Michael Rossi's Landlording Blog

I started out the day with 17 rents to collect. With the exception of one iffy tenant and a couple of chronic late payers (bless them for the late fees every month), I got all the rents I was expecting today.

My project today was to rebuild the rail for the deck that I rebuilt yesterday. That turned out to be a bigger job than I anticipated as the untreated wood that was used for the rail was in bad shape. So, I rebuilt the entire rail with treated lumber.

I also inspected one of the apartments that will be inspected by Section 8 tomorrow. It was generally in good shape. I had to plug in the exhaust fan in the bathroom, as a working exhaust fan (or a window) is required for the Section 8 inspection. However, this tenant doesn't like the noise that the exhaust fan makes, so she has me unplug it right after the inspector leaves every year.

To my dismay, I also had to put a battery in the smoke detector. You'll notice that I didn't say "replace" the battery, I said put a battery in the smoke detector BECAUSE THE TENANT TOOK THE BATTERY OUT OF IT!!! I am continually shocked at the number of tenants that remove their smoke detector batteries to use them in some other gizmo, like toys and various electrical appliances. I wasn't able to coordinate with the tenant of the other house that will be inspected tomorrow, but she said the only thing she could think of that needed to be done for her inspection was to find her smoke detector!!! She apparently hasn't only taken the battery out of her detector - SHE'S LOST IT!!!

It's a good thing that fires are relatively rare, because otherwise every tenant on the planet would burn to death! I just can't believe that people are so dumb as to remove the smoke detector batteries or remove the entire detector!

Before the inspections tomorrow, I will be in court for the conclusion of my lawsuit against the tenant I evicted last month. We have a default judgment against the tenant who didn't respond and tomorrow's hearing will be to get the amount of the judgment finalized. This idiot tenant is the manager at the local Dollar General and it should be easy to garnish her wages!

I spent today getting ready for a pair of Section 8 inspections on Wednesday. My primary focus was to rehab a second floor deck for one of my apartments. Some previous landlord had overlayed the original deck floor with particle board - UGH! Obviously, particle board is NOT intended to be an exterior material and certainly isn't meant to be an exterior floor decking. Over the years, moisture has caused the particle board to get VERY soft and it was becoming unsafe. So, I removed it and the original decking underneath and replaced it with pressure treated 5/4 inch deck boards. It was a big job, but I got it done. Tomorrow, I will replace the top rail which is also rotted.

Mixed in with working on the deck was day three of rent collection. With August 1st and 2nd being on Saturday and Sunday, I collected a BUNCH of rents today. I would normally have made a mid-day trip to the bank if I collected that much money, but I was just too busy working today. So, by the time the end of the day came, I had a BIG pocket full of cash. I'll take that to the bank in the morning before I do anything else.

The other thing I did today was inspect a 3 bedroom house that I just got back. I received a call from the long term tenant (6 years with me, 9 years in this house) last night, informing me that they had moved. No notice! The good news is that they took almost all their stuff and they cleaned up the house. It will need new carpet, but not much else. This is the first house I've had available in 3 or 4 months, so it should rent quickly. With this kind of demand, I'll be raising the rent also!

You've probably never heard of a Cluster Headache. I've had them on and off since I was a kid and they are brutal. According to the doctors, they are the worst headache (pain wise) that you can have. They're called Cluster Headaches because they occur in clusters, often every day for months. Cluster headaches come on VERY fast. From the first feel of tightening in the head or neck to excruciating pain can take as little as 5 or 10 minutes. I never go anywhere without having medication close by (in my truck, backtop bag, snowboarding bag, bike bag, etc). At the first sign of a cluster headache, I take 4 Ibuprofen and 3 extra strength Excederin. Then, if the pain doesn't ease up within 30 minutes, I take a Flexeril . Flexeril is a nasty drug. It's supposed to be a muscle relaxor and they do a good job of stopping Cluster Headaches, but they make me drowsy and mean. The medicine in combination with the cluster headaches makes me very sensitive to light and especially sound. It's very hard to listen to anyone talk when you have one of these headaches.

