completely up to the Lender...and they don't "trust" the value? Madness.

With luck, we will close by Thanksgiving! No, I really do hope it's sooner than that but I'm not a patient person so all this fooling around is killing me. In the end, it will be great to definitively say just how much Mike and I were able to raise our home value, in just a few months, with our own hands. Then we can finally give ourselves that long awaited pat-on-the-back and start working on other projects that have been neglected for far too long. Can anyone say, "Garage"?