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Apr. 10th, 2008 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI'm sure everyone is atwitter to hear how the Great Toilet Fixing went.
I showed up at the tenant's first thing this morning to put some eyeballs on the problem so that I would know what I needed to do to fix things. Constant readers will recall that the tenant was claiming that the toilet "just kept running" and that they tried to shut it off at the supply line but the valve there broke so they broke into the basement and shut off the water there.
What to my wondering eyes did appear? Well, I'll tell you. First, though, you need to know some basic things about toilets to fully appreciate that what did appear.
1. Yer average toilet tank (the tank is the thing with the flushing handle on it, the rectangular higher-up part of the toilet) attaches to the sitting-on part of the toilet by way of two bolts that go down through the tank (they're usually under water if the toilet tank is full) and into ear flap holes located on the sitting-on part behind where the toilet seat attaches. There's also a rubber-gasketed hole (covered by the flapper) which is where the water goes from the top tank part to the bottom for-sitting-on part when you hit the flushie lever, but that doesn't have any actual connector parts. It's just kind of a gravity thing.
2. A toilet is usually affixed to the floor by way of two bolts through its base to a toilet flange that is screwed to the floor. The bolts are carefully threaded into slots in the toilet flange and their big, flat heads keep them from pulling back out of the toilet flange slots. (The mechanism is a lot like the one used in those chain slide locks you see on apartment doors. You put the bolt head in the big round hole at one end of the bolt slot on the flange and then slide it to the narrow part of the slot where it can't pull out.)
3. Water gets into toilets by way of a supply line that comes out of the floor or out of the wall on the left hand side (when you stand facing the toilet, as if you were going to pee into it like guys do) of the toilet. There is typically a shut-off valve between the pipe and the toilet supply line (flexible, chrome, or whatever) so that you can replace stuff in the toilet without flooding the fucking house.
4. Possibly the single most important piece of toilet-related information: Toilets are ceramic, like many coffee cups. If you drop toilet pieces, they will break. Ceramic has absolutely no elasticity in it and cannot deform under stress. The only thing ceramic can do is break. Ceramic failures in toilets are sudden, loud, and full of lots of sharp pieces.
The first thing I observed was that the dining room ceiling had fallen down, about a 4x4 foot square piece. This would have been more of a problem except that the tenant's bed and huge stack of boxes and dressers and shit were out of the way. (The tenant has other people living there, see, and one of them is using the dining room as a bedroom. Six people inhabit this two-bedroom apartment.)
The second thing that I observed was that the PVC supply line was totally and completely detatched from the shut off valve in a shape very like the ones you get in medical encyclopedias for a "spiral fracture". Srsly, there was no connection at all between the supply line and the shut off valve.
Third observation: Toilet was full of stale urine, which smelled amusingly rank for about half a second, whereupon it started to, er, piss me off. (Come on, you knew that one was coming.)
Fourth observation: Someone had rocked the toilet tank back and forth until both ears on the for-sitting-on part had broken off. The big bolts that were supposed to be holding the tank onto the for-sitting-on part, they were hanging in mid-air. There were no pieces of broken toilet anywhere around, so this wasn't a recent thing. Breaking toilet pieces is like breaking a coffee cup -- there are bits around forever afterward, getting stuck into bare feet and leaving tiny bloody blotches in your footprints. It'd *been* like this for a while. At this point, I decided that the tenants would be paying for the toilet and my labor on this repair. Herion addicts do not break both tank-holding-ears off toilets.
Fifth: The bolts holding the toilet to the floor were rusted into ick. There was no way they were going to move. So, y'know, I got gordian on their asses. I removed the tank (empty of water) and set it aside, out of the way. I got a hammer. I beat on the toilet feet near where the bolts come up through. The toilet foot areas (on each side) shattered so that I could pick up the toilet without having to unscrew very rusted bolts. With rather a lot of care, I picked up the for-sitting-on part of the toilet and tipped the bulk of its contents into the bathtub, where all the liquids ran down the drain with a happy yellow gurgle. (I say "bulk of its contents" because it is difficult indeed to fully empty a toilet of all toilet ick.) Then I carried the for-sitting-on part downstairs and put it in the back of my truck. I did not get any ick on me, but I can't speak as to the condition of the sidewalk. (My bad.) Ick also dribbled out on the bed of the truck but as I don't sit there and as it's supposed to rain later this week, I figure it'll be fine. After that, I scraped up the wax ring crap and carefully deposited it in the wax ring box. (Toilets sit on what is called a wax ring. This is made of beeswax and it mushes down to provide the watertight seal between the toilet and the sewer pipe. If you have a bad wax ring, you get shitty water on your bathroom floor. A wax ring is a single-use item. If you pull a toilet, you need to put in a new wax ring. You scrape the old one up with a putty knife. Also, beeswax is stickier than you think.)
