Tag Archives: maintenance

Thoughts on being a slum lord…

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Sometimes I think the slum lords get it right. They buy the buildings cheap, pack in the tenants, collect as much rent as possible, and let the building fall apart until its time to abandon it and move on. Landlording is easy if you don’t bother to reinvest in the property. Sink not draining? Tough. Water heater acting “funny”? Who cares. Driveway collapsing? So what. By the time someone gets around to making them fix it, the building will be too far gone to save anyway and they’ll be on to the next deal. Yeah, sometimes I think the ones who just let the place fall in on itself have the right idea. Buying the property is the easy part. It’s the maintenance that’s going to kill you in the long run.

Some day, almost anyone who’s ever owned a home ponders the thought of being a landlord. Someone else is paying you to live in your place. Sounds like a license to make money, right? Well, let me disabuse anyone out there thinking about doing it of that notion. A rental property is pretty much a black hole into which you’re going to throw a never-ending stream of money. It’s like having a boat without the perk of, you know, actually having a boat. It’s going to start with an easy sounding $500 repair to the driveway, which will morph into needing to remove half of the driveway, which then becomes digging up the a trench across driveway and replacing a section of sewer pipe, and ultimately becomes a project remove the entire driveway, trenching deep enough to meet code (since the original builder didn’t bother with that), replace the entire sewer line from the house to the street, and then lay down an entirely new driveway over the freshly fixed and sparkling new swear line. By the time it’s done, your $500 “it’ll only take a few days” repair job will turn into a month long $7000 fiasco involving two city inspections, several pieces of heavy equipment, and a squad of bonded and insured union tradesmen. And you’ll get the joy of watching it all happen from 1000 miles away and hoping that someone down there actually has half an effing clue what’s going on.

So yeah, when you’re seized by the idea of being a landlord, save yourself the time and trouble and just go to the bank, take out a couple of thousand dollars, and set it on fire right there in the parking lot. You’ll have just as much to show for your troubles.

Air…

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You can imagine my surprise when I walked upstairs a few minutes ago and found the temperature hovering somewhere in the low 80s. The A/C was on after all and even though it’s a smallish window unit, it usually doesn’t have any problem cooling the bedroom and office to something approaching a livable temperature. That is, of course, when the condenser coil isn’t frozen solid. Before I rush to judgement and start raising three kinds of hell about it, I’m going to let the thing thaw out and then run some tests to see if it was just me letting it run too long in high humidity we’ve had this week or if it’s something wrong with the unit itself like a freon leak.

Given the upstairs issue, I thought it would be a good time to check the main wall unit in the living room. I almost wish I could have avoided that experience. After dropping the front cover, I have suspicions that this was probably the first time the cover has ever been off the unit. And there’s not one chance in a 1000 that the filter has ever been so much as brushed off, let alone actually cleaned. Any guesses how I spent the last hour of my Sunday night?

I don’t know why something like that would surprise me about this place any more. If they can’t figure out the big maintenance issues, I don’t suppose there’s a prayer of them paying attention to the details. Admittedly, most of my experience with renting has been in apartment communities, but I just don’t remember those having such problematic upkeep and management issues. I hate the thought of moving all tis crap again, but unless there are some radical changes in the way things are done around here, I’ll be looking for new digs in about 10 months.

On the up side, I just sent the owner a $225 bill for having the Expedition towed. That at least gave me a warm fuzzy.

Cletus…

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God love her, the representative of the management company hired as a caretaker for the homeowner’s association must have the patience of a saint. There was one couple at the meeting last night who I’m pretty sure were enjoying their first “big city” experience after coming fresh off the farm. Neither the budget, or the attached explanation of expenses, nor the further explanation of the manager, or the helpful comments made by the other owners seemed to sink in past the first or second layer of brain cells.

The only reason they were there is to figure out where their $120 a year HOA fee went and why the management company was hassling them about the length of their lawn. The nice lady went to incredible lengths to explain that she was only able to enforce the rules put in place by the previous builder and written into the HOA covenants and restrictions and once a new board was elected, they would be responsible for modifying and enforcing the rules.

