Deck Repair Fail at the Ol' Rental Unit

I've been sitting on these pictures for a while, because frankly, I've been a little embarrassed about the whole thing. But a few months have passed, so I can laugh about it now. Kinda.

It started with the previous tenants. They were good guys, this was just one of those things. Ashes from their grill spilled onto the deck, burning a hole in it. (This is why the city of Chicago forbids such grills on wood decks, although everyone does it anyway.) The guys fessed up and agreed to pay for the damages.

Although we've never done a deck repair before, it didn't look like it would be that big a deal. Certainly not worth hiring a contractor for. Just pop out the old boards and nail the new ones in place.

First board off, no problem.

Second board off, just as quickly and cleanly. Both were taken down to the dumpster, broken down, and tossed in.

New boards were put in place.

 

So did you catch it? Did you see where we went wrong and somehow completely failed to notice it, even though I'm snapping away with the camera?

Yes. We took out the wrong board. I wish you could see the look on Ted's face at this point when we realize it, but our light was fading fast and I didn't use the flash.

In our defense, I'd like to say we were overtired. Tenant transition is always a hectic time, and between that and our day jobs we hadn't slept much the couple days before. But still, really. What kind of home improvement aficionados are we?

We couldn't even go downstairs and get the old, undamaged board, because we had already broken it down. Back to Home Depot we went, and eventually sorted it all out. And it looks great.

Replacing deck boards really is very easy. But I can understand now why people will write on their bodies in Sharpie marker which body part is to be operated on before going into surgery. You just never know.

Box House - Another View

The seven-year-old son of a friend recently finished a project in school. Using burlap, felt and glue, he was told to do a picture of a house he knew. He did ours. Not having a piece of felt big enough, he used several for the attached porch. The small square in the lower right corner is the garage. He even included my red van parked in front. Not wanting the burlap to unravel, I stitched his picture to a quilted block. It's hanging in the back porch for all to see.

Here's a picture of the house to compare with his.

Pretty good job!

Our Wood Floors Are Ruined. Is it Chocolate or is it Poo?

Oh, it's poo.

If you haven't been reading the blog for long, I'll try to catch you up. We bought the Box House at the end of 2007 just as the real estate market began to crash. The plan was to sell our condo in Chicago and my mom's house in the suburbs and move into our new two-flat, where we would begin work happily restoring it. Unfortunately, it didn't happen like that. Despite being on the market for over a year, we didn't get a single offer. And so, like many others, we found it best to rent out the properties rather than leave them empty, sucking up money and resources.

So now, in total, we're renting out three units: the condo, Mom's house, and the unit upstairs from us at The Box House. Overall, the landlord gig isn't a bad one. Sometimes you have to deal with goofy requests and strange personalities, but on the day-to-day, you hardly ever hear from tenants. And there is the benefit of having someone else pay the mortgage (at least in part). You can put up with all kinds of minor issues then.

Up to now, the worst we had experienced was broken fixtures, banged up walls, and tenants leaving without cleaning anything. Then, at the end of May this year, one of our old neighbors called to tell us that there were pit bulls living in the condo, as well as people who weren't on the lease. At least two more individuals than we knew about.

We went over right away, and discovered that there were in fact dogs on the premises. We were told they belonged to a guest staying with them, and would be out shortly--the dogs and the guest. Overall, the place looked to be in good shape. Everything seemed in order. Still, we insisted the dogs and people leave by the end of the week, and they said okay. They had been reasonable tenants up to that point, so we weren't terribly worried. So this should have ended it.

Then we received another call from the neighbors, who said, "I hate to tell you this, but the dogs are still there." Boy! That was irritating, to say the least. Again the tenants were told in no uncertain terms that the dogs had to go; we got a song and dance saying that the guest was looking for a new job and a new apartment of her own, and had trouble finding a place to board the dogs. Too bad, not our problem. The dogs had to go, we said, and pinned them down to agree. Our mistake this time was that we did not put it in writing for them. When the dogs were still there a week later, we looked into starting eviction proceedings and realized that in our state, we had to give the tenants a notice of violation to the terms of the lease; they were then allowed 10 days to correct the problems. In this case, the actual violations were illegal occupants and unauthorized animals.

