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tricky game of being hostile
Saturday, April 24 2021
It was so warm this morning that the thing I did while waiting for the "instant tea water" tap of the kitchen to recover from the french press of decaf I'd just made was to cut my hair out in a sunny part of the yard. Diane the Cat was intrigued, as she is by everything I do, and soon she was rolling around on the clippings.
Gretchen had hated my old hair so much that her delight completely overpowered any reservations about the crudeness of the cut.
We drank our coffee and played the New York Times Spelling Bee. Gretchen got the panagram right away: "embankment" with "m" in the middle. Today marked the first sighting this year of those little annoying black flies that buzz around in front of your face (they rarely land or bite, though I think they occasionally do both).
This afternoon, Gretchen and I had some things to do in Kingston, the first of which was as the Brewster Street House. We're kicking that tenant out because she's been our worst tenant by far, we have a month-to-month lease with her, and she has been playing games with communications, pretending not to get emails and texts. She'd even pretended not to get the email saying we were coming over today, but we came over any way. The plan was to meet with with our realtor to get an estimate of the market value and Tafa, our friend Kristen's Senegalese husband who runs a house painting business (we had him paint parts of our house way back in 2002) to get an estimate for how much an interior paint job would cost. If we could sell the house for enough, we'd sell it. But we're going to have to repaint it whether we sell it or not, given how trashed the place is.
When we arrived at Brewster Street, the tenant was there and she was playing a tricky game of being hostile to Gretchen while being friendly to Tafa amd me (our realtor had not yet arrived). Gretchen was taking none of her shit, and when the tenant said something about not getting an email that we were coming over, Gretchen said her name with a oral colon and then listed all the ways she had tried to contact her. The house was a complete dump, and it's looking like the tenant's sister is now living there. Nearly every non-floor surface is going to need a fresh coat of paint even though the whole interior was repainted only four years ago, and Tafa estimates it will cost around four thousand dollars.
When the realtor arrived, we gave her a quick walkthrough of the house, and it proved difficult for her to see past the clutter and dreary state of the surfaces. And though a house of about the same size (but in much better shape and with off-street parking) had sold for $360 thousand, she didn't think we could sell this place for more than $250 thousand, even in this market. Gretchen had done the math and decided that the house wasn't worth selling if she couldn't get $300 thousand. So it's looking like we're going to have to paint it and re-rent it. The realtor also told us we'd have to give the tenant more notice under the existing coronavirus tenancy rules; the one month notice stipulated in the contract for month-to-month tenants was apparently unenforceable. This was one of the reasons the realtor kept talking as though we should sell the house no matter what. She apparently knows a fair number of landlords who are having trouble collecting rent. But I don't think they curate their tenants as well as we do. (Currently all our tenants are paying their rent more or less on time.)
Our last thing to do in Kingston was to visit Celia and Alex (my boss) at the rental they recently moved into on the Rondout after selling their big Victorian house in Tivoli. It turned ou they were living in a brick row house in a surprsingly active neighborhood. When we arrived, a grandmother was out on a nearby porch while her grandkids were playing with toy trucks in the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street. Celia gave us a quick tour around the house, which includes a surprising three floors of rooms (though the basement was a separate apartment occupied by someone who smokes an astonishing amount of cannabis).
We sat out on the front porch snacking on chips, guacamole, crackers, grapes and cookies while we talked about all the various things that impact our lives. A discussion of Celia's potential retirement inevitably led to the situation at the workplace Alex and I share, and how uncertain things are now that the higher-ups have decided our project has run out of money. Meanwhile the kids continued to play, eventually repainting a modern equivalent of a Big Wheel in white chalk and then putting on their name-brand helmets and riding up and down the sidewalk. Various people evidently related to these kids came and went in immaculate new cars. Meanwhile a teenage boy was doing skateboard tricks in the street.
Back at the house, I was feeling exhausted after the stressful experience at the Brewster Street house and the subsequent socializing. So I climbed into bed before it was even dark outside and found myself getting day-endingly sleepy as I watched a YouTube video.
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