I did a post last year November called The Ghost of LL. In it, I talked about how the costs of making the upstairs apartment of property Alpha rental ready were so high because I was lazy when it came to making repairs. After reviewing the costs for making the upstairs of Beta rental ready, I realized that most of the costs had nothing to do with Stan at all!
Stan left a ton of garbage and some holes in the
wall. Costs were as follows: $20 for the garbage bags, $6 for sheetrock mud,
$10 worth of gas driving back and forth to the Chase dumpster, and $50 for
Handyman Stan to repair the sheetrock and install new locks on the door. That’s
only $86!! Even if you add $200 for some painting of the mudded walls, that's still less than $300! This means that all the other repairs came as a result of my negligence
as a landlord. There was a bathroom door that’s been broken since 2008 that I
had to pay for. There were rooms that I wanted to change the color of but never
did. There were the two staircases that Carver had actually offered to do for
free last year but I completely forgot his offer until it was too late. There’s
that antique Moen tub/shower control and faucet that was rotted out. While I
had Alfonso there last year to change out the windows, I could have had him
replace the plumbing to handle normal tub faucets. Instead I have to replace it
with the exact same antique model—for $170! (Note: That’s the problem with
buying old houses: if something needs to be replaced I have to either buy the exact
same item or update the surrounding area to accommodate the cheaper equivalent
of that item.) All these things, combined with Handyman Stan’s higher costs for
fixing these issues, were major factors in the high costs for that apartment’s
repairs.
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