I'll be honest with you. The wife and I were what you might call "difficult." Not in a bad way. We just have standards. We are of the opinion that most houses are built poorly, by people who have never seen a house, using materials they found nearby. This is not a controversial position in our home. It is the only position.
Then we met James Goodwin at The Local Real Estate Group.
James is a bald man, which I mention because he is, and a review ought to be accurate. He is of normal height, which I also mention because I don't want anyone going in with the wrong idea.
Here is how we shop for a house. We walk in, and I go straight to the nearest door, and I grab the handle. Most door handles, I am sad to report, are feeble. They wiggle. They have a sort of looseness to them, like they're already considering quitting. Some of them turn but don't fully commit. One handle, in a house I will not name, came off in my hand. The realtor that day pretended not to see it. James would never have done that.
By house number eleven, James understood the assignment. He would unlock the door, step aside, and just watch me work the handle. Sometimes he'd grab one himself. He'd give it a wiggle, look at me, and shake his head. We didn't even need words. He'd just close the door and we'd get back in the car. The wife would already be putting her seatbelt on.
He showed us 47 houses. Forty-six of them had handles you wouldn't trust to hold a coat. The 48th house was the one. I walked in, grabbed the handle on the front door, and it didn't move a millimeter. It turned with intention. It clicked back into place like it meant it. Every handle in the house was the same. Solid. Confident. Built by someone who had at some point in their life met a door.
James didn't say anything. He just looked at us. And somehow we knew. That's the kind of realtor James Goodwin is. A man who understands that a door handle is a promise, and most builders are liars.
I'd also like to take a moment to say that I am genuinely proud of James. When we started this process, he was a man who looked at a door and saw a door. Now he can walk into any house in the city, give a handle a single firm turn, and tell you everything you need to know about the people who built it. That is a skill. You can't teach that in real estate school. Well, you can, but apparently they don't.
If you have standards and you suspect, correctly, that most homes are an insult to the trade, James is your guy. The Local Real Estate Group should give him a raise. Or at the very least, a house with handles as good as ours.
Thanks James. We finally have a home where the doors feel like doors.