Trying to get back the grant
so here's the scoop. we are a little crazy for even thinking this way but basically we want to somehow get the HOME FIRST grant that we have been told the house is uneligible for. To backtrack for those not in the know, we attempted to get to grants to help with down payment grants. One is hopefully going to come through, a NYC grant for 6% of the house cost, mainly going toward closing costs and maybe a little extra for the down payment. We were hoping to get another grant, a regional one called the HOMES grant which would have given us an extra whopping $27,000 toward the down payment. I mean that is a HECKofaLOT of money!! We were told that the second grant is not going to be an option because the house has lead in it. Bummer. So the nice lady lowered her asking price another 10k and we were going to try to come up with the extra cash. We also did a lot of calling to other places, trying to get that HOMES grant elsewhere but the two other possible options that i found were currently out of funding.
Last night DH and I were talking and were all like 'its such a shame that we are losing so much money -- free cash! -- just because of lead. And DH is like 'what if we somehow got the lead out before we actually closed?' hmmm....now this can be interesting. See, unlike the first time that they check for lead ( fancy electronic screening devices), the second time that the company rechecks, they do a much simpler check. They visually scan the area to see if there is any chipping and do a manual wipe to see if the affected areas come out positive or negative. Now, we are thinking if we can just paint the areas (mainly windows and doors, some walls) and do the wipe ourselves, we can maybe get the reports to come back negative without even replacing the windows. What we want to do is test out a small area in the house, do the actual painting and swiping from a kit, maybe even have them check that one window/area and see if that could work. If so, we would maybe think of doing this to the whole house.
The pink elephant in the room is that the nice owner of the house is still there....so that could complicate our running around the home and painting and swiping techniques. But maybe if we'd pay for her to have a little vacation in a hotel or something she'd be open to it? It shouldn't take more than a few days to do the whole project and she is so nice, I wonder if she'd agree to something like this. we'd also offer her back the 10k she lowered her amount to, in cash.
Are we mad for even going down this route at all? Its just that money would help us soo sooo much....