Mortaine’s Blog

The vote was in: dragons and castles. Come see my new style!

To and :

I love Penn!!!!

I wrote a nice, long journal entry, only to lose it while Logjam was pretending to update. Sigh.

Okay, here are the highlights of the entry:

We own a 2-BR duplex with a vacancy. It’s a total bitch because our rent is too high, but we can’t lower it because we bought at the worst possible time and the market took a nose-dive immediately afterwards. With the mortgage and the taxes, we break even.

We have repairs to make that are expensive and which we can’t afford, but which are hazardous to leave alone. The second-story deck on the other apartment (still occupied) is going to fall down, I swear, if we don’t do something soon. There’s a hole forming in the wall in the vacant apartment right now, and a hole in one of the decks down below (repairable by us, at least, for cheap). I want new carpet in the vacant apartment to make it not so dark in there. Right now it has dark brown wood paneling, dark brown wood open beam ceilings, and the dark brown shag carpet that was the uniform for all apartments in the last 30 years. We are probably going to need to get a loan to be able to make these needed repairs and replace the carpet.

There were four burned out lightbulbs out of the five in the kitchen chandelier. Why is that? Why would you leave four bulbs burnt out?

In the last two days, we have:

• replaced the four burned out bulbs
• replace the strangely-shaped 60 watt bulbs in the rest of the house with 75 watt bulbs, just so there will be some light in the apartment
• replaced the lightswitch plates with plain beige ones…. previously, there were these funky flower ones from the 70’s on all the lightswitches
• replace the deadbolt. The last time we changed the locks, there was so much graphite in it, this black stream came pouring out every time the locksmith squirted some WD40 into the mechanism. Never put graphite into a lock! They used to do this to loosen up a sticky lock, but all it does in the long run is jam the lock with graphite shavings
• replace the door handle lock. The deadbolt is in the normal position of 2 3/4″ from the edge of the door. The door handle, for some completely unknowable reason, is 5 inches from the edge of the door. The good news is, this is “standard” enough to actually get a replacement latch so that the locking door handle that I bought to go with the deadbolt (keyed alike) can be installed on the door. Of course, it’s not standard enough to be sold in a hardware store, but John was in Capitola and went to the San Lorenzo Door Store (I kid you not– a “door store”) to pick up the 5″ latch for about $10. This latch thing is the part that sticks out of the door and actually keeps it from opening, okay? The equivalent in the deadbolt is the actual bolt.
• spent hours in voice mail hell with PG&E, only to have them call back 2 days later, have the caller ID say “Out of Area” (so it goes to voice mail), and then hear an automated message saying “once again, that number is 1-800-743-5000. If you no longer need assistance, please hang up now.” I finally got them to switch over so that we won’t have interrupted service.
• replace the battery in the smoke detector

Still needed: replace the board in the patio, de-algae the patio so it’s not a hazard, possibly patch the wall upstairs so it doesn’t develop a hole, get a carpet estimate and possibly new carpet in there, get a deck estimate for the other side and (oh I hope) replace it.

I un-cut this part because it’s Important!!

About that smoke detector. For all my friends who live outside of their parents’ homes (and even those who don’t), please go check your smoke detector right now. Yes. Now. Now. Because, okay, if your house burns down with you asleep in your bed, the landlord will eventually replace the house. That’s what insurance is for. But you? You who were so cheap or lazy that you didn’t bother to replace a $2 9-volt battery? You are dead or horribly burned and maimed for the rest of your life. No matter how much you hate your landlord and resent him for making you live in that hell-hole he calls an apartment, you’d better go check your smoke detector battery right now and replace it if it’s not working.

I SAID NOW!

Okay, you’re back, then? Wrote “9-volt battery” on your grocery list, did you? Goooood.

All right. So we replaced the battery on the smoke detector. We replaced several lightbulbs, both burned out and functional-but-weird-and-dark. We replaced the locks– that’s a huge thing because the new locks are very smooth and don’t make you feel like you’re breaking into your own apartment.

We showed the apartment to someone today, and will show it again to an editor of the local newspaper (who’s looking for housing) tomorrow at noon. The editor had run an advertisement in the rentals section of the classifieds in his own paper that he was looking for a 1 or 2 BR apartment that’s ok with a cat. Hmmm…. could be a really good fit, I think. Except he has a kid, and those are generally pretty destructive, even though one cannot discriminate against childer.

Well, this was a LOT longer than I thought it would be, and it pretty much re-creates what I wrote originally. Have a nice night, everyone.

I got 474 support points!!! It’s a palindrome!