​Ups and downs of Real Estate

Ups and downs of Real Estate

                                           “Don’t fight the wave, ride the wave”

Its 7am on a Saturday and my handy man is suppose come to my property to help me resolve my frozen pipe problem and to do a couple of other things around the house before the tenants move in (Yes, I finally got tenants). I get a call at around 7:15am and it’s my handy man. He tells me one of his clients has a more pressing issue at their property so he asked if he can come at 2pm instead. I let him know that it was fine and my girlfriend and I decided to take advantage of the time and complete some errands till the handy man shows up. Before we left, we decided to open the bath knob a bit just in case the ice melts in the pipes. Having water running would help defrost them a bit faster. We only slightly opened it just to make sure nothing crazy happens while we are gone.

It’s about 1pm and right before I drop off my girl in the nail salon, I ask her if she has enough charge on her phone. She tells me her phone is at 10% so we decided to stop by the house to pick up a charger. We had bags to take inside so we decided to bring some upstairs since we were here already. We open the door and everything seems normal. We are house hacking but because our tenants haven’t moved in yet, I always open the rental unit’s door just to make sure everything is ok. When I open the door all I see is water dripping down the ceiling, landing on the brand new hardwood floors of my rental unit and down to the basement. “Holy S!@#” I yell and I am guessing my girl heard it because she ran straight to the bathroom to check out the problem. I run to the basement and shut off the main water valve. I call up my handy man and tell him “I need you here now!!”(I never speak like that so he knew it was real) I run a quick checklist on all the major things in my basement like both hot water tanks and my tenant’s furnace and it checks out. I run upstairs to the tenants unit, I run to the closet and grab some towels and buckets to stop the water from messing up the hardwood floors. Once that was under control, I ran upstairs to figure out what caused all of this.

I get to the upstairs unit where we are currently staying and see that the bathtub is full of water. We realized something is wrong with the drain but there wasn’t any time to think about that because right now our only concern was taking all that water from the bathtub and dumbing it into the toilet. Once we did that we started looking around to see what could have caused this and luckily we counted out a broken pipe because there wasn’t any signs of that. We then checked the tubs drain and there you have it. It was clogged. We got really angry for a minute and then looked at each other and just started laughing.

Once my handy man came, we decided to break the wall where the pipes were to see why this was happening and we realized that these pipes weren’t insulated and neither was the wall. It cost me a lot of money but it was well worth it. We ended up replacing all the damages. Everything looks even nicer than before. We insulated everything so we shouldn’t deal with this at all.

It is real easy for someone to have something like this happen and give up on real estate but if you learn that there is a positive in everything then guess what, you can never lose. You can only learn or win. There will be ups and there will be downs but that’s ok. We (my girlfriend and I) plan for things to go wrong so when it does, we aren’t freaking out. Just last week, we finally locked in some tenants for this unit that was vacant for 40 days. We were super excited about that and a week later we have this to deal with. Once again, as long as you plan for things to go wrong, I think I and whoever is reading this will be ok. Well that’s my story for the week and I’ll keep everyone posted on my journey as a new landlord!!!! See ya.