Renting Is Not For The Faint Of Heart

No, it most certainly is not.
You go into renting a house, an apartment, an efficiency - my case: rooms, and you start off nievely thinking that everyone thinks the same way you do. Pay your rent on time, use common sense in the house, treat each other with respect. Oh, and BTW, if you happen to miss the bowl, clean the - mess I'll put it as another word came to mind - up.
You find out after not very long that people that are renting are more unsensical and somewhat selfish in their ways of doing things around your house than not. Some are very sensitive, I'm not throwing out the blanket of totalitarianism.

But, I have had my share of the bad kind and I have learned to shore up and not be so giving.

However. In the case of the ex-tenant who came back for a few months, I was thinking this person was going to behave as he did when he was here before: he paid his rent on time and then when his girlfriend moved in, he paid extra for my extra monthly incurrences. Okay, so I made my input before she moved in: for each extra person that moves in here, I incur more costs regarding electricity and water. I can't put a definitive number on it as I had no desire to go that far with it, but I did go beyond what I figured it would cost me, I stated an extra $100 per month.

It's not dishonest - there is also extra wear and tear. Well, honesty really has nothing to do with it. I find it acceptable to simply charge an extra $100 per month for an extra person in the same bedroom. If the person that is already renting that room doesn't like it, then that person can either not have that person move in, or that person can go find a new place to live.

I already thought of myself as a person that could confront others easily when the situation necessitated it. But, when they are living in your own home, there was a feeling that overcame me that I wasn't expecting. Not that I didn't wany my money, or that I didn't want to confront people on stupid, gross habits, especially in the bathroom, but - they are in my home. It puts a different feel to the matter.

However, after having had a couple of totally rotten/bad apples in here, that feeling has dissipated. It totally disappears when I start looking at my expenditures and my income and finding that if one single renter doesn't pay his/her rent, I'm going directly to the hole.

I'm digging into the 401k loan money that I took out some time ago, actually, to save my @$$ when I thought I was going to lose the place after the AC quit, I paid $650 for the repaid and was totally broke. I'm not far into it, and I haven't cashed one tenant's check yet - I'm waiting on the number 2 tenant to pay his rent which will be due tomorrow and I have no reason to believe that he isn't going to pay it.

The 3rd and temporary tenant a totally different matter. I delivered a notice to him today via slip-under-his-bedroom-door mode. I am very agitated right now. My next door neighbor returned and his junk vehicles are littering the neighborhood. He literally drove in with a mule train of garbage vehicles plus someone must have driven more vehicles behind him - his modus-operandi. GARBAGE. Junkifying the neighborhood I am going to call a complaint in tomorrow. I am further repulsed by his adjunct to his neighbor on the other side - an ex-felon, about a year out of prison, a drug dealing SON OF A BITCH. Freakin' bastard, I despise the man.

I am speaking out of character tonight, I find that I can't stop myself. There is a backlash of s*** inside of me that needs to be vented and here it is, coming out in full force. The ex-felon is a mouth freak - if he says ANYTHING to me again like he has in the past when this returning neighbor comes back - and this freak is over there - I am going to give him an earful of his own medicine. He is on parole, in fact, BOTH of them are on parole, I could freakin' get them into serious problems with them saying ANYTHING in terms of a threat.

But really, I feel like hauling off and decking the idiot. I know, I said it already, I said it in my other blog earlier today, I am cranky and irritable. I have too much on my plate and it's going far too slow to get it removed. But I cannot stand mouthy a-holes voicing lines of ignorance that goes on forever. When it's in person, and if it's bad enough, you can bet that I am going to say something blunt, frank and to-the-point. I tried to give this ex-felon freak a bit of latitude - I am not into starting wars with neighbors, but this guy is not a neighbor. He is living totally off of his mother, who bought the house for him, bought him a new car, buys his food, pays all of his bills.

He has no job, he does nothing, he is a waste.

Again, I am not myself today and I have no excuses - but- I offer none either.

Anyway, after delivering the notice, I go outside to water plants. I did that for a while and then I sat down on a lawn chair on the east side of the house and simply emptied my mind. I was already mad at the dogs - one of them got into the trash can and another got over a fence and trampled some plants. NOT the fencing that I put up on the east side of the house for the dog-free zone, another area in the rear of the house.

Grouchy. I am being bombarded with too much from all sides and it's eating at me.

Okay, well back to the non-paying tenant, another source of EXTREME irritability. He obviously read my message because while I was outside - and didn't even know he had returned home from work - he had delivered me a hand-written note.

Without going into all of the details - he alleges to pay me this week and then $100 every week after that to get caught up.

IF this is true, then there is a big sigh of relief. I will no longer be digging holes into the finacial realms of ruin, I will at least be breaking even, but actually doing a little better than that.

I have to do something. Get some prayer, have some drinks, whatever, but I have to find a way to calm down, because I can tell you that with everything going on right now in my life, I am freakin' on the edge.

ben