That shook them up a bit. But did it get rid of the dogs or the occupant not on the lease? No. Everything just snowballed from here. In the days that followed, one of the tenants up and left the state, giving no notice to his roommates, leaving no forwarding address, etc. Another of the three legal occupants, we discovered, wasn't even living there and hadn't been for a while, although she was still paying rent. The third roommate was "never around because she had to work all the time." This left the primary occupant of the unit someone who was "a guest" and who would "be leaving any day now" for her own place.

Unacceptable. We wanted them all out. Now. However, in real life eviction is not as easy as it is in the movies. You don't call the sheriff and have them out on the street the next day, no matter how they're violating the terms. You have to go to court, it could take months, and in the meantime they could decide to stop paying rent and not leave the unit. Essentially squatting. This was the beginning of July, and we felt the best course of action might be to simply come to an agreement to end the lease early. Which we did. We negotiated an early release for the end of the month, had them sign off on it, were told the "guest" and her dogs would be out by the 15th because she found a new place, and even found a new set of tenants to take over the lease for August.

However, we did do another walk through to confirm that there was no dog damage. While it was a bit untidy, there were no obvious issues.

Well, comes time to check out this week and this is what we find (and remember, this all happened within four weeks' time):

Puddles of dog urine so thick and heavy in the blue bedroom that the floor boards are soaked through and lifting. The damaged area covers most of the floor space, and no doubt goes down to the subfloor. The smell is overwhelming. We found a urine soaked mattress beside the dumpster. Our guess is that the illegal tenant had locked the dogs in this room for extended periods with nothing but a mattress on the floor. (This had previously been the bedroom of the tenant that took off.) The mattress trapped the puddles on the floor, causing all the damage. Another section of damaged floor:

I'm not sure what the dark blue stain on the wall is. Everything in here smells like urine, so I can't tell for sure if this is urine or not. But that is definitely poo in the middle of it.

Both bathrooms were complete biohazards; the bathtub itself was clogged and we still need to snake it:

Poo:
When I last saw this couch--just a few weeks ago, remember--it was old, but decent enough that I'd sit on it:

It smelled horrible. When we lifted it up, there was another huge puddle of dog urine and all this crap:

Including a bottle of nail polish, chewed open and hardened into a glob:

Despite the fact that our lease says no wax on the hardwood floors, they had all been waxed. Although why someone who leaves dog urine soaking into the floor would choose to wax, I'll never know. It was so slick in spots we were sliding along on the floor.

It was a "partially furnished" apartment, and my $250 vintage rug that I had left to protect the floor from scratches from the bar stools was crunched up in a ball on the deck. It was urine and rain soaked, smelled like rotten fish, and severely faded from the elements. It is unsalvageable.

The garage door frame was busted, and there was a huge puddle of oil on the floor where their spot was, bad enough that the neighbor who shares this garage slipped in it last week:

More urine on the wall:

Nothing in the kitchen had been cleaned, there was mildewing laundry in the washer, holes in the window screens from dog claws, and drawers full of rotten vegetables in the fridge. It was one hell of a freak show.

And all I could do when I first saw it was cry.

This place had been our home. I loved living here, and I hated to see it like this.

And then I got really, really angry, and I kicked some boxes around while cursing.

And then, when we both calmed down, we photographed every square inch, brought in three neighbors to witness the damage, and contacted the one tenant who wasn't living there anymore, but who was paying rent. She's pretty much as shocked, horrified, and disgusted as we are, and plans to pay for the damages. Still, there was no way this place was going to be ready for the new tenants.

