Electrical Problem

We had a death in the family this week and therefore I didn't work from Sunday through Thursday as I was spending time with my family and we had a bunch of company at our house . I finally got back to work today and had every intention of finally laying the new laminate floor in the kitchen of one of my two bedroom houses. Unfortunately, I had a couple of other issues come up and I spent all afternoon working on those issues.

The first issue was a tenant that left a message yesterday about an upstairs tenant (Section 8) that was causing trouble. I tried to call the tenant that was reported to be causing the problem and then I tried to call the tenant that complained about the other tenant. Both of their cell phones had been disconnected. So, I stopped by the apartment building to check up on the situation. The downstairs tenant was home. He said that the tenant upstairs had started drinking heavily about two weeks ago and had been a problem every since. He also said that he saved the life of the upstairs tenant about a week ago when he was extremely drunk and severely cut his foot on a broken beer bottle.

After hearing that side of the story, I went upstairs to talk to the upstairs tenant. He wasn't home, so I'll stop by another day to get his side of the story and try to get him to behave. Dealing with tenants is a lot like dealing with 3rd grade children.

My next stop was at an apartment that supposedly had a couple of lights that weren't working. My assumption was that the light bulbs had burned out and that the tenant wasn't intelligent enough to put in a working light bulb (it happens all the time). To my surprise, putting in new bulbs didn't fix the problem. So, I checked the fuses - all were ok. Both of these lights were ceiling lights (one was a ceiling fan). I checked voltage at both fixtures and found that there was no power to either fixture. So, I went back out to the fusebox to troubleshoot that. Everything checked out fine at the fusebox. To make a long story short, the trouble ended up being a broken wire in one of the electrical boxes in the ceiling. I replaced the first light fixture and then went to Lowes to get another ceiling light fixture to replace the old ceiling fan that had been installed. It is my policy to make Section 8 rentals as simple as possible. A ceiling fan is just one more thing to go bad and they can be quite dangerous. There was a recent legal case in which a landlord was sued when a tenant lost an eye in a ceiling fan mishap. The tenant was bouncing on a couch and was struck in the eye by the whirling ceiling fan blade.

Afer I finally finished the electrical issue (more than 2 hours after starting), I had to show a one-bedroom house to a prospective tenant. He filled out an application and claims he will take the apartment - we'll see. That was it for today. I'm planning to work tomorrow. Maybe I can finally get that floor started.