We've closed!

So here's the story behind the building for those of you who haven't heard it already...

Sometime last Summer we decided to start a cafe in Lawrence, after looking at property available on Essex St, we decided that it would be best for us to buy a place instead of rent. So, then started the great search. We looked at 2 properties, one of which interested us in particular. This one had been vacant for over 6 months and was a foclosure owned by a bank going bankrupt- we could sense a sweet deal- but we had no idea how difficult it would be for us to actually get it. We looked at the inside of 275 and knew it had great potential. I contacted someone at the company and after several months of e-mails was connected with someone who was in charge of getting rid of vacant properties (I spoke with him on March 13, 2008). We got all our stuff in order and made an offer on March 24th. Our offer was rejected for being too low, but we were asked to make another offer, and we did that on April 11th. We did not hear back until May 1st, but found out that day that the offer was accepted! We were told on May 6th to expect a P&S agreement to arrive in the mail, which it did not occur, so we took matters into our own hands and made our own P&S which we submitted on May 28th; fortunately, since we wrote the P&S we gave ourselves plenty of time to find financing and close and set a closing as no later than August 1st. Then, well, that's a whole story if it's own- but we got turned down for financing from about 10 different banks/mortgage companies and were quite worried all of this would fall through- finally we spoke with someone from RTN credit union, and we were approved in just 3 days (RTN rocks by the way!). We were then supposed to close mid July, but the sellers decided to be very difficult and slow in getting the documents to our lawyer and we had to delay closing several times...but finally, on Monday, August 11th we got the building officially!