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tenant nocebo
Tuesday, December 31 2024
The ideal tenant in one of our rental properties pays their rent on time and doesn't ask for anything. Most of our tenants qualify as ideal under these terms. Sometimes they do ask for things, but it's for the sorts of thing a landlord should provide, like unclogged drains or heating systems that work. In some cases the tenant tells us about things that don't really affect the tenant but definitely affect our property, such as a leaking pipe. When we get a new tenant, it's always a bit of a mystery what sort of tenant they'll end up being. The other day our new tenant at the Brewster Street property wanted to have a call with Gretchen about the house, which suggested there were too many issues to list in an email. Gretchen eventually did get a list of issues, which seemed manageable, and I arranged to go over there to deal with some of them today. But by this morning that tenant wanted to have another phone call. Now she was freaking out about fraying asbestos in the basement. Asbestos is, like black mold, one of those things that people completely lose their shit about just knowing it exists. It ends up being a negative placebo (nocebo), poisoning their thoughts and causing them to imagine symptoms. "Maybe we should just let them break the lease and move out," I sighed.
Gretchen decided to come with me when I drove over to the house at noon. (We convoyed in separate cars so I could stay there and work as long as I needed to.) I brought over a bunch of supplies, including those for copper pipe soldering, electrical wiring, and covering up exposed asbestos. I also brought a tiny drill bit for use in cleaning out a clogged gas jet. I'd never met the new tenants and had built a model of them in my brain. I had them being maybe 15 or 20 years older than they were (their desire to talk instead of text is a totally boomer thing). Like most of our good tenants, they looked to be in their thirties or perhaps late 20s, and they'd done a good job cleaning and setting up the house. (Apparently our last tenant there had left it in a somewhat disgusting condition). I was most anxious to see the basement, where mysterious piles of dirt had started appearing. I looked at the dirt and immediately knew what had made them. "That's from rats!" I declared. (There was nothing to gain by being evasive.) I said I'd be coming back with some concrete to seal up the new holes, where were against the foundation wall near the washing machine in the southwest corner of the part of the basement having a real foundation. From there, our conversation turned to the asbestos issue. I'd noticed what appeared to be asbestos insulation on the pipes in the Downs Street mansion and in the Wall Street house, but I'd never notice anything on the ductwork in the Brewster basement (it's our only house in Kingston with a furnace instead of a boiler). The male half of the couple that now lives in Brewster, who is himself a professional builder, pointed out a patch of grey fabric on the duct boot overhead and said that that was the asbestos. I then saw similar such patches on several other boots, but nowhere else. In a few places it looked like it was ripped, but I wouldn't've said any of it was fraying. The main concern our tenant had was that the boots seemed damaged in places and they were worried that damaged asbestos might be hanging in the airflow of the vent and filling the air blowing from the register with asbestos particles. This actually seemed like a legitimate concern, though not one I would know how to address except by replacing the boots. But that might cause more asbestos to be released. Maybe we really did need to consult an asbestos professional. But I doubted we'd be able to find one who wouldn't use the existence of asbestos (and widespread irrational fears about it) to take advantage of us financially.
Shelving that issue for the time being, we went outside to look at some gutter issues, the kind of issues a normal tenant would be unlikely to raise. It turned out that there was a missing downspout at the corner of the porch, and it was causing water to dump onto the floor of the porch, which had begun to rot in places. Other gutters were dumping water against the foundation. All of that needed to be fixed.
While Gretchen went through some construction materials in the basement (another of the many issues the tenants had raised), I started working on getting the kitchen faucet to work better. Its hot water was clearly clogged somewhere, probably by a build-up of calcite (a problem I'd dealt with several months ago in the bathroom sink upstairs). (The male half of the couple had suspected the problem was due to a somewhat-crimped pipe in the basement, but I knew that that crimp wasn't severe enough to cause a noticeable difference in the rate of water flow.) I the trick of getting the cold water to flow backwards through the hot water hose into a container, and this definitely flushed out some crud, though not enough to make the faucet work acceptably. It was looking like I was going to have to run a strong acid through it, something that would require me to replace it. Fortunately, a poorly-functioning gas burner on the stove was easily fixed with a couple twists of that tiny drill bit I'd remembered to bring in the brass fitting that serves as a jet. By this point Gretchen was long gone.
My other big landlording chore of the day was to fix a light on the ceiling in the upstairs hallway. It used to be controlled by a pullstring, but pullstrings are not suitable as every-day switches. They quickly wear out and then the light is either on all the time or it is off. I'd added proper light switches to the lights in all the bedrooms after we kicked Eileen out (she was the tenant who had been operating the house as something of a flophouse for squirrely young men), but I'd never gotten around to doing this with the hall light. Since the walls are all made of plaster, it's impossible to easily wire them with switches set inside the wall, so I'd used surface-mount conduit and switch boxes. I just happened to have enough of those materials to install a surface-mount switch today. But the wire in the light fixture itself was in terrible shape; insulation was cracking and falling off the wire, making it dangerous to work with, particularly since I didn't bother switching off the circuit breaker. But I managed to repair the damaged insulation and wire in the switch. What I couldn't managed to do was get the fixture tight against the ceiling. This had been done by someone in the past improvisationally using long screws sent at an angle into whatever material they could find, but after all the work I'd done, the screws I had didn't seem to be long enough. I'd be coming back in a few days to deal with the rats and the gutters, so I could fix the light then. Meanwhile the tenants had been playing Pokemon games on their phones and then watching a violent gangster movie featuring foul-mouthed Italian-Americans. By that point I'd decided they're not tenantzillas after all. I wished them a happy New Year and drove off.
On the way home, I stopped at a gas station on Broadway to get a sixpack of some strong IPA from the Sloop Brewing Juice Bomb cinematic universe to enjoy as a New Years Eve road beer. Meanwhile a cautionary tale was playing out on Broadway, where some fool had destroyed his car rear-ending someone. It was hard to imagine driving fast enough on Broadway to cause that amount of damage, but perhaps road beers had played a role.
Back at the house, Gretchen and I had a mellow New Years Eve. We didn't go out or celebrate in any way. I'd decided to drink, but I did so by myself in the laboratory. Gretchen didn't drink anything but water. We did manage to stay up late enough to wish each other a happy New Year, but it's hard to get excited about a year when Donald Trump, the villain who will not die, somehow claws his way back into the presidency.
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