[thwarted]

That was exactly my experience when buying my first home back in 2003. There's a lot of information out there about buying a home, but very little of it is actually useful for first time home buyers, IMO. The mortgage company literally waited until the last minute to approve everything (or the broker waited until the last minute to tell us). Meanwhile, we had no place to stay if it fell through because we'd already ended our lease on the place we were before, and didn't really have the luxury to tack another week or so on closing if there were issues.