My Guy and I have been rehabbing a house. Not our house. Our rental house. The house he lived in before we got married, the house we couldn't sell during the recession and so have been renting for lo these long six years. The house we very much want to sell now.
The tenants left the house ... asunder? That's too Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-musical kind. Trashed? That sounds a bit too punk rock. Lemme put it this way: In the midst of arguing with my husband about why she should get the entirety of her deposit back, the tenant mentioned off-hand, as you do, that her 4-year-old had been using the carpet in one of the bedrooms as a toilet.
She wants her deposit back. Every last cent.
Holes in walls. A youngster who is now evidently quite adept at signing his name, seeing as how he practiced - in marker - on most of the walls in the house. Trash, trash everywhere.
 |
| Nothing to see here. Just a wall. Like all the other walls. |
We are doing most of the work ourselves. Everything takes longer than we think it will. And the work we are contracting out costs more than originally anticipated. Like, say, the floors. Why, just this morning, the flooring crew showed up and informed us that instead of taking one day, the job would take three. And they'll need to remove the kitchen cabinets, even though the new countertop was just installed. (You know, the countertop we had to replace because the tenant didn't think the leaky kitchen faucet was worth mentioning, but the entire counter ended up rotten and moldy? That countertop?) Oh, and this whole deal will move the carpet install back anywhere from three days to a week. And this whole thing will cost us 1500 more American dollars.
I broke. I'm day drinking.
I'm trying to view this as some sort of lesson. Mostly, the lesson seems to be, "Don't anyone make fun of me when I randomly clean because that is the only thing that separates us from savages. The lack of deep grime is what differentiates women from beasts."
I've been trying to look kindly upon our tenants. If you don't come from a clean home, I guess you don't know how to keep a clean home. Surely they have many other redeeming qualities.
Right now, the only redeeming qualities I have come up with are:
- Don't have cats.
- Didn't leave a sex dungeon for us to clean up.
I'm hoping this list will grow, but right now? It's what I've got.
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