Art Deco Lights for the Pantry and the Front Entryway, and a New To Do List for the Tenant Unit

I swear, these are the last ones... Honest.

Well, unless you're going to get all technical on me and count this one, too.


The top pair of starry lights came from a deco-era theatre in Chicago that was torn down. They will light the pantry of each unit at The Box House. At present, there is just a bare bulb in each.

The bottom light, which I mentioned a few days ago that I was drooling over, is going to go in the tenants' unit. The current tenants are closing on their house in May, so we're looking to rent the unit out starting June 1st. It looks like we'll be able to get some work done on the unit before the next set of tenants move in. Our short list includes:

• Rewiring the light in the stairwell outside their unit
• Rewiring the dining room and living room
  
• Replacing the light in the entryway
• Replacing the light in the dining room
• Replacing the light in the pantry
• Adding a fan light in the living room
• Painting (using Venetian Plaster) the dining room, entryway, and living room. I think we're going to use a seafoam in the dining room, a pale aqua in the living room, and a creamy color in the entryway
• Adding push button switches to some of the rooms
• Stripping the sconce lights in two of the bedrooms of the layers of white paint

We've been asked why we're putting such effort into a rental unit. I guess there are a couple of reasons.

For one, The Box House is a two-flat that we live in. It's our home as well as an investment property. We'd like to upgrade and restore both units along the same lines. A nicer unit will attract good tenants, ones we hope will have a similar appreciation for vintage detail. Sharing a two-flat with another family is quite different than living in an apartment building. It's a more intimate relationship, because you always run into them on the stairway or in the laundry room. We want to attract a tenant who appreciates the building in the same way that we do. It takes some effort to find such people, but this will be our fifth go-around as landlords (twice for the condo, once for Mom's house, and this will be our second time at The Box House) and we (think we) have a good sense of who will make a good tenant.

Second, improving, upgrading, and restoring the unit upstairs will only add value to our home.

And finally, when the other properties sell, when the basement here is finished into a "third unit," and when we find ourselves in between occupancies, Ted and I may move to the upstairs unit. It was the original plan, before everything got modified. So the changes we make I'll eventually get to appreciate on a day to day basis--even if it's four or five years down the road.

Our First Year as Landlords, Part 2

Seriously. Look at that fan. WTF?

When we rented out the condo last fall, this fan was in good shape. Maybe it wasn't the most stylish ceiling fan, but it worked. It had a globe over the light bulbs. It wasn't hanging from the ceiling all dangly-like.

Our tenants never told us they broke it. We discovered it for ourselves a few weeks ago, when we were showing the place to prospective new tenants. There is a dent in the wood floor below, directly beneath the fan. And no glass globe in sight. I'd have been willing to forgive it as an accident if they'd told us about it. We'd have replaced the fan if they'd let us know it was broken. But no. Not a peep, not a hint.

(Not even from their fourth, illegal roommate, who was sitting in the living room as we showed the place, trying not to make eye contact with us. He knew that we knew he had been living there this summer; but from our perspective, it wasn't worth mentioning just a few weeks before the end of the lease period.)

The fan was bad enough. But there were other issues, such as ash and charcoal left in the fireplace.

Large chips in the venetian-plastered walls...


Black mold in the shower...

And pubic hair and assorted bodily fluids on the not-inexpensive wood-and-chrome toilet seats...

There were red beard hairs in the bathroom drawers and toothpaste stains on the marble counters. The kitchen cabinets were splattered with food and the oven hadn't been cleaned of grease from the bottom. The baseboards, fan blades, air returns, and window sills were thick with dust. The front sliding glass door was off its track and the back door was scraped from the security dowel rod they had wedged into place. The hundred-year-old mirror that I specifically left a bottle of beeswax for to keep the wood properly conditioned was splattered with zit filling and a bit dry. And the beeswax was nowhere in sight, they had packed it and took it with them.

I could go on and on, but you more or less get the point.

The funny thing is, they thought they had cleaned it adequately. They cleaned the refrigerator and microwave, dusted the obvious flat surfaces--counters, tables--and swept the floors. But that's it.

Last fall, when Ted and I moved out, we had scrubbed every surface till it shown, cleaned out the fireplace, conditioned the marble and granite surfaces, even dusted the flippin' fan blades one by one. The place was like new. (In fact, we had a housing agent look at it last year and he thought it was new.)

I don't think I'm being too anal in my wish to have the condo returned in the same condition the tenants received it. However, while there was more wear and tear in one year then Ted and I caused in six, none of the damage is irreversible, expect perhaps the floors. There are more scuffs and scratches in them, despite the fact that the renters were given explicit instructions on floor care and despite the fact I left them felt furniture guards (giving them instructions in the lease that they were to use them on all furniture). There are still a couple of deep scratches.

But I guess that's what deposit money is for.

From the one-month's deposit they gave us, we purchased a new fan (a modest one on clearance from Home Depot), among other things:

And altogether, we spent about seven hours cleaning and disinfecting the unit for the next set of tenants, who were moving in the following day. And the old tenants will be charged for that, too. I looked up the general cleaning rates online, so they'll get billed at slightly less than that because we did the cleaning ourselves.

