It's not nice to diss your own blog and not make entries.
Funny, I got in here this morning and it shows I have exactly 911 entries. Yesterday was 9/11. Just pure coincidence, but it was still interesting.
Anyway, I got started on the ex-Marine's room.
The first GLARING problem was the mold at one corner of the room. Upon closer inspection, I found the carpet to be wet. Pulled up the carpet, the padding also soaked and yes, mold covered. Floor was wet, portions of the drywall - wet. Okay, what the bleep is going on here?
I had thought maybe he had been spilled stuff off of the dresser that was there forever and a day, but, it was too wet to be that. The bathtub is directly on the other side of the wall from where the wetness is, THAT must be the problem.
Fun fun. This morning? I had to cut a hole in the drywall on the bedroom side to access the back of the water outlet array that fills up the tub or shoots water up to the shower head. No visible water leaks upon first examination. Turned on the shower - THERE. The fitting that holds the line going up to the shower head? Loose. A LOT of leakage. Everytime someone takes a shower in there, bam, water all over the floor under the tub and going through the walls.
Also UNBELIEVABLE. How does a house manufacturer install something like that without check to make sure it's leak free? The fitting was very loose. The application is to simply turn it by hand on these "new" plastic lines they are putting in homes nowadays. Well, it WASN'T hand tightened and I put the full responsibility for this squarely on the manufacturer's shoulders. THEY can come out here and replace drywall, a portion of the flooring and fix it right for FREE as far as I'm concerned.
I'm sure they'll have a different story, but this is total BS. There is no fault of mine or anyone else living in the home here, at all. They might try to say "time limits" are up or whatever, but when they start getting repeated phone calls from me, day after day, if it has to go that far, they might eventually decide to lubricate the squeaky wheel. So, now I have a hole in the wall, semi-rotted wood on the floor where all this was going on, wet drywall and a portion of the carpet that is ruined by mold.
I currently have a fan running in there, but everything is saturated. It will take days and days - at least - for all of that to dry out. Well, no choice in the matter. Meanwhile, I started painting the room, but the paint I bought was too cheap, it is not giving good coverage and will take forever to get it done. So, I am going to take the unopened gallon of paint back and spend the money for better paint and get it done on one coating, not 2.
I have a few people interested in renting the room, but, I can't do any of that until I get this water mess dealt with. I don't figure this to be done, frankly, until next weekend as I am not about to do anything else with that corner of the room until all of that is dried out.
First day of real NFL football. Not sure how much time I will have for any of that today, but there is a tv in the bedroom I am working on.
This isn't, btw, the half of what has been going on around here.
The day the Marine moves out, my Playstation 3 and my Nintendo Wii systems - $500 and $250 respectively, plus games, plus controllers, plus headset and whatever else - mysteriously disappeared. Going through video surveillance did not reveal him or anyone else carrying the thing out. However, that night (the night it could have disappeared), one of the female tenants had a guy over that I hadn't seen before. He was carrying a backpack. He was here, with her, all night long. In the morning, when he left, I got a good view through surveillance of his backpack, it was significantly more "filled up", in fact, crammed it appeared than when he walked in.
I called the Marine who flatly denied taking it (but then again, I wouldn't actually expect a person to admit something like that) and I called the tenant on it. She tried calling the guy - I guess she was going to make up some story about me throwing her out if my systems didn't reappear. No answer, she left and I haven't seen her since yesterday morning when I was dealing with all of this.
Meanwhile, I called the police. I know they aren't going to actually DO anything, but they will give me a police report. I am going to file a claim against my insurance. Even taking out the deductible, I will still get enough money back to buy my son another Playstation 3 - just get a used one and go it that way.
Onto another subject, my son hands me over $400 yesterday to fix the old Buick. Just handed it right over. Yup, I am going to get the issues with it fixed and he can drive that car until he doesn't want to drive it anymore. I gets decent gas mileage -22 in the city if you drive like a granny - it runs great and I figure those cars are good for 180,000 to 200,000 miles as I have seen them still cranking around the city with that much mileage on them. Mine has 130,000 on it. Just getting started : ) It needs a battery; a harmonic balancer; a rear wheel brake wheel cylinder, an oil change and that should do it. Rubber is still very good on it.
Yes, I have a lot on my plate right now, not the least of which is the fact that I have an empty room that is not bringing in money and it's not going to be done for probably another week. I don't really know, depends on how long it takes to dry all that out of there. However, the flip side is that my electric usage is going down, down, down as the high temps go down and I don't have half a dozen hungry teenaged mouths around here any more eating all of my food. Once a full month passes I can add up a month when they were here in visits to grocery stores and a month that they are not here and get a good idea of the savings - hundreds of dollars anyway. What I'm saying is that my expenses are down probably equal or close to the amount of money coming in from that room that is now vacated, so I think I can survive until I get someone else in there. That is, if the other 2 continue to pay on-time.
That's enough for one entry and I need to get moving anyway, there is just plain too much to do.
G'day.
ben