We ended up hiring a cleaning service. A crew of four men was here for nearly five hours--that's how long it took to clean and sanitize it. (Mighty Maids / Mighty Men of Chicago, if you're interested. 773-472-7711) They rocked. We then spent a full day making repairs, sanding patching walls, fixing doors, etc. We discovered other little things. The stack of service manuals for all the appliances that we kept in the utility closet (and had pointed out to the tenants) is gone, presumably thrown away. There are four wheels missing on the dishwasher rack. We found one down the hall, another in the sink, and are still missing two. One of the nightstands I left is missing. Ninety percent of the light bulbs were missing or blown out, and the remaining few had a wattage way too high for the fixtures. Lucky they didn't set the place on fire. (Again, they were told this when they moved in, and it's in their lease.)

The blue room is still uninhabitable, and we're calling floor companies to come in and give us estimates on ripping it out and replacing it. The new tenants have started moving in, and we're lucky in that we know them already, and they're more than happy to work with us on getting the place in 100% ship shape order. It's going to be a hassle.

What's most disappointing is that we write a pretty tough lease with contingencies for all sorts of situations. We screen our tenants really well, checking in with past landlords, calling to verify their jobs and length of employment, running credit checks. What we can't predict are things going sour in the relationships those people have with others, when roommates get into fights, move out, leave the state, abandon their property, invite friends to stay with them. A person can have a decent credit rating, but still be a liar. It's easier when you're living in the same building where you're renting out a unit, but when you're a couple miles away? You rely on what you can glean from periodic visits to "perform maintenance" and you are grateful for your friends and former neighbors in the area who act as watchdogs.

It's just frustrating that when you do discover a bad situation, you can't immediately correct it. Just Google "tenants from hell" sometime and see what you come up with.

I wish this flippin' economy would turn around and we can sell some property.

Condo Tenant Transition

It's been a really rough 48 hours, and I am oh-so-glad to be home. Ted and I were at the condo to check out the old tenants, possibly do a bit of extra cleaning, and then check in the new set of tenants. What we discovered when we got to the unit was a landlord's worst nightmare. I'll blog all about it tomorrow when I'm feeling a little more focused, but thought I'd leave y'all with this image this evening.

Yes, that's dog urine* dripping down the wall. Gag. Now envision that across the entire condo.

Why oh why am I being plagued by dog urine lately?

*Clicking the image to enlarge it is not recommended. It's really, really gross. Just be thankful you can't smell it.

Renovation Recap, New Tenants In

I barely crawled out of bed yesterday. I think all the stress of prepping the tenants' unit, getting ready for and taking a week-long vacation, and juggling real work had caught up with me. I woke up with one whopper of a cold: scratchy eyes, sore throat, stuffed head, congestion, the works. So I dosed up on Nyquil, didn't get out of my jammies, and brought one of my client projects to bed with me, although I didn't actually get much work done on it.

I'm feeling much, much better today, and rather self-satisfied with all the work we did accomplish. We pretty much hauled butt on the tenants' unit, taking advantage of a few weeks of down time between tenants.

In three weeks, this is what we did. There are links to some of the projects:

Bedroom #1
Updated electrical, including new wiring and installation of a reproduction push button switch
Stripped the original sconces, refinished them in silver, and rewired them
Painted the room blue using Behr Venetian plaster
Replaced all switch plate and socket covers

Bedroom #2
Updated electrical, including new wiring and installation of a reproduction push button switch
Stripped the original sconces, refinished them in gold, and rewired them
Installed new smoke detector

Bathroom
Repaired door so that it closes
Recaulked tub

Kitchen
Installed new lock on door (the old one was unsafe, and not up to code, requiring a key to lock from the inside)

Dining Room
Updated electrical, including new wiring and installation of a reproduction push button dimmer switch
Replaced light fixture with a vintage chandelier, which Ted rewired before installing
Painted the room Tuscan Tan using Behr Venetian plaster

Living Room
Updated electrical
Found the original light switch hidden in the wall, and restored
Found the original sconce boxes hidden in the wall, and restored
Rewired and installed a set of sconces, circa 1920, found on eBay
Installed new ceiling fan, where there was no other light fixture
Painted the room using Behr Venetian plaster

Basement
Cleared one of the rooms in the basement to create a storage area for tenants

Garage
Although not related to the tenants, we cleared a lot of crap out of the garage

Garden
I created two new flower beds along the front of the house, pictures to come

Whew! I think I need another vacation!

