TVIt was “the most difficult search ever”, but single mom Bianca (44) and her son Jitse (18) found a house through ‘Blind bought’. That ultimately required a radio call, Bianca’s very last savings and a handy TV team. Even three weeks after the recordings, Bianca is still not recovered. “I am so very grateful.”
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170,000 euros. Single mom Bianca was willing to pay for her own house with two bedrooms and a small garden near Lanaken. A modest amount by ‘Blind bought’ standards, and an extremely difficult assignment according to real estate agent Béa Vandendaele, but the viewer’s favor factor for the cheerful, hard-working mom and the apple of her eye Jitse were enormous. “I have indeed received a lot of positive reactions,” says Bianca. “People who understood how difficult it is to buy something as a single person and how high house prices are these days. When negative reactions came online – for example someone said that instead of looking for houses, Jitse and I would work a little more to pay for it – people jumped in the breach for me. Heart warming.”
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Bianca had been looking for five years and continuing to rent was not possible. “It would be too big a bite out of my budget, with a view to my retirement,” she said earlier. But Vandendeal found a house after months of searching – thanks to a call on national radio. Still a few hundred meters from Bianca and Jitse’s apartment. It was not a luxury villa. A house from just after the war with a decor in fifty shades of brown, lots of wooden slats, a dilapidated bathroom and kitchen with nothing more than a cold water tap.
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16,000 euros refurbishment budget
But modest Bianca and her Jitse were overjoyed with the find. “Nobody has ever been so happy with a house”, real estate agent Béa and interior architect Bart Appeltans shed a tear while they followed behind the scenes how the duo saw the house for the first time. “I just couldn’t believe the team had found something. Close, then”, Bianca looks back. “Especially because I know the street and I knew there was nothing for sale. If the house had been made available through the regular market, it might not have been possible to get it. You have to be very fast and because many Dutch people are also bidding in this region, the price after bidding might have gone above my budget. So I’m extremely grateful to the Bought Blind team.”
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Appeltans ultimately left 16,000 euros for a renovation. He called it “a refurbishment budget” instead of a renovation budget, so the interior designer visited Bianca one more time before the works and asked if there was anything left at the bottom of the boiler. That turned out to be about four to five thousand euros. The two bedrooms that Bianca requested remained unchanged, but Appeltans – with, as always, unmistakable mentions of Dovy Kitchens and X2O bathrooms – did create a new bathroom and kitchen in the building.
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The last hundreds of euros were spent on paint to freshen up the living room. Because there was nothing left to pay the painters, the production team – including broker Béa – took up the paintbrush themselves. “Fantastic, huh? I have also benefited a lot from them besides the cameras. If there was anything I could always go to them. Everyone was so very sweet.”
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Still working
It has now been three weeks since Bianca was shown her house and she still does not fully realize what happened to her. But that didn’t stop her from getting started right away. “In the upstairs bedrooms we laid laminate flooring and installed skirting boards,” says Bianca. “We also painted, wallpapered and removed floral wallpaper in the hall.”
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In the coming period, the focus for Bianca will again be on saving money, but there is still plenty to do with those pennies. “The house is still heated on oil, so I want to tackle that in the future and I also want to redo the garden. There are pebbles there now and I would like some grass and plants. But all in due time, we are already very satisfied.”