John, rentals, and why we are always so busy

By the way, I got the second rental rented yesterday! I haven’t started advertising the third one yet, because, ugh! Maybe tomorrow.

The third rental, Peregrine, has irrigation issues (as they all did). The front irrigation works, but the side and back irrigation is older, and had been abandoned and not attached to the newer control system.

There are really nice bushes in the back, that the previous owner had been hand-watering. I can’t count on tenants to hand-water. So my options are fix the irrigation, or let the bushes die.

These bushes are directly out the living room window (which faces the backyard), and are the only live things in an unfortunate sea of cement, so I think they’re important.

I got a bid from a landscape company – a low cost landscape company – a couple of guys my painter knows – and the bid was $2,500. Ouch. That’s an expensive couple of bushes. And the guys weren’t about to mess around trying to actually fix the irrigation – that would take too long. Who knows what might be hidden or broken under all that cement. Their bid was to install new irrigation, and only included the back and one side, and not the other side I wanted.

John decided it made more sense to simply fix the existing irrigation himself. He started working on it yesterday, he’s still working on it today. He started first thing this morning and it’s now 6 PM.

He also moved an enormously heavy batch of tile from the house we’re remodeling to our storage unit, to use later in one of the rentals. You probably know the story, if not, OMG. Tile. But since the tile isn’t going to be used in the remodel after all, it’s not our contractor’s problem. And yeah, we could hire labor. At least in theory. We have had no luck with that.

Last time I hired labor in New Mexico (last fall when John was still in California), they decided that the most efficient way to move boxes down the staircase was to lay an extension ladder flat on the stairs and slide the boxes down the ladder, catching (or trying to catch) the boxes at the bottom. No. Seriously! It was more like a box-toss than anything. It was a box free-fall. Those boxes came bouncing and crashing down at high velocity and they definitely did not all survive it. That was back when the dogs and I had moved into the house on the hill for the first week, before giving up and renting the one we’re still (still, still!) living in.