Sixth: Tired, for the moment of working on the toilet, I stuffed a plastic bag down the hole (to block icky sewer fumes) and went downstairs to examine the water line. Upstairs, about half an inch of the water line had been sitting out of the floor. Downstairs, because the ceiling had fallen in, there was easy access and excellent visibility for the water line. I got a union, a hacksaw, and my pvc stuff out of the truck and fixed the water line issue. I also cemented the shut off valve onto the new pvc water line.
Back upstairs, I looked at the toilet flange on the floor. It was very rusty and the slots were not very slot-like anymore. I decided a new toilet flange was in order because I did not want to be back again in two weeks after the deteriorated flange let the tenants tip the fucking toilet over on the floor and break it. I unscrewed the existing flange from the floor. I tried to lift it out. (Toilet flanges are NOT supposed to be cemented to the sewer line. They are supposed to nestle gently in the cuddly PVC embrace of the sewer line without the benefit of cement.)
I experienced difficulty with lifting out the toilet flange. The hardware store person said I might have to jiggle and twist but I gotta say, I made a yeoman effort and nothing jiggled or twisted.
Fuck.
I went downstairs and used my hacksaw to saw through the sewer line, right below the elbow. Happily, I had easy access to the sewer line because, yo, the dining room ceiling was all fallen down. Fortuitous, that. Also, despite the fact that this is one of our older buildings, it had been replumbed in PVC which is fairly easy to saw through.
New toilet flange. New 3" elbow plus coupler. Too long, so cut 1/2" off of sewer line, not any more fun than it was last time. Cemented coupler and elbow to existing pipe. Put end of flange in end of elbow. Everything fits. Yay! Power screwdriver toilet flange to floor.
Put down wax ring. Put in floor bolts. Put toilet for-sitting-on part on top, thread floor bolts through holes. Finger-tighten, sit on for-sitting-on part (to squish down the wax). Tighten bolts again. Not too tight.
Put tank on for-sitting-on part. Affix bolts. Turn water shut off to OFF position. Attach supply line. Have tenant turn water on. Water sprays every-fucking-where. Oops. Someone, the someone given the shutoff valve to hold onto, had been screwing and unscrewing the parts for something to do. Looks like they didn't screw them all back together before handing me the part to cement it in place. I fixor. Tank fills up. It is dripping, I gently tighten tank-holding bolts. Dripping stops. Flush. Adjust fill level. Flush. Flush. Looks good up here. Go downstairs, have tenant flush upstairs. Looks good. Nothing is leaking. My PVC skillz do not suck. I go back upstairs. Tenant says "I do not like this toilet. It does not flush very much." (It is a low-flush toilet, which is all they make these days. The previous toilet was a 5-gallon flood flusher model.) Tough shit, tenant. You shouldn't have snapped the fucking ears off of your old toilet.
I put seat (sold seperately) on toilet. I put lid on toilet tank. I had a nice chat with tenant about the care and feeding of toilets. I told tenant we would be billing her for the toilet and labor involved in replacing it. She wanted to know when her ceiling was getting fixed. I told her it'd be when the drywall was. (She didn't get it.)
And then I fixed the basement door latch. The light ballast in the basement is going bad -- I put in a new bulb and it's still shitty as far as light quality. I am hoping that Friday is somewhat less exciting.
I showed up at the tenant's first thing this morning to put some eyeballs on the problem so that I would know what I needed to do to fix things. Constant readers will recall that the tenant was claiming that the toilet "just kept running" and that they tried to shut it off at the supply line but the valve there broke so they broke into the basement and shut off the water there.
What to my wondering eyes did appear? Well, I'll tell you. First, though, you need to know some basic things about toilets to fully appreciate that what did appear.
1. Yer average toilet tank (the tank is the thing with the flushing handle on it, the rectangular higher-up part of the toilet) attaches to the sitting-on part of the toilet by way of two bolts that go down through the tank (they're usually under water if the toilet tank is full) and into ear flap holes located on the sitting-on part behind where the toilet seat attaches. There's also a rubber-gasketed hole (covered by the flapper) which is where the water goes from the top tank part to the bottom for-sitting-on part when you hit the flushie lever, but that doesn't have any actual connector parts. It's just kind of a gravity thing.
2. A toilet is usually affixed to the floor by way of two bolts through its base to a toilet flange that is screwed to the floor. The bolts are carefully threaded into slots in the toilet flange and their big, flat heads keep them from pulling back out of the toilet flange slots. (The mechanism is a lot like the one used in those chain slide locks you see on apartment doors. You put the bolt head in the big round hole at one end of the bolt slot on the flange and then slide it to the narrow part of the slot where it can't pull out.)