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few things on the list, so I'll let Mom and Ted chime in to remind me. Now that the new tenants are in, we can refocus our attention to other portions of the house. Upcoming projects include Mom's bedroom, installing two new doors in the basement, and clearing out (the goal) 30% of the junk in the basement as we reorganize all storage areas. Oh, and Ted and I have hopes of moving to the basement soon. We'll see how that goes.

There's Gold in Them Thar...Rooms

I am soooo pleased with how the stripped and refinished sconces turned out for the tenant unit. They look great against the blue Venetian Plaster walls.

They look so good, in fact, that I decided to strip and refinish the matching set in another of the bedrooms in the tenants' unit.

In the process, I found a paint even more dreadful than the dreaded fleshy peach--the innocent baby blue. So far, it's taken four stripping cycles to remove it--each time leaving the stripper on for 10 times longer than the directions call for.

This does not bode well for the task ahead--removing the same blue paint from all the trim in my bedroom. It seems the previous owners worked with monochromatic color themes: everything blue, everything peach, everything white. Whenever we discover one color of paint, there's a 100 percent certainty we'll find it in every other room.

Slowly, slowly the stripper worked its way through the paint, while I puttered in the garden.

This set was originally gold, without any polychrome, so I refinished them in gold again, although I chose a reddish-gold instead of a yellow-gold. I drybrushed on a base coat using a product called Rich Gold from Sophisticated Finishes, and then did a top coat of an antiquing liquid from the same line called Black Tint. It's hard to tell in this photo, which was taken at 2 o'clock in the morning, but the finish looks appropriately old, and matches the gold finish on our 85-year-old electric fireplace--a close enough match that most people probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between vintage and new finsh. I'll try to get a better picture in the daytime, as we finish up with the last few projects on the tenants' unit.

(Special thanks to Ted for rewiring all of these fixtures!)

Stripping for the Tenants

I tried, honestly I did, to strip the sconces with an environmentally friendly product.

Truth be told, I hadn't even planned on stripping these quite yet. They belong in one of the bedrooms of the tenants' unit, and I thought they could wait.

But after seeing them against the freshly plastered blue wall, I couldn't stand how ugly they looked. It bothers me when people don't remove switch plates, socket covers, and the like when repainting. This is always the result: a fixture with three or four coats of thick paint on it. It was obvious these were lovely at one time, but the paint had obscured all the details.

And so, despite the fact that we have a to-do list as long as my arm, I threw one more project in the mix. I first tried to remove the paint with Franmar's SoyGel, a product I've had mixed results with. It did well on the first layer of off white, and the underlying rancid butter yellow. But then I came across the dreaded peach enamel.

At one time, everything in the house was painted a gawd-awful peach. Long ago, long before Crayola came out with its Multicultural Crayon set, they had a crayon named "flesh."

That's what color I'm talkin' about. Picture it on wood trim, on walls, on light fixtures, on the ceilings. Oh yeah, we've encountered it on everything. Everything I've attempted to strip in The Box House has a coat of this enamel hidden somewhere in the layers. And SoyGel can't cut through, not even if I leave it on way longer than required, not even when I place a sheet of plastic wrap on it and leave it sitting for days. It won't budge. And our Silent Paint Remover? That starts smoking almost immediately when it encounters this paint. I'm not sure what it is, but this paint's evil, and has nearly reduced me to tears many a time.

So for the sconces, I gave up and used the super-toxic-strip-through-anything stripper from Home Depot. And, thank heaven, it worked, because I'm dealing with a tight schedule for this project. But I do feel a little guilty.

