Two Days and Counting!

My mind is REALLY on our camping trip later this weekend. To get ready for our trip, I spent part of the morning paying all of my real estate bills that are due through next week. With several dozen properties, I literally receive several bills every day and they must be paid on time. I usually spend an hour or so each week doing the bills for that week. However, when we're going on a trip, I try to do the bills far enough in the future that I won't have any bills to worry about when I first return home.

After paying the bills, I headed to town to start painting the interior of one side of the new duplex we just bought. As I reached town, I received a call from one of our tenants who said her outside faucet was spraying water everywhere. I went straight to the house with the water leak and found that the faucet had a pin hole in it. I shut off the water at the meter and removed the leaking faucet. The local plumbing supply store is only about a mile from the house and I was able to get a replacement faucet for less than four dollars. Less than 5 minutes later, the faucet was replaced and I was on my way to the duplex. These type of incidents are where it is VERY beneficial to do your own maintenance. It would have cost about $80 to have a plumber fix this minor problem. It took me less than four dollars and 15 minutes to do the job. Eighty dollars saved is eighty dollars earned!

The unit I'm working on in the duplex is a real mess. The walls are wood paneling and are in poor condition. In fact, the paneling was in such poor cosmetic shape that the previous tenant put wood paneling wall paper on the wood paneling. I thought that was quite humorous. This is a $550 per month rental, so I certainly am not going to spend a fortune drywalling the apartment. With low income apartments, it is absolutely critical to remember that I will not be living in the apartment. Most likely, a tenant will be living in it who won't take great care of it anyway. That's the rental game. We fix them up and the tenants tear them up.

I decided to paint the paneling white, as I have done in other rentals in the past. Painting the paneling usually results in a good looking unit which is easy to rent. After stripping off all of the fake panel wallpaper, I spent about 3 hours painting. I got four walls done, two in the living room and two in the kitchen.

After all of this, I finally got down to the important work of the day. I started the engine on the RV. It ran fine! Next, I tried to start the generator and was not as lucky here. The generator didn't want to start and was making a clicking sound. At first, I thought that the starter solenoid might be trying to agitate me. However, after a little thought, I decided that a more logical cause would be a low charge on the coach battery. I ran the engine on the RV at a higher RPM for about 5 minutes and attempted to start the generator again. BINGO! The generator started right up and ran fine! At this point, I don't know whether the coach battery is good or not. I'll probably just take the first trip this weekend with the existing coach battery and see whether the driving will allow the battery to fully charge. If not, I'll simply replace the battery.

In addition to the engine and generator, my wife and I also started stocking the RV. We got most of the food in the refrigerator and the pantry partially filled. We'll finish stocking the RV tomorrow and I'll fill the water. I think we're just about ready to go! Two days and counting!