3. Water gets into toilets by way of a supply line that comes out of the floor or out of the wall on the left hand side (when you stand facing the toilet, as if you were going to pee into it like guys do) of the toilet. There is typically a shut-off valve between the pipe and the toilet supply line (flexible, chrome, or whatever) so that you can replace stuff in the toilet without flooding the fucking house.
4. Possibly the single most important piece of toilet-related information: Toilets are ceramic, like many coffee cups. If you drop toilet pieces, they will break. Ceramic has absolutely no elasticity in it and cannot deform under stress. The only thing ceramic can do is break. Ceramic failures in toilets are sudden, loud, and full of lots of sharp pieces.
The first thing I observed was that the dining room ceiling had fallen down, about a 4x4 foot square piece. This would have been more of a problem except that the tenant's bed and huge stack of boxes and dressers and shit were out of the way. (The tenant has other people living there, see, and one of them is using the dining room as a bedroom. Six people inhabit this two-bedroom apartment.)
The second thing that I observed was that the PVC supply line was totally and completely detatched from the shut off valve in a shape very like the ones you get in medical encyclopedias for a "spiral fracture". Srsly, there was no connection at all between the supply line and the shut off valve.
Third observation: Toilet was full of stale urine, which smelled amusingly rank for about half a second, whereupon it started to, er, piss me off. (Come on, you knew that one was coming.)
Fourth observation: Someone had rocked the toilet tank back and forth until both ears on the for-sitting-on part had broken off. The big bolts that were supposed to be holding the tank onto the for-sitting-on part, they were hanging in mid-air. There were no pieces of broken toilet anywhere around, so this wasn't a recent thing. Breaking toilet pieces is like breaking a coffee cup -- there are bits around forever afterward, getting stuck into bare feet and leaving tiny bloody blotches in your footprints. It'd *been* like this for a while. At this point, I decided that the tenants would be paying for the toilet and my labor on this repair. Herion addicts do not break both tank-holding-ears off toilets.
Fifth: The bolts holding the toilet to the floor were rusted into ick. There was no way they were going to move. So, y'know, I got gordian on their asses. I removed the tank (empty of water) and set it aside, out of the way. I got a hammer. I beat on the toilet feet near where the bolts come up through. The toilet foot areas (on each side) shattered so that I could pick up the toilet without having to unscrew very rusted bolts. With rather a lot of care, I picked up the for-sitting-on part of the toilet and tipped the bulk of its contents into the bathtub, where all the liquids ran down the drain with a happy yellow gurgle. (I say "bulk of its contents" because it is difficult indeed to fully empty a toilet of all toilet ick.) Then I carried the for-sitting-on part downstairs and put it in the back of my truck. I did not get any ick on me, but I can't speak as to the condition of the sidewalk. (My bad.) Ick also dribbled out on the bed of the truck but as I don't sit there and as it's supposed to rain later this week, I figure it'll be fine. After that, I scraped up the wax ring crap and carefully deposited it in the wax ring box. (Toilets sit on what is called a wax ring. This is made of beeswax and it mushes down to provide the watertight seal between the toilet and the sewer pipe. If you have a bad wax ring, you get shitty water on your bathroom floor. A wax ring is a single-use item. If you pull a toilet, you need to put in a new wax ring. You scrape the old one up with a putty knife. Also, beeswax is stickier than you think.)
Sixth: Tired, for the moment of working on the toilet, I stuffed a plastic bag down the hole (to block icky sewer fumes) and went downstairs to examine the water line. Upstairs, about half an inch of the water line had been sitting out of the floor. Downstairs, because the ceiling had fallen in, there was easy access and excellent visibility for the water line. I got a union, a hacksaw, and my pvc stuff out of the truck and fixed the water line issue. I also cemented the shut off valve onto the new pvc water line.
Back upstairs, I looked at the toilet flange on the floor. It was very rusty and the slots were not very slot-like anymore. I decided a new toilet flange was in order because I did not want to be back again in two weeks after the deteriorated flange let the tenants tip the fucking toilet over on the floor and break it. I unscrewed the existing flange from the floor. I tried to lift it out. (Toilet flanges are NOT supposed to be cemented to the sewer line. They are supposed to nestle gently in the cuddly PVC embrace of the sewer line without the benefit of cement.)
I experienced difficulty with lifting out the toilet flange. The hardware store person said I might have to jiggle and twist but I gotta say, I made a yeoman effort and nothing jiggled or twisted.
Fuck.
I went downstairs and used my hacksaw to saw through the sewer line, right below the elbow. Happily, I had easy access to the sewer line because, yo, the dining room ceiling was all fallen down. Fortuitous, that. Also, despite the fact that this is one of our older buildings, it had been replumbed in PVC which is fairly easy to saw through.
New toilet flange. New 3" elbow plus coupler. Too long, so cut 1/2" off of sewer line, not any more fun than it was last time. Cemented coupler and elbow to existing pipe. Put end of flange in end of elbow. Everything fits. Yay! Power screwdriver toilet flange to floor.