The original finish was gold, but we decided silver would look better on the blue wall, so I drybrushed it with American Accents craft and hobby enamel. I'm fairly happy with the results, because all of the rich detail is still visible. If I had more time, I'd try to add a faux antique finish, but we need to get these back up on the wall ASAP.

Progress on the Tenant Unit

We interrupt the Road Trip Recap to bring you a few pictures of what we've been doing to the tenants' unit this week.

We've had almost a two-week gap between occupancies, so we took the opportunity to replace some of the very scary cloth wiring:

Seriously, this crumbling old LIVE wiring was going through boxes that were hidden within the wall, stuffed with newspaper and plastered over more than sixty years ago. Why the Box House hasn't burned down already, I'll never know. It's such a relief to have this replaced.

Mom and Ted did most of the actual rewiring. We correctly guessed that there were sconce boxes in the wall above the fireplace, based on our house forensics downstairs. As with our living room, the tenants' living room also had major work done in the 1940s, where the ceiling fixture was removed and capped, the sconces were removed and plastered over, and the light switch plastered over. All that remained were five wall sockets. We found and opened everything.

While they rewired, I painted. Actually, I used Behr's Venetian Plaster. It is applied with a trowel, takes forever, but the results are fantastic--lots of lovely texture and it hides all kinds of lumps and bumps in the plaster and lathe walls.

We chose colors from the stained glass windows in the living room:

Okay, to tell the truth, we chose colors we liked, and then said, "Hey, did you notice how well these colors match the glass?"

What is not noticeable right away is that the previous owners did not tape the wood trim when they painted the rooms white. There's paint splashed on all the woodwork. I'm still trying to figure out what to use to remove it without removing the finish, which has a lovely patina.

Here's the fan Ted installed after opening up the ceiling box. We needed to add a support rod to hold the weight.


An antique chandelier from eBay went into the dining room. Arrgh. See the white paint on the wall behind it? That's not my crappy paint job. I had everything taped. That's white paint on the wood, all the more noticeable because of the color contrast.

Sconces were also purchased from eBay, and installed. Grr. The white paint is really noticeable on the trim here, too.

We still have quite a bit of work to do. We discovered that one of the vintage chandeliers that came with the house has frayed, bare wiring so that's all getting replaced. And I decided to strip the sconces in one of the bedrooms. All in all, we hope to have everything done by the weekend (touch wood).

Rental Apartment Renovation

Well, today was kinda bittersweet as we said good-bye to our super awesome upstairs tenants. At the same time, I'm kinda excited to get to work on the unit. First task--painting.

Need Help Identifying Light Fixtures. Deco? Mid-Century? Home Depot Special?

We had to fix a leaky shower head in the tenants' unit this week, so while we were up there I took a few more pictures of some of the light fixtures that are in place. Soon as we can coordinate with the tenants, we'll start swapping some of these out with the fixtures I picked up on eBay.

These candle sconces we're keeping:

Fixture A.

There are four of them total upstairs, and they just need to be stripped of the gawd-awful paint and rewired. These are no doubt original to the house, circa 1920s.

But this one I'm not sure:

Fixture B.

It's currently in the dining room and is much too small for the space. The vintage one we're replacing it with can be seen here. Although not my particular style, this floral number is kinda quaint. I was thinking 1930s, based on some I've seen on eBay. Does anyone else recognize the style? Rather than rehome it, I might put it in another one of the bedrooms, which is currently lit with bare bulbs.

What about this one?

Fixture C.

It's a pull cord, and the shade is similar to many I've seen on eBay reputedly from the 1920s. Thoughts? (It's being replaced with this one from the 1930s.) I'm not sure yet if we'll be rehoming this one or not. I'm not overly fond of it, and can't think of a place for it. But it's in great shape.

And finally, there is this:

Fixture D.

It's also on a pull cord. Various eBay sellers are calling similar ones a) deco, b) mid-century modern, c) vintage, d) antique, e) used. I suspect it's fairly recent. I don't have a replacement for it yet, so more than likely it will stay for the time being.