We're holding back just enough of their deposit to cover actual expenses. But I really, really hate cleaning up someone else's pubic hair, and feel like charging a punitive fee for that. Ugh. I'm still grossed out at the thought.

But our tenants should consider themselves lucky that we were renting to them, and not some other landlord. Many landlords run a scam when it comes to deposits, keeping more money than necessary, which makes all landlords look bad.

The owners of the other condo unit in our building that is being rented out, the ones I bitched about in my other landlord post for being terrible absentee owners, kept 90% of their tenants' deposit, after waiting six months to give it back to them. Ninety percent. Granted, they left it a mess, with holes in the wall, etc., but those landlords didn't actually clean, repair, or repaint anything, to the best of my knowledge.

Now, if I actually liked their tenants, if I didn't think they were a pain in the asterisk, often making life difficult for others in the building, I might tell them that what their landlords did was illegal. In Illinois, tenants are protected by the Illinois Security Deposit Interest Act, the Security Deposit Return Act, and, in this case, the City of Chicago Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance, which states: "the tenant shall be awarded damages in an amount equal to two times the security deposit plus interest" if a landlord fails to comply with the law. Waiting six months to return a mere fraction of the deposit, and not providing a written notice within 30 days, means that these tenants are likely entitled double their full deposit back plus court costs should they take them to small claims court.

But I didn't like those tenants. So they can find all this out on their own. I'm just sayin'.

For our own protection, because Ted and I will be withholding a portion of our renters' deposit, we photographed everything we did with before and after pictures. Right down to the beard hairs in the drawers and the black mold. They won't be able to argue it. We have photos of everything as it was last fall, too, when they took up occupancy.

I know it sounds like all of this is a big hassle, and part of me wishes we could sell the condo in this bad economy. But since we can't, I'm not really going to complain about what amounts to just a few days of work a year. (Although friends of ours who are landlords say that's just because we haven't had the tenants from hell yet!) It's not a bad gig, and the rent covers most expenses as we wait for the housing market to improve. (Please, God, it has to!)

So, gentle readers out there who are also landlords, what is your worst tenant experience?

Our First Year as Landlords, Part 1

Whew! It's been a very hectic week. I apologize for the lack of any sort of blogging, but we've been busy little worker bees.

It's hard to believe, but it's already been a year since we moved out of the condo and rented it to a group of 22 year olds. It was a risky venture, and we were a little nervous to discover what condition they would leave it in upon check out. While they seemed like clean cut kids and their credit and jobs checked out, we heard from the other owners in the building that our tenants would sometimes have loud parties (no surprise, they're fresh out of college) and--perhaps most unforgivable--they befriended the only other tenants in the building, who were also 22. Two flats of younguns, twice the chaos--especially when they began to date one another. Drama, drama, drama.

I can't really get upset about the partying or socializing, however, as long as they respond to neighbors' requests to keep down the noise and take it inside when necessary, and not destroy our place or the yard. I've attended some very noisy and disruptive parties in that building in owner-occupied units, so it's hypocritical, I think, to take on a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do attitude.

Of the six units in the building, two are rentals, including ours, which is on the top floor. The other owners who are renting out their unit bought it strictly as an investment, with plans to flip it. Silly them. Flipping condos like that is not the smartest of investments to begin with, and with the real estate market tanking these last few years, I'm sure they're losing money. We've only met those owners once; they're very much absentee landlords. They've never lived in the unit, they pay their assessments late, don't show up for meetings, and don't respond to their tenants let alone to any of the other owners. They make renting out our unit more difficult, because a lot of the frustration and resentment other owners may feel about there even being rentals in the first place (there was no rule in our condo docs against it) gets dumped on our shoulders. In other words, we get a lot of general snarkiness thrown our way, even though our tenants are behaving themselves.

Anyway, our tenants--BFFs from college--decided they a) didn't want to live together anymore and b) wanted to move to Lincoln Park or Lake View, two Chicago neighborhoods chock full of other twenty-somethings and a booming nightlife. So we needed to find new tenants for the unit.

We did the usual advertising on Craig's List, and got a smattering of applicants. Overall, not as many as we hoped for, particularly as October 1st is the second-busiest moving day in Chicago. Our best guess is that with the economy, people aren't switching apartments much. In fact, I noticed that the streets weren't clogged with rental moving trucks like they usually are this time of year. We also listed the unit with Apartment Finders and other such services; they didn't bring us a single applicant, which is just as well, since the fee for finding someone is one month's rent. Sure, they do the credit checks and employment checks, but that's very steep.

We did eventually find another trio to take over the occupancy. They are older than our last group, closer to thirty, and are more laid back and low key. I'm more comfortable with this group overall.

I'm dragging a bit tonight, as I spent the day at Mom's house painting--and this after a rather party-harty sort of weekend to celebrate Ted's 40th birthday. So I'll chronicle the condo's condition in tomorrow's post, the kinds of things we discovered and surprises we encountered after we checked them out, and what we did/will do differently this time around for the new group. All in all, this first year has served as an excellent trial run for landlording.