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multiple landlording chores
Thursday, January 2 2025
Today I had a bunch of chores to do over at the Brewster Street Rental, so I started prepping not too long after getting up and playing Spelling Bee with Gretchen (though not collaboratively) in front of the fire in the living room. I needed to put a ladder on the roof of the Subaru, track down three good five gallon buckets, find my hoe and a long-handed shovel, and see what gutter downspouts and fittings I had in the garage. Gretchen and I would be convoying to Herzogs to hopefully discuss how to deal with asbestos with their most senior paint counter guy. On the drive down Dug Hill Road, I stopped at the bridge across Englishmans' Creek to collect river rocks. The water was high, so there weren't many rocks that weren't under water, meaning I had to reach into that frigid water with my bare hands to get what I wanted. It was unpleasant, but it didn't take too long to fill a five gallon bucket about 3/4 full with good rocks. At the time I was wearing my big black boots, which are leather and date to before I was vegan, and they were good at keeping my feet dry when stepping into shallow water.
At Herzog's, the guy who had any knowledge about asbestos was off at lunch, so we didn't get any good information there. Furthermore, I didn't like the prices they had on kitchen faucets, nor did I like the style of gutter screws they sold (slotted screws, are you kidding me?). So we left without buying anything and I drove off to Lowes, with the idea of perhaps talking to the oldest, most been-around-the-block guy at their painting counter. After getting an 80 pound sack of concrete mix, a variety of gutter fittings and mounting brackets, and phillips-head gutter screws, I found a nice faucet for about $120. Unfortunately, they didn't have anyone on staff who wanted to talk to me about asbestos at all.
Over at the Brewster Street rental, I untied the ladder on the roof and started doing some setup. I also knocked on the door to tell the tenant I was there and would be doing things, but that I'd mostly be using the side door (which gives me direct access to the basement without having to go through the other parts of the house). She wanted to know what we were thinking about doing with respect to the asbestos issue. I told her we were researching it still. At that point she said something to the effect that she and her partner had discussed the issue with friends and they'd been told that only professionals should deal with asbestos and that a DIY solution would be unacceptable. That through me into a fury, of course, though I kept a lid on it with sheer force of will (helped somewhat by a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine I'd taken this morning. I looked the tenant unblinkingly in the eye and said, "well, that might end up being too expensive." I then shifted my weight, feeling awkward as I did so that I might be telegraphing aggressive thoughts. We bantered back and forth on this for a little while, and it seemed like the least she'd be willing to accept is a professional air quality test. But I was wondering if it would be possible to get such a test without it being biased by the strong desire to sell remediation. [Only later would I learn that in New York State, at least, remediation companies are not allowed to do testing and testing companies are not allowed to do remediation, as the allowing it would produce a conflict of interest that would either find asbestos where it wasn't present or not find it (even though it was there) after a shoddy remediation.]
Despite my rage at this troublesome tenant, I decided to do what I'd come to do to the best of my abilities. In short order, I'd installed a new gutter downspout on the on the southeast corner of the porch and then climbed the ladder to look at the problematic northeast corner. There I found a built-in gutter that was disintegrating into curled-up hunks of rubber or asphalt. Due to settlement and a failure of waterproofing, water was no draining through a hole that had opened up into the porch roof itself. The problem was not clogged drains but instead drains no longer being where the water wanted to flow. It would need fixing, but I didn't have what I needed for the job. So I put the ladder in the backyard for later use and moved on to my next task.
I went down into the basement and swept up all the dirt piled up by rats excavating along the south end of the west basement wall. Once that was out of the way, I found substantial voids under the wall at the level of the slab. Unlike in more conventional modern construction, the foundation wall seemed to stop at about the same level as the slab and go no lower. This meant that that rats tunneling beneath that wall would arrive just beneath the slab, and, since it is so thin, they wouldn't have to tunnel much further to find a crack that might be exploited for ingress. In this particular place, it seemed like the slab had settled a little below the bottom of the foundation wall, creating a void large enough for a rat to get through if only the dirt were removed, which is precisely what the rats had done. I pushed as many river rocks as I could back into that void, pounding them in when they got stuck. Then I mixed up all the concrete I'd brought an built a little shelf where the slab met the foundation wall such that any existing gap was covered up and perhaps filled in with concrete. I studded this wall with a line of river rocks, giving it a nice rustic decorated quality. I had some concrete leftover after I'd built a fairly long shelf, so I used it to fill in a sketchy area in the southeast corner of the basement. I also forced handfuls of concrete into holes I found in the southwest corner of the basement where the west and south foundation walls came together.
Then I went up into the kitchen and installed the brand new kitchen faucet, which was an easy job. As expected, once I'd done that, the hot and cold water worked with equal pressure, much to the tenant's delight.
My last chore of the day was to fix the ceiling light in the upstairs hall. Because of how intimate I'd be getting with the wiring, I decided to first turn off the circuit breaker in the basement. Since some of the insulation on the old wires was so degraded, I used shrink tube on it (I'd even bought a cigarette lighter at a gas station on Albany Avenue so I could make it shrink). Still, the old wire was so terrible that I found myself muttering about it as I worked, causing the tenant to call out from the other room at one point to ask what I'd just found. But the shrink tube worked pretty well, and I managed to push things around to the point where I was able to get the ceiling fixture tight against the ceiling and secured with very long screws going off to god knows where in the plaster ceiling. But then when I went to turn on the circuit breaker, I found that the handle on the breaker had gone completely limp, unable to ka-chunk in either direction. Evidently it had given up the ghost. This is what sent me back to Herzog's at around sunset to get a replacement (I actually got two replacements). As I was installing the new breaker, I was alarmed to find evidence that water had gotten into it recently. I'd added a bunch of caulk to a fitting outside in hopes of preventing such water from getting in, but somehow it was still finding its way down the wire and into the box. That water had probably been what had killed that breaker I'd just replaced.
On the way home, I cracked open a road beer to celebrate a day full of successfully-completed landlording chores. I would keep drinking into the evening, though I was careful to take 150 mg of diphenhydramine so I'd fall asleep before drinking so much that I would wind up with a hangover.
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