Becoming Landlords

We are now on our way to becoming landlords. If this is a three-step process, we have completed Step One: Purchase House. Other than that we were dealing with a bank that had foreclosed on the property last summer and it went correspondingly slowly, there isn't much to report about Step One. I found the house on Redfin after its listing price dropped by $60k. Suddenly this house wasn't just in our price range - it was a potential steal! We decided there was something wrong with it on preliminary inspection (an agent let us in when we drove by to check it out) and decided to bring in an agent on our end, even though this hadn't been in our plan. He helped us get it inspected and we were then fairly warned that one wall of the house was full of WDO and some portion of it needed to be replaced. Given the asking price on the house, there was no bargaining room with the bank, but even if we do replace the entire south wall, the house will still be a steal, so we signed up. Last week we closed, and now we are the owners of a three-bedroom, two-bath house with a fully fenced yard on a nice quiet street, with little views of the Olympics and Lake Washington. Dog-owning renters, here we come . . . .

Oh, but that means we will need to take care of Step Two on the road to becoming landlords: Fix House.

Step Two began with the most important task of all -- removing the dead battery from the smoke alarm in the master bedroom ceiling. This had not been done before and we had suffered through its every-40-second beeping during our other visits to the house because it was out of reach on a high cathedral ceiling and a ladder was required to get to it. My first order of business upon getting the keys to the house was to load our ladder into the car in order to attack this shrieking fixture of our new place. Battery removal accomplished, we set out to dig up the holly trees planted too close to the rotted side of the house and start cleaning the gutters. Well, "we" is fairly generous. Evan did most of the lopping, sawing, digging and chopping (with an axe) to accomplish the removal of both trees. I did help with removal of dirt around the roots. My jobs were less strenuous but more dangerous: removing 20 foot long blackberry vines shooting over the fence from a monster bunch of stems in the neighbors' yard (interestingly, they don't have a giant blackberry bramble, which you would imagine from the size of the vines climbing the fruit tree in our yard), and climbing to the top step of the ladder (the one that is clearly labeled "DANGER: DON'T STEP HERE!") to clean out as much of the gutter muck as I could reach. Evan held the ladder of course. Ari helped dig up this and that and eventually decided to retire inside to watch Wall-E.

Today, Step Two really got underway as one of our contractors, Tracey, started pulling off siding on the south side of the house and confirmed that the carpenter ants had been having quite a picnic. We were ready for this news, so it will be interesting to talk with the pest control guy who is coming tomorrow about the extent of the infestation. Clearly some portion of the wall will have to be replaced, and we will be finding out this week about the integrity of what's there. In the southwest corner of the house, you can simply put your hand through the siding and right up to the drywall inside (and probably push right through that if you used anything stronger than your finger). But we could see that when we first saw the place, so none of this is a big surprise.

My yucky job for today was to clean the toilets so that Tracey and anyone else working at the house (and we) could use them. Apparently if you leave a toilet unflushed and closed up for six months, a lovely crop of mold will grow all over the seat, around the rim of the bowl, and inside the tank. Luckily it all comes up easily with regular toilet bowl cleaner and a little cleanser with bleach, and I suppose I'd rather clean mold off a toilet than other things you might find while undertaking a toilet cleanup. I took note of the fact that I spent a good 30 minutes cleaning green/gray living organisms from two toilets and pondered my new role as the "non-working" spouse in our family. Would I have been doing this at some point (late at night?) if I were still working? Would we have just paid someone else to do it? Today it just seemed like another in my seemingly never-ending list of domestic chores (how did I manage to run our house when I worked?) and I just smiled about the fact that I was doing exactly what I wanted to further my own ends and not putting up with someone else's demands that I get something done to further theirs.

Today's other task involved getting some sturdy and lockable doors on the storage room that is part of the carport. Tracey suggested I head over to Second Use to see what I could find, and I was rewarded for my trip over to Southpark with the discovery of a lovely set of solid core french doors that were just what we needed -- $40 for the pair! Of course, being in Second Use makes me want to have another house that I will live in myself, or a big remodel project on our house, so that I could wander around in there and find fabulous salvaged items to make my project "green." Or just cool. I'll have to remember to go back there to look for kitchen cabinet pulls when we get around to replacing those in the rental.

We are still a few weeks away from Step Three in this process - finding a tenant.

Wife Beater

"Mom, I love you all the time, no matter what. Even when I hit you." The words of a future spouse abuser? I hope not. Just the latest cuteness from my little guy, whose "guns" this week were shooting "love" and "Thomas trains." I guess the lessons of Valentine's Day have carried over into this new week.