In the 6 years that we have owned and rented out our townhouse up in the Northeast, we have had 7 different groups of tenants. Of those 7, 2 have been pretty bad to deal with. The most recent ones were, by far, the absolute worst. Horrid even! Constant late rent, or bounced cheques, or no rent, etc. We took them to court through the RTDRS 2 times. The first time, Ben and I were way too nice and forgiving and let them get away with a lot. But the second time, we gave them the boot! Because of so many different groups moving in and out, and because we allow pets at this property, the townhouse was in dire need of a few renos. We re painted the entire place, ripped out the old carpet, put new carpet in, ripped out the old lino, and put in some nice laminate. The whole process took us about a month and a half, and about half of that time, we had NO electricity. These tenants also stopped paying their power bill (without our knowledge) and when their power got shut off they tried to jimmy the electrical box and steal electricity! Which was so stupid because if the power company shuts off your power, there is no tampering you can do with the electricity box to get it to your house. *eye roll* Anyway, it took an electrician about 3-4 weeks to fix the damage they had done and get power back on in that place. Since the townhouse is fairly old (built in the 70's) he had to order in special parts to fix it, and that's what made it take so long. In the end we had to pay him $1000 to undo that damage, and he gave us a deal too! Sigh.
So I would take the kids to school each day, then drive up to the townhouse and do what I could with only sunshine as my light. I would work every morning, then come back at lunch to pick up Olivia. Ben would come after work and do more work, and I would usually join him. We came as many weekends as we were free to. During this time I cleaned, cleaned and cleaned some more, Ben ripped out all the carpet and lino himself and disposed of it, and then we painted, painted and painted some more. So much tedious work! But worth it. When the power came on, that's when we were able to get installers in there to lay new carpet and new laminate. It was so much work.
Here are some pics of it all:
So this is what it looked like after the tenants moved out. So dirty....
Holes in the walls, dirty walls and doors and windows, and DISGUSTING carpet and lino. Yuck.
 |
| Upstairs hallway |
 |
| Master bedroom. When I was cleaning out this room, I found what I think was a meth pipe. There were lots of cigarette butts too. |
 |
| Disgusting tub.... |
 |
| Scouring the kitchen. They were super heavy smokers, and when I sprayed the cabinets to clean them, yellow drops of liquid fell. Those white cabinets actually looked yellow before I cleaned them. |
 |
| Def had to wear masks as we took out the carpet! Pet dander and dirt and dust everywhere. |
 |
| This is what the floor looked like underneath the carpet in the living room. I am sure most of those stains are from animal urine. |
 |
| Ben hard at work |
 |
| In the process of it all.... |
 |
| I LOVE before and after pictures! Here is the ceiling fan in the dining room, before and after. It was thick with this fur-like dust. I completely took it apart to clean it. |
 |
| And the shower and tub before and after. I peeled off the old caulking and put in some new, and scrubbed it like crazy! Shiny and clean again. |
You can definitely see the progress being made! This was after the laminate was installed.
and the new carpet...
Loving the progress...
Most of the doors upstairs were damaged, and so Ben installed new ones. We let the kids come help at this point and with little jobs like painting the doors. Here are Chloe and Olivia in the basement helping me with that, and Izzy and Lily helping Ben with the baseboard installation.
And here are all the after pictures! It is clean again, and smells clean too. No more smoke smell. yay! I actually wish it looked this good when we lived here!
We found a new set of NICE tenants really easily. We have always been able to rent this place out fairly easily, which is good. We are learning as we go, but we are no longer allowing pets, and we are really screening the people and making sure they are reliable and decent people. We hope to hold onto this place and rent it out for many more years to come.
