Finally on Tuesday we received the Open Space Continuance from escrow. It took escrow 7 days to fill out the form and get it back to us! Joel and I signed 4 copies of it for King County on Tuesday night and first thing in on Wednesday morning, our realtor, Lance, drove it to King County for their approval. And by Wednesday afternoon, King County had approved the continuance! I’ve heard that it normally takes a few days for King County to review the continuance, do the necessary research, and finally approve it. We were very lucky that it only took a few hours and that’s because we were able to talk with King County about our continuance ahead of time. Ultimately, this means that we get to have lower taxes for the area of our property that contains wetland + wetland buffers. Score!

Wednesday was full of great news, not only did we get the open space continuance, but we heard from our lender that our loan paperwork was approved by their underwriters and ready to be sent to escrow! We have until June 10th to close on the lot, but I want to close early on May 31st, to ensure that no funny-business happens with the seller since it’s bank-owned. May 31st also marks the end of our feasibility study period, and since we don’t have a financing contingency if something completely unforeseen were to happen with our loan we could still get our money back using the feasibility study as an excuse.

I also heard back from King County Records Department yesterday that the files we requested were in. When we went a few weeks ago into King County they told us that the wetland information and the site grading permit that the previous owners had submitted back in 2005 had been archived. They needed to pull the archive box from downtown Seattle and bring it to their office for us to look through. Today, I went to King County’s office in Snoqualmie to check out what they found. It was great – not only did they have the site grading permit which discussed the clearing area and the buffer requirements, but they also had the FULL wetland report! It’s a fairly extensive document and I’ve yet to read through all of it, but it was definitely a bonus to find that there. While there, I was able to photocopy all of the documents that I wanted (40 some-odd pages) and it only cost me $2! Getting a full wetland report for only $2 seems like a good deal to me! Hopefully in the future when we submit permits the report will only need to be updated for any information that has changed. That will really save us a lot of time and money in the future.

So, for the next week, we should have a smooth sailing into closing!