My wife and I are in the process of trying to rebuild our credit and we could really use some insight as to what we can expect.
This time last year we bought a condemned home, gutted it and rehabbed it to the point we could live in it. We used every penny we could beg, borrow or steal to get it done. We took full advantage of having a number of cards with high credit limits, little or no usage on them and lots of 1.99% balance transfer offer mailings sitting on our desk. We went from <10% util to >90% util in about 2 months and we even added a wells fargo home improvement card that we instantly maxed to finance new windows. Around Christmas time we got the first notice, from Chase, that they were cutting the limit on one of the cards because of a sudden increase (yeah, no kidding 
). At that point it became a race for us to use as much credit as possible on the cards before it got taken away.
We always knew we were going to refinance once the house was done enough to pay back that credit but what we didn't plan for was the utter devastation we'd rain down on our credit scores. I've dropped from 760+ to 670 and my wife has dropped from 740+ to 660. In addition to those low scores, we ended up with over $90k in revolving credit card debt. That of course has made refinancing a 9 month nightmare of rejections and reapplications. Finally, after great work by the guy at Wells Fargo we got the refinance done. We got a pretty good primary at 4.75% but a really crappy heloc at 10.25%. The goal now is to get all the cards paid off, get the scores back up and then refi again to reduce the rate on the heloc.
We paid off all but one of the credit cards about 2 weeks ago (knocking util to about 5%) and now boa just cut the cl on one of our cards from $16k to $900. How quickly might others follow suit? All of our cards have due dates in the coming days and they'll all report $0 balances will that make a difference to stop others from cutting limits? I'm not too concerned about the limits as it's the utilization that counts towards the credit score but the more they cut the higher my util goes without me actually doing anything. How long will it take for our scores to bounce back? Can I dispute boa cutting our credit line by waiting until they all report and showing the better fico? Outside of high usage and high util, we both have long credit histories (14 years+), have never been late and have had mixes of auto, mortgage, bank cc, store cc.
I should note that it has been all worth it as the value of our home increased by more than 50% (you don't read that sentence very much these days). I'm just curious how long we'll suffer credit hell for real world success.
p.s. Sorry for the long post
