The crazy things tenants do

Funny story. I think John was a little annoyed, but I’m just shaking my head.

John went over to our rental yesterday, the one that’s on the market. He wanted to fix a few little things and do some watering. He came home to tell me that there’s an outdoor faucet missing. Hu? Like, completely gone. He says there was a faucet along the side of the house and it’s completely gone. No faucet anymore. No hole in the wall. Nothing. Like it was never there. He went to use it to water some flowers that our real estate agent had put in a pot at the entryway, and the faucet didn’t exist.

I was not inclined to believe his memory. There are faucets in the front yard and in the backyard. I figured there never was a faucet along the side of the house. I was sure he was confusing it with a different house. We’ve had a lot of houses, and we’ve never actually lived in that one; easy to get confused. 

I couldn’t imagine a tenant would remove a faucet, cap it off, re-stucco the wall and repaint? But John was like, I’m not going crazy, it was there. So he went back through a bunch of old marketing photos I had on my hard drive. He’s right. There used to be a faucet there.

Every year we nag all the tenants to winterize their water lines. They must have failed to do so and burst a pipe. And apparently it was cheaper to cap it and patch it all over than it was to replace the faucet. 

That house had a fair amount of turnover, so we don’t even know which tenant did it. It wasn’t the most recent guy because he’s a friend of mine and he would have said something. We think it was the people before him, who were a bit of a problem in some other ways. But we will never know, because someone pulled a fast one on us!