The concept of maintenance of common areas seemed to present a real analytical challenge for this bunch. Apparently somewhere in the world $170 a month to cut, trim, and treat grass, salt side streets and alleys, and do general upkeep is considered excessive. If $10 a month in fees is going to get your goat, try living somewhere where the condo fees are north of $500 a month. Then we’ll tiptoe into a conversation of unreasonable fees.

My point is this: I don’t want to do it. You don’t want to do it. The guy down the street doesn’t want to do it either. So let’s just agree to put a board in place, let them make the executive decisions, and continue to pay the nice lady a few hundred bucks a month to handle the detail stuff like sicking the lawyer on people whose paint is peeling or who park derelict truck on the street. Otherwise slack-jawed yokels like you and the missus will run this place into the ground.

Sigh.

Hardest part…

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Sitting here at the tire place with nothing but time on my hands reminds me how much I despise sitting around just waiting for things to happen. Aside from the unhappy series of events that led me here this morning, the last 36 hours have mostly been about waiting; waiting for people to do things they said they would do a week ago; waiting for hundreds of pages of handouts to churn out of the printer; and for the other shoe to inevitably drop.

Now that I have plenty of things that need done, I’m waiting again this morning and my schedule is purely in the hands of other people once again. Of course sitting here watching the torrential rain gives me a chance to think about the 20 cases of paper products sitting in the back of the truck and wonder just how well the “watertight” bedcover will actually perform. Any results less good than “wow its really dry back here” will tend to ruin my next six days.

I’ve still got a laundry list of things I need to get done today and the clock is running. The later in the morning it gets, the faster it seems to run. I suppose I’ll feel a bit better when I get the dogs to the kennel this afternoon. In the meantime I need to get serious about making everything else ready to be on the road for a while. In order to even get to that point, though, they need to get these damned tires on the truck and get me back up and moving. Sitting here while time’s wasting is making me crazy.

Dear Neighbor (or Another reason why I hate people)…

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Dear Neighbor,

They pick up the trash in our subdivision on Wednesday. It’s customary for folks to put their trash out on Tuesday evening and then take their newly emptied trashcan off the curb when they get home Wednesday afternoon. Is it really so hard for you to get with the program? Why is your lovely green can still sitting on the curb on Saturday morning? It’s right there by your mailbox and I’ve seen you picking up your mail in the afternoons when you get home. Is it too hard for you to extend your other hand and drag your can back to the garage like every other damned person in the universe?

And another thing… Why the hell are you watering your lawn? I mean, really, why bother? You clearly hate cutting your grass because you do it so rarely… Not to mention that there are three foot tall weeds growing around every obstruction in your yard… including you house. If you’re not going to do the required maintenance, why do something that actually encourages the stuff to grow in the first place? And really, if you’re too lazy to break out the weedeater once a week, at least invest $5.00 in a bottle of Round-up and kill that shit.

Yours very sincerely,

Jeff

A rant on rails…

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I’ve never tried to run a railroad, but I love things that are organized, so I think I could make a pretty good show if it. Unfortunately, the people at Metro (who have been running a sort of “mini-railroad” for the better part of 30 years) seem to either have an intense hatred for organization or are simply incompetent. This, however, isn’t a rant specifically aimed at Metro’s leadership. Rather it is a rant pointed directly at the asshats who are my fellow riders.

The Green Line was delayed this afternoon due to some maintenance fuck-up down the track and as a result, trains were packed to capacity. Yet every time one pulled into the station, the great unwashed sea of humanity surged forward in an effort to cram themselves onto the already full cars… If you are getting the image of salmon leaping over themselves on their way up the rapids to their ancestral spawning grounds, you’re getting the right idea.

I’m never quite sure what thought goes through someone’s head when they think they are going to fit in the several inches of space between people already standing on the train. They apparently look in the mirror and have some sort of interesting disorder… their body image and the real world are completely at odds. I may be a pasty, white widebody, but I have enough of a concept of my own general dimensions to realize I am not going to fit in the 6-inch gap between some guys left shoulder and the door. Sometimes I wonder what actually goes on in people’s heads when they clearly are doing something stupid, but usually my give-a-shit isn’t strong enough to spend much time pondering on it.