Young home hunters persist
Knowing what they want, learning the rudiments helps a couple find their sunny corner of Dorchester
My fiancée, Lauralee, and I wandered through the newly renovated condo, peeking into each empty room. Sunlight bounced off the shiny hardwood floors. The walls and trim were freshly painted in coats of ivory and beige. The place was churchlike in its quiet -- no squeaking floorboards, no sound from the neighbors. I forgot that we were in Dorchester.
I imagined putting groceries in the stainless-steel refrigerator, and Lauralee cooking stir fry on the jet-black range atop the gleaming chrome oven. I pressed my fingertips against one of the black countertops. The surface was cold, and I could see my reflection.
''Real granite," said the real estate agent, rapping his knuckles on the surface. Not like the chipping Formica back at my apartment.
He handed us a flyer, and there, on the corner of the page, in bold black type, was the number. It always came down to the number, and the number, it seemed, always went against us: $359,000. I folded the paper and crammed it in my pocket. Later, it would end up in my blue recycling bin, joining so many other listings that Lauralee and I saw during our house-hunting spree last spring.
We are two young professionals (I'm 30 and Lauralee is 29) with college degrees and steady jobs, and, if we wanted to own property in the neighborhood where I grew up, our options were pretty limited. We were looking for two bedrooms under $200,000. And we quickly learned that our budget allowed us only a tiny, refurbished condo in a cut-up, renovated Victorian; a carpeted, cavelike two-bedroom in a noisy, square brick apartment complex; or a condo in one of those old houses that leans to one side and ''needs updating."
I always dreamed of buying property in Boston, preferably Dorchester, my hometown. Born in St. Margaret's and reared in Fields Corner, I still live there -- in an apartment on Newport Street the past eight years. I'm a ''Dot Rat" -- it says so on the tattoo across my back. Lauralee, a teacher in the Boston schools, lives there too.
Our house-hunting would start each day with a scan of real estate ads. My mother and our friends would forward us ads from craigslist and boston.com. Condos with ''turn-of-the-century charm" (translation: one floor of a three-decker) were selling for upward of $300,000.
This was not the Dorchester I grew up in. When we started house-hunting, I was thinking of the days when landlords in Dorchester torched their houses for insurance money. I remembered being asked, ''You're from Dorchester? Did you ever see anyone get shot?" People still ask us that, so I wondered just who were these high rollers moving into my 'hood, buying condos for $300K? Where were they coming from?
If we (two incomes! no kids!) were priced out, then how could a large family, or a single mom, or a blue-collar worker, ever afford a place of their own?
My family blamed ''the yuppies" for taking over our old neighborhood, forcing out families and poor folks. Of course, I too am a young professional -- but that didn't count, my mother and aunt would quickly reply: How could I be one of them? I wasn't moving from the outside in; if anything, I was moving from the inside ''up." Or trying to, at least.
In April, I decided to take a home-buying class with Amy Westhaver from South Boston, my best friend. She was also determined to buy in her hometown. We signed up for ''Homebuying 101," a free 10-hour course provided by the Department of Neighborhood Development.
We showed up early for the first class, smiling, and sat in the back as dozens of our classmates arrived. There were blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and a few white folks -- a mix of men and women in their 30s and 40s. Over the next five weeks, we learned how to apply for a mortgage, how to make an offer on a house. We reviewed our credit scores. We did homework.
And we grew increasingly despondent.
How could we get $10,000 for a down payment and closing costs? I still lived paycheck to paycheck. Lauralee and I had a combined income of $90,000 -- which sounds impressive but doesn't mean much considering car payments, dental bills, tuition loans, and credit card debt.
As our instructor talked about 3 percent down payments, I calculated that I'd be dead before I had enough to put down on a condo, let alone a house. I'd doodle on my home buyers' textbook: a house in Dorchester, surrounded by an electrified chain-link fence, with an explosion in the distance; a mushroom cloud above the house, with large dollar signs written inside. Underneath I scrawled, ''No Hope."
But Lauralee and I kept at it. We found a handful of condo units selling for less than $250,000 and plowed through the list. Most were disappointing -- too cramped, or too many holes in the walls. In one unit, the floors were so slanted that it felt like walking through a funhouse.
One afternoon in May, Lauralee called me at work, excited. She was standing in one of the condos on our list: the top floor of a robin's-egg-blue three-decker in Fields Corner. It was near Saint Ambrose, where I went to elementary school. The place was huge -- three bedrooms, sunroom, large foyer, even a back porch and garage. The price was $239,000.
''Everything seems to be OK," she said, hopefully. ''I think you'll like it."
The next day I went to see for myself. I immediately liked the bright blue of the house, and the black-and-white wrought iron fence wrapping the property. I climbed three flights of stairs and found myself inside a spacious foyer with high ceilings. The floor wasn't slanted. Straight ahead, there was a wide hallway with built-in cabinets and drawers. To my left, I saw sunlight pouring through three windows in the dining room, and trees and flat rooftops in the distance.
This place was beautiful, in the way that only a not-updated-at-all Victorian could be. It had bucked home decor fads for decades and stood for more than a century as is. It was genuine. It had character. It had to be the biggest three-decker apartment I'd ever stepped into. I could breathe in here.
The original woodwork was intact; there were cast iron doorknobs with skeleton keyholes. Sunlight spotlighted smudges of dirt on the walls.
The kitchen sink was tucked inside a walk-in pantry. It had old wooden cabinets that looked like miniature versions of French doors with tiny brass latches.
Another rectangular cabinet was built into the wall of the kitchen -- it once housed an ironing board. Stains covered the hulking refrigerator, and the handle was sticky. The stove was dark brown and splattered with grease. When I tried to peek inside the oven, the handle ripped off and fell to the floor with a clang.
I opened the back door and cautiously walked onto the porch, clutching the railing where the white paint was peeling. I took a few steps and then skipped up and down across the porch. I could see rooftops all the way to the Blue Hills.
The owners were converting their three-decker into three condo units. We quickly made an offer for the top floor. Lauralee and I decided to start with $220,000 -- high enough to be taken seriously, but low enough that we'd have some room to negotiate. We did have one advantage: Lauralee's employer provided free real estate attorneys for teachers. So Lauralee found a great lawyer who would make sure we got a fair deal. We called Mount Washington Bank. They preapproved us for the mortgage. And we settled with the sellers on $235,000.
Luckily, we qualified with a state agency to receive a second mortgage to cover much of the down payment. My mother loaned us $3,000 to help pay the deposit and closing costs.
On June 23, we signed the purchase and sale agreement. I could hardly sleep, and had recurring nightmares of the place burning down before we could move in.
A month later, on a warm July day, Lauralee and I went to the closing at the Suffolk Registry of Deeds. A crowd gathered around a small table in a windowless room. I gulped bottled water and grew claustrophobic as we signed what seemed like dozens of documents. I got good vibes from the sellers, who would soon be our neighbors -- they planned to continue living on the first floor.
Two hours later, we emerged from that tiny room as the proud owners of the top floor of a three-decker.
One of the first things I did after we moved was to retrieve a bumper stick I had packed away. Made by Dot natives, it read: OFD -- Originally from Dorchester. I had previously modified it, by pasting over ''Originally" with my own adverb. I bounded down the stairs.
Now, parked in front of my Dorchester home is my black
Emily Sweeney can be reached at esweeney@globe.com. 