I had a VERY bad headache yesterday that didn't want to go away, and I took almost the entire day off (except for a quick trip to sign some papers for "free" government weatherization of one of my apartment buildings). Today, I had one of the worst headaches I've had in years and the first round of drugs Ibuprofen, Excederin, and Flexeril didn't stop it. I had to wait til noon to take the second round. Finally, by 2pm, my headache started to improve and I was able to go into town to do a little work.

What does this story of my headache have to do with the rental property business? EVERYTHING! One of the best things about owning a rental property business is that I can set my own schedule. When I felt bad yesterday, I didn't have to go to work. When I felt bad again today, I didn't have to go to work. I could take off without calling a boss or asking for permission. As they say in those credit card commercials: The freedom to set your own schedule - PRICELESS!

When I did recover this afternoon, I went into town to work on a 1 bedroom apartment that I rented for August 1st. The previous tenant broke the commode and I needed to repair the floor and replace the toilet with a new one. In addition, I had to replace the smoke detector, which the tenant stole and replace the bathroom mirror. I did the smoke detector and mirror first, since they were minor jobs. Then, I removed the old commode and cut out the water damaged section of floor. I used the cardboard from the box for the new commode to make a pattern for the new subfloor, which I will make out of 3/4 inch treated plywood. Due to the late start, that is all I did for today!

They say that when it rains, it pours. If that's true, then today must have been a real storm. I started my work today with a trip to the bank and post office. When I picked up the mail, I had EIGHT letters via certified mail. As a rule, certified mail is generally not a good thing. That was especially true today as they were all lawsuits! UGH!

I posted the story of the first lawsuit about two weeks ago (7/16/09). As you may recall, the city has decided to attempt to collect past due water bills from the landlord, even though the tenant subscribed to the water service. They don't even try to collect from the tenant - they just go after the "RICH" landlord!!! Needless to say, that is COMPLETELY IMMORAL. Although we're headed straight into socialism and the government wants to 'share the wealth' through taxation, it is RIDICULOUS to think that I should pay the tenant's bill for them. What's next? Should I buy their clothes? Should I buy them a car? GIVE ME A BREAK!

If you've read much of my story, then you know that I'm a real jackass when I think I've been wronged. I will NOT give in and pay these bastards! Instead, I will do whatever it takes to fight these frivilous lawsuits. Along with a few other local investors and our REIA, I am trying to organize a lawsuit against the city. We have a big-time, out-of-town attorney coming to the next REIA meeting and we will be organizing as many landlords as possible to be party to the lawsuit. I will be writing a scathing Letter to the Editor and will meet with the news department of the newspaper to have a news article done on this story. As far as I'm concerned, it's going to be war against the morons running the city! They're up for election in November and our REIA already has two members running for city council!

Beyond that bit of cheery news to start my day, I did actually get some work done. I trashed out a vacant 2 bedroom apartment; collected 2 rents; and started working on rehabbing a deck in preparation for a Section 8 inspection next week. I also repaired a broken screen door lock.

After not working much last week, I did get a little work done today. To start, I had a tenant that reported that her kitchen light had gone out. I always suspect that the bulb(s) are burned out when a tenant reports that a light is out, but in this case the tenant swore that the switch didn't feel the same as it felt yesterday (she thought it felt much weaker than yesterday). I have seen switches break on occassion and that is often how they feel. This particular light fixture had four flourescent tubes and the tenant reported that they all were on yesterday. It seemed highly unlikely that all four bulbs burned out at once. So, I removed the switch cover and tested the switch with a meter. The switch was fine. I should have gone with my next inclination. So, I changed the bulbs and the light worked fine. I suspect that three of the bulbs had burned out over time and the last bulb finally burned out yesterday. Obviously, the tenant hadn't realized that only one bulb was working until yesterday and the tenant just imagined that the feel of the switch had changed. No big deal!

My next project was to mow the grass at 2 apartment buildings and then spray weeds. Both of these buildings have small yards and that only took about an hour.

Finally, I was scheduled to meet a woman who was interested in one of my apartments. She is significantly disabled and this is a downstairs apartment. Moreover, her son lived right across the street and he would be able to come over and help her with her daily activities. She liked the apartment and put down a non-refundable deposit so that I would hold the apartment for her. One more apartment rented!

