As closing day for my new home approached, I knew that I was going to meet the sellers of the place eventually. There was admittedly a little bit of apprehension in the thought, since these are basically the people that I’d been playing hardball with in negotiating listing prices, how much of the closing costs I wanted them to cover, and the additional costs I made them incur in repairs and requests found through home inspection, and now I was going to have to face them so they could hand the keys of their property over to me.
This was somewhat a new experience to me; the last time I was at the closing table, I was the seller, and the buyer was tremendously low-maintenance, was willing to cover most of the closing costs, and barely asked for any work at all. And the first time I purchased a home, it was brand new and purchased directly from a builder, so there was nobody on the other side of the table that I had the innate feeling that I was taking something from them, regardless of how legitimate and normal the transaction was.
Furthermore, I had my suspicions initially based on an errant piece of litter on the property that the prior owners may have been Asian, and it was confirmed during the process that despite not being anywhere near Duluth or Suwanee, they were in fact Koreans. Yeah, I lol’d too at the strange coincidence of it all that I would of course, pick the home of other Koreans to choose to plant my new roots into. So, I knew going into closing day, that I would be coming face-to-face with other Koreans, after I had kind of put them through a little bit of the ringer, just so they could sell their home. I wasn’t necessarily scared to face them, but there’s no denying that my requests probably cost them a little bit of money they probably were hoping to not spend.
Regardless, the whole closing process wasn’t at all a bad one; the seller(s) were really nice people, and there was no indication that they were at all sour over the expenditures necessary to make the sale happen. I was amused by their realization that mother couldn’t speak to daughter discreetly in Korean without me being able to understand it, so most of the correspondence was kept in English, for the sake of the other non-Koreans involved in the process.