Well, all I can say is that being a landlord is certainly a mixed bag, and an education.
Let’s see, I left off last time I mentioned this subject with the house full of furniture and Jim off to Oklahoma to see what, if anything, our tenants intended to do about the situation.
I guess Jim showing up on the west side of Oklahoma made the guy take notice, especially when he was informed of our intention to sell everything in the house on or about May 10 if he didn’t get it out of there. He promised faithfully that he would be there May 1 to get his stuff, and that he would pay us what he owed us at that time. He actually showed up on May 3 along with a helper, and the two of them busted their asses hauling all the furniture off to a storage facility. He also provided us with a check (postdated of course) for all that he owed us. In all fairness, this man has never given us a check that was bad on the date it was written for, so I believe that the arrears will be made up.
However, the propane tank is empty, so there is no hot water across the street, which makes cleaning something of a pain. We are having 150 gallons delivered Friday, which will cost us right around $300. When new people move in, they will have to pay us for what is left, which will be most of it, so we will recoup that money eventually.
Jim has been cleaning out the basement, which apparently contained a lot of stuff that the tenants just didn’t care about. His comment to me was that we will never have to ever buy another extension cord, since there were about 25 of them down there. We also discovered that sometime in the past the tenants decided that it would be a good thing to have some chickens, and built a very nice chicken coop in the basement, which is still there. Interestingly enough, the conditions they provided for their chickens were better than what they required for themselves.
What I mean by that is, they actually changed the straw and cleaned the chicken coop out. But upstairs, where they lived, they apparently never once bothered to vacuum the house. This is what it looked like in the living room.
Weren’t they considerate? See all the spots where they had area rugs to protect the carpet? When I vacuumed the house, which took me four hours the first time and two hours the second time, I collected over 5 gallons of dust and dog hair. I had to clean the filter on my vacuum cleaner 5 times during the process. It smells a lot less like “Dog” now.
Just for your joyous delectation, I am including a close up shot of what it looked like where their couch used to be.
At least the carpet wasn’t filthy there. We had a professional cleaner come in to give us an estimate of how much it was going to cost us to clean those carpets. Her comment was, “I’ve been doing this for 25 years and this is the dirtiest carpet I have ever seen.” She will come with her equipment tomorrow to ascertain whether it is possible to clean this carpet. If the process will work, it will cost us $300 at a minimum. If her process, which is a dry one, will not work, then we will have to get a wet carpet cleaning process in to scrub it.
Hopefully it will come clean — it was brand new Stainmaster carpet 5 years ago, and it is entirely possible that it will give up all that dirt. That is what I am visualizing, anyway. Replacing the carpet is a major big deal. It cost us over $6,000 when we put it in in 2005, I’m pretty sure carpet has not gone down in price since then. It was supposed to last 20 years. Sigh.
What is odd is that the bathrooms were spic and span, the kitchen was clean, the stove absolutely spotless, the cabinets and closets were clean too. So what was with the carpet, anyway?
The real irony of all that is, the lady of the house has allergies, respiratory problems and asthma. These problems were sufficient to cause her husband to purchase and install special HEPA filters on the furnace, but apparently they weren’t doing the trick because the furnace was completely blocked off from the house by plastic and tape over all the vents. Plus, she had installed several “air freshener” emitters (chemical poisoning units) in the house in an attempt to counteract the dog scent. Additionally, there were fabric softener sheets distributed all around the place; apparently in the fond belief that this would also help counteract the dog scent.
Frankly, if I was suffering from respiratory difficulties and allergies, I would have vacuumed my house more often than once every three years.
You know he took those area rugs, which were just as filthy as the carpet they didn’t cover, and hauled them off to Oklahoma. Wonder how her allergies are going to be when they get flopped down in her new environment?
Jim wants to send him a “Congratulations” card: It would read like this: “Dear So and so and Ms. So and so, In the opinion of the carpet cleaner, you have managed to produce the dirtiest carpets she has ever seen in her 25 years of cleaning houses and rental units. Congratulations! Dirtiest carpets ever. You should be proud.”
On a more positive note, the garden is looking wonderful. The wild flags have started blooming.
I love how you end on a positive note
I know different people have different standards to each other, but as you say, it is amazing how they can have different standards within the same environment.
Why on earth wouldn’t someone vacuum? Unless they were going to leave the whole house dirty, which they didn’t . . .
Living with dirt is the one thing I simply cannot, cannot understand. I think it corresponds directly with the kind of random crisis behavior you saw in your tenants: not just effect but cause. I think if you ignore dirt long enough you get increasingly comfortable with ignoring other things that are crying out to be dealt with.
I guess they’re not goners, because of the clean kitchen and so on, but then I’ve seen similar weirdness: I’ve known more than one guy whose grooming and dress standards were right out of GQ but whose living quarters, when I finally saw them, were appalling enough to sever a nascent relationship.
I don’t know if you’d ever see any result, but I’d bill them for the carpet.
Ugh! Your post reminded me of the days when I rented my houses. I was lucky in that I didn’t have too much trouble with my tenants but always was a big job to clean up. And I was lucky in that I was only a couple miles away from those structures. Glad those days are behind me. Hope all goes well on that front.
Your flags are looking great. I have some but haven’t seen them bloom yet.
I’ve had houses treated worse than this, but when the carpets are messed like this, the stench in the house is just revolting. I have a carpet cleaner guy in the area who has worked miracles with this sort of thing, but isn’t cheap to pay someone to clean this sort of filth out of the carpets.