In our guest post series, we feature real-life homeowners to highlight their home-buying journey. Today we’re featuring a wonderful couple named Dominique and Adam.
I was so excited when Dominique and Adam first reached out to Ted and me. I was seven months pregnant with our fourth child (Liam) at the time, and the idea of taking on a client that late in the pregnancy was intimidating, but there were plenty of reasons to be excited. They specifically said they had discovered us through our social media channels and blog, two fundamental tools I immediately invested in when we set out to become realtors nearly three years ago.
Meeting Dominique and Adam only made me more excited. They were energetic, honest, down-to-earth, and way cooler than us.
We were thrilled to help them find a home, a task which proved more difficult than expected through a number of sudden hurdles. Still, we had fun getting to know them through the process, and we met plenty of their friends along the way.
This is the story of buying their first home from their perspective:
The search for our first home began with a pair of dead birds.
The place looked promising when we first walked in. I thought so, at least. I was still poking around the high-ceilinged ground floor, while my wife Dominique took the stairs in twos, like she couldn’t get through it fast enough. Ted walked along behind me, pointing out potential pitfalls.
“These are the original windows, so you might want to update those.”
“See this stair stepping crack here? In the plaster?”
“You’ll likely have to get the chimney repointed to keep—”
I heard a cry from above me and shuffling feet. By the time I had reached the room where Dominique was standing, her hands balled into fists, I was panting and out of breath. Ted walked in behind me a minute later, seemingly unperturbed.
“That’s definitely a sign,” she said. “We’re going to die here.”
She pointed to the floor in the center of the room where, lying side by side on the hardwood, were two dead pigeons.
I should mention here that our last name is Dove.
“We’re not going to die here,” I said.
“Of course we aren’t,” Dominique said. “Because we aren’t buying this house.”
I looked to Ted for help. But it was clear from the look on his face I wasn’t going to get any.
“You guys are better than this house,” he said.
Spoiler: we’re not dead. In fact we are alive and well, having spent almost a year in a home that we absolutely love. Ted and Julie Block deserve a good amount of credit for both of those things.
Dead Bird Day began our eight-month journey of searching for a home. We started out thinking we weren’t picky—we just wanted somewhere with no dead animals. Not so much to ask, right? But as the months wore on, our list of no’s grew longer: no center row-homes, no one-bathroom homes, no highly textured walls, no concrete backyards. We were worried we were starting to become obnoxious. But with every new “no” we added to our list, Ted and Julie would respond with something like: “Okay, no problem. There’s actually a place that was just listed I think you might be interested in…” And then the next day, we were touring another place. I think we went through more than thirty houses in those first few months. And every single time, Ted and Julie would bend over backwards to make sure we saw it within twelve hours. More than once, we were the very first people to walk through a place.
Then one day, something promising. It was a house very near the Millvale apartment we were living in at the time—a neighborhood we loved. It was huge; much bigger than the price would suggest. Wonderfully under budget. There seemed to be nothing wrong with it, at least from the pictures online. So we emailed Ted, and twelve hours later we were standing on the front porch, waiting with bated breath.
The place did not disappoint. Three full floors plus a finished basement, hardwood floors, and an open kitchen that led out onto the back porch. It was everything we wanted and nothing we didn’t. But Ted wasn’t so sure. As we were smiling and pointing out everything we loved, he was pointing out the cracks in the walls, the chipping in the bricks outside, and on and on. But we didn’t listen. We put in an offer, and voila! It was accepted. We were ecstatic. Even as we were jumping up and down, however, Ted tried to manage our expectations.
“These old houses can have a lot of hidden problems,” he said. “Hold off on the champagne until after the inspection.”
So we put down the bottle and he called the inspectors—inspectors the Blocks recommended. They were amazing, as were all of the other people the Blocks recommended along the way.
But by the end of the walk through, even the inspectors were worried. There was water in the basement, carpenter ants in the front porch, leaks in the roof, the mortar between the bricks all over the house was dissolving: the list went on and on. By the end of the three-hour inspection, we were crestfallen and back to square one. The only thing we walked away from that house with was another no: no flood zones.
After that, Dominique and I lost steam. Where before we were seeing a new house every other day, now weeks would go by when we wouldn’t even say the word ‘house’ to each other. But even through that time, Ted and Julie never gave up on us. We still received regular emails from them with new house listings, potential neighborhoods we maybe hadn’t thought of—even just little notes, checking in to see how we were, offering to take us to see a few houses “just for fun.” They were never pushy. They just wanted to know that just because we were feeling like giving up didn’t mean they were going to.
By the time we found ourselves standing on the front porch of what would become our home, we hardly had any expectations left. We’d left our list of no’s at home. We knew we’d been too picky: we just had to learn to settle for less than we wanted, and everything would be fine. We thought that was the only way we would ever be able to find a house in our price range.
The home that captured Dominique and Adam’s hearts.
It was with that mindset that we began our walkthrough—jaws dropping further with each room we entered. It was perfect. Not too big, not too small, finished attic, open kitchen, hardwood floors. It had everything we wanted. But even more importantly, it didn’t have a single thing on our no’s list. Because even though we had thrown our no’s in the trash, Ted and Julie remembered. And everything we’d said we liked or didn’t like over the course of those eight months had seemingly been logged away somewhere and jumbled around to finally produce the house of our dreams. Julie even stopped by on a whim, though Ted was showing us the house that day, because she had a feeling that this would be the one. It passed inspection with flying colors, and thanks to Julie’s business savvy and negotiating skills, we made it through the whole process with our budget intact. Just two months later, we were all moved in.
Since then, Ted and Julie have found homes for a number of our good friends, and have even sold my parents house. That is not a coincidence. We recommend them to everyone we know, and they have never once disappointed. But more than that, we have come to consider Ted and Julie our friends. I still like to tell the story of Dead Bird Day from time to time, mostly because I think it’s hilarious. But it’s only because of Ted and Julie that I’m able to find it funny, sitting on the couch in the living room of our perfect-for-us home. Without them, I might be telling it a different room, pointing right to the spot with those two dead birds had been.
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If you’re ready to start your home-buying journey, we’re here to help! Contact us at theblocks@theblocksintheburgh.com or 412.926.7976!
Cheers.
Julie & Ted