Wow! What a Day!

In the rental business, you quickly learn to be flexible and to multi-task. That's just a normal part of the business and it's what I expect. However, today seemed like an unusually busy day, since so many different things were going on.

My day started by meeting a contractor to look at the roof on my home. The roof had been damaged by the storm and I wanted to get his opinion of the severity of that damage. I actually spent a few minutes last night looking at the roof myself, and it appeared to me that it was ruined. The shingles on the entire south-facing front of the house are missing all the grit from the shingles, while the shingles on parts of the north side look new. The paper portion of the shingles are literally paper thin in many areas and many are ripped (in addition to the shingles that are completely missing). The contractor's opinion is that the roof is obviously ruined and MUST be replaced. He said that without replacement, any further storms would remove more and more of the roof. In retrospect, I think that the roof was seriously damaged when hurricane Ike came through, with 80 mph winds and that Wednesday's storm finished it off.

After the roofer left and I finished talking to my insurance company, I made a trip to the bank; the post office; and another bank (to make one of my apartment building payments). Next stop was the local treasurer's office, where I paid 5 figures worth of income tax (for only 1/2 a year). OUCH! I just hate seeing all that money going to the government to waste!

The next item on my list was to stop by one of my 1 bedroom apartments to inspect it before the annual Section 8 inspection. Outside of a new smoke alarm battery, the apartment was ready for the inspection. Checking my list, Section 8 was also the next order of business. This task was to drive to the Section 8 office to initial a change they had made to one of their contracts. My newest tenant is a veteran who is part of a brand new Section 8 program for veterans. It seems the paperwork for this new program was slightly different and I needed to initial a change, reflecting that I was not providing air conditioning to the tenant. While I was there, they also gave me the rent check for February for this unit. Getting money is always a good thing. With that check, I can officially report that all rents have been received for February and that another month will go by without an eviction.

While I was at the Section 8 office, I received a call from the service provider for the DSL Line that allows me to access my security cameras via the internet. My DSL Line went out during the big storm on Wednesday. The technician said that he would be at the apartment building in about 10 minutes, so I made a bee line for the Pink Elephant. Sure enough, the techician found that the line had been damaged in the storm. After some work, the line was fixed. Once the line was fixed, I needed to do some reprogramming of the computer and router to get the cameras back online.

Once the cameras were fixed, I walked next door to meet the Section 8 inspector for a complaint inspection. This Section 8 tenant is a pain in the butt. Every time she has a concern, she calls Section 8 instead of calling me. On two occassions she has plugged up the toilet or sewer line with tampons and baby wipes. I'm not very happy with her and will not renew her lease when her year is up. Her complaints today were roaches, spiders, termites, and the plugged sewer line (which I already fixed). Of course, the roaches and spiders are being caused by her filthy housekeeping habits and I have told her that repeatedly. In fact, I think that the reason she called Section 8 is that I accused her of living like a PIG (which she does and I told Section 8 exactly that). To make a long story short, this is a BRICK BUILDING, so there were no termites. Those were a figment of her imagination. The inspector took a flashlight and checked every nook and cranny of the apartment. After a very thorough inspection, he was only able to find two roaches and he told her that her poor housekeeping skills were attracting the roaches. There were numerous spider webs around the apartment and obviously she was too lazy to take a broom and remove them. That addressed her list of grievances and needless to say, the apartment passed the inspection with flying colors.

My final project was to install the quarter-round trim pieces around the laminate floor that I installed a few days ago. As it turned out, I was about two feet short of quarter-round stock and I'll finish that along with installing the transition pieces another day.

Have a great weekend!