Put down wax ring. Put in floor bolts. Put toilet for-sitting-on part on top, thread floor bolts through holes. Finger-tighten, sit on for-sitting-on part (to squish down the wax). Tighten bolts again. Not too tight.
Put tank on for-sitting-on part. Affix bolts. Turn water shut off to OFF position. Attach supply line. Have tenant turn water on. Water sprays every-fucking-where. Oops. Someone, the someone given the shutoff valve to hold onto, had been screwing and unscrewing the parts for something to do. Looks like they didn't screw them all back together before handing me the part to cement it in place. I fixor. Tank fills up. It is dripping, I gently tighten tank-holding bolts. Dripping stops. Flush. Adjust fill level. Flush. Flush. Looks good up here. Go downstairs, have tenant flush upstairs. Looks good. Nothing is leaking. My PVC skillz do not suck. I go back upstairs. Tenant says "I do not like this toilet. It does not flush very much." (It is a low-flush toilet, which is all they make these days. The previous toilet was a 5-gallon flood flusher model.) Tough shit, tenant. You shouldn't have snapped the fucking ears off of your old toilet.
I put seat (sold seperately) on toilet. I put lid on toilet tank. I had a nice chat with tenant about the care and feeding of toilets. I told tenant we would be billing her for the toilet and labor involved in replacing it. She wanted to know when her ceiling was getting fixed. I told her it'd be when the drywall was. (She didn't get it.)
And then I fixed the basement door latch. The light ballast in the basement is going bad -- I put in a new bulb and it's still shitty as far as light quality. I am hoping that Friday is somewhat less exciting.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-11 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-11 08:44 pm (UTC)Sadly "Applicant looks like a complete fucktard" is not a legally-defensible reason not to rent to someone who's obviously (more than 75% likely) a loser.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-11 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-11 09:53 pm (UTC)Rich people are very picky about amenities and landscaping and curb appeal and having brand-new appliances and shit like that. They also want everything to work perfectly all the time and if it doesn't, they want it fixed *instantly*. They're picky and demanding and they require much nicer apartments BUT THEY WILL NOT PAY SUFFICIENTLY HIGHER RENTS TO JUSTIFY THE NICER APARTMENTS. They pay *somewhat* higher rents but not enough higher. Therefore, your profit margin, it is the sux0r. Also, there are few high-end-apartment-renters in my area. Most people in this area who can put together 600 or 700 a month, every month, are homeowners. Apartments, therefore, have to cost less than the "starter" house payment if you want to have anyone around to rent them... so you're looking at a high-end apartment that should not cost any more than about $550 a month. If you drop the cost of your highest apartment to about 450, your pool of potential tenants gets a lot bigger.
As I've said here previously, profit in the landlord game is one percent of the value of the property per month as rent. That's the amount of rent you should get per month out of the place in order to make money.
So, if your property cost you 120K then you should be getting 1200 out of it in rent every single month or you are LOSING MONEY. Now, where I live, 120K will get you a pretty decent house with a bit of ground underneath it. (Single family homes are way overvalued by the market and they generally do not pencil out as rental properties.) There exist stupid people who are renting houses like that around here for $600 a month and they think they are doing well. They are not. They are renting to their tenants at a loss of $600 a month. Me, I don't have ANY tenants I like enough to throw them six hundred dollars a month. How 'bout you? (This is why we don't own/rent a lot of single family homes.)
Anyway, since I'm renting to poor people, quite a few of my tenants will not pass a credit check even if they are honest and pay their bills.
Some of them are unbanked -- I get the rent in big wads of twenty dollar bills because they just cashed the paycheck and are going around paying all their bills with the money. First week of the month, I go to the bank every day and I generally have over a thousand dollars (in cash) each day of that week. I also have a stack of checks, but those do not look nearly as impressive as the wad o' twenties.
Some of them have had their credit ruined because their parents put the utilities in their names when they were like six years old and then never paid the bill. (Not making this up. The utility companies have started asking for birthdates to go with the social security numbers to prevent this sort of thing from going on, but for a long time, they didn't seem to notice it and a lot of rental-aged people are finding out that mommy or daddy put the electric/water/gas/phone in their names a gazillion years ago and then didn't pay the bills.)
Some of them pay their bills *now* but have outstanding judgments against them from *before* -- if they don't need to be able to borrow money, the judgments are not a particularly pressing issue for 'em.
We are not dealing with people who have *good* credit, mostly. We are dealing with an entirely different socioeconomic class. :)
As for getting a previous landlord reference, we try. They say they are living with friends or with parents or have never rented anywhere before or they give you a disconnected cell phone number for the "landlord" -- mostly it's a huge fucking waste of time.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 06:09 am (UTC)