We've all heard that some of the 911 masterminds were subjected to waterboarding in an effort to get critical information from them. By all accounts this water torture was quite successful, yielding critical intelligence. I too have experienced water torture and the bad thing is that I'm not even a terrorist!

Here's what happened. I had some tenants move into a 2-bedroom apartment on Saturday. The downstairs apartment just below this apartment has had an intermittent leak in the ceiling below the bathroom in that upstairs apartment. The downstairs tenant reported that the leak only occurred when the previous upstairs tenant took a shower. So, before the new tenant moved in, I wanted to ensure that the water leak was fixed. To that end, on Friday, I took at look at the bathroom in the upstairs apartment in search of possible sources of leaks.

This bathroom has an old claw foot tub that has a shower enclosure around it. Two curtains enclose the tub. On my inspection, I noticed that the shower curtains didn't quite close on the end of the tub opposite the shower head. If the tenant was taking a shower without the curtains completely closed, that could certainly explain the leak. So, to fix the problem, I added a third curtain to that end of the shower so that it was securely covered. I then ran the shower for a solid 20 minutes and checked the downstairs apartment for leaks. The result was that there was no leak and I believed that I had solved the problem. By running the shower for 20 minutes, I had not only eliminated the possibility that water was getting through the curtain, but I had also eliminated a leak in the drain line. Furthermore, a leak in the water lines was also eliminated because the water lines had been continuously pressurized, even while the apartment was vacant.

On Saturday, the tenant began moving in. Shortly after the tenant began moving, I received a call from the downstairs tenant that her ceiling was leaking. This was particularly puzzling because the tenants weren't even in the apartment yet and certainly hadn't taken a shower. I decided to go take a look at the situation even though it was a weekend, even though the leak was only slowly dripping and the repair could certainly have waited until Monday.

Sure enough, the ceiling in the ground floor apartment was leaking with a slow drip. I checked the bathroom in the upstairs apartment again and didn't find any evidence of a leak. Somewhat frustrated, I decided to cut open the ceiling in the downstairs apartment to see where the leak was coming from. To my absolute amazement, there was a pin-hole leak in one of the hot side waterlines. That certainly was illogical, but that was definitely causing the leak. Why it leaked only intermittently I can not explain. The water line was continuously pressurized and one would think that it would leak continuously!

At any rate, since it was Saturday, I decided to do a temporary repair by installing a stainless steel band clamp designed to repair just such a leak. The water line was very close to the bottom of the floor of the upstairs apartment. To get the clamp to seal correctly, I needed to rotate it slightly by tapping it with a hammer. I didn't tap it very hard, but at that point the water torture began anyway. As I tapped it with a hammer, there was a sudden gush of water. No, the clamp hadn't failed, the torrent of water was coming from several inches above and to the right of the clamp. I ran outside and shut off the water to the entire building. I then went back to the upstairs apartment and the tenant reported that he heard a sound coming from the wall. I touched the wall and it was HOT! The old galvanized water line had broken inside the kitchen wall.

As I began exploring the extent of the issue, it became apparent that all the old galvanized water lines in the apartment were in bad shape. I found several spots that were badly corroded. Worse yet, the pipes all ran under the floor and in the walls. This would be a major project!!! UGH!

So, I started ripping open the walls and floor. Water lines ran behind the built-in kitchen cabinets and I had to demolish them also. It was a huge project!

To make a long story short, I ended up replacing all the water lines, from the basement to and through the second floor apartment. By the time I quit on Saturday afternoon, I had all the water lines (PEX) installed and the water back on to the building.

On Monday, I installed new kitchen cabinets; a new countertop; and new sink. I also did a lot of patching of the walls (where I had ripped out the old water lines). What started out as a minor slow drip rapidly turned into full blown water torture! The good news is that I survived the incident and the new tenants are thrilled to have a brand new kitchen!

Today, I only worked about 2 1/2 hours. I mowed grass at two apartment buildings; sprayed weeds at 3 buildings; and removed several small trees that were a nuisance.