Hi. My name is Anastasia Scuttlebutt and this blog is about the trials and tribulations I went through with my tenants. Are you ready? Here goes . . .
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Suddenly everyone had advice for me, the main trend being, "Don't become a landlord, whatever you do," "Tenants are nothing but trouble," "You'll only regret it," and so on, and so on.
Having led a somewhat sheltered life, I naively considered most people to be basically nice. I couldn't understand why everyone was so negative about my idea of becoming a landlord. But without fail, as soon as I mentioned my impending landlorship, a lip would invariably turn up at the corner in a knowing smirk, followed by the "I wouldn't be a landlord if you paid me" routine.
Funny -- out of all the advice-givers who professed to know so much about the subject, none of them was a landlord. I mean, if I'd met someone who'd actually been a landlord, with a horror story or two to tell from personal experience, it might have made me pause for a moment in my headlong dash to become one. But there again, I'm headstrong and stubborn. Being fixated on my goal, I brushed them off with a, "Yeah, yeah, you had trouble with your tenants, but I won't have tenants like that."
Anyway, what was the problem? What was all the fuss about? How bad could it be? I was a tenant, my parents and friends were tenants, and apart from the occasional blocked toilet, we weren't any problem to our landlords. And so what if I could only afford a house in a poorer neighborhood? The tenants there were just regular people too, right?
Not that I had a lot when I was growing up, either. Born in England, I spend the latter half of my childhood in South Africa, where my parents emigrated to start their own trade-show (exhibition) business. I was eleven years old, tall, skinny, pale-skinned, and shy. My five-year-old sister, Frederica, was the complete opposite. Outgoing and vivacious, she tanned easily, was never at a loss for words, and was a constant show-off, even when no one else was in the room. Oh, how I envied her self-confidence and her ability to stand on the knuckles of her toes. Alas, I was born the most un-supple child in creation, much to the frustration of various gym and ballet teachers throughout my childhood. Frederica also inherited both of our parents' talent for art, singing, and acting, whereas I had only managed to inherit an offshoot of the creative gene by being kind-of good at writing.
Divorced from my moody father a year after we arrived in South Africa, my young, attractive mum married a six-foot-four, skinny, red-headed Dutchman named Wim (W-uh-m). Wim was full of fun and loved the outdoors -- though I wasn't too keen on his passion for fishing because I felt sorry for the fish. He also loved me and Frederica as if we were his own. He cheerfully got up with us in the middle of the night to look for meteors, paid us a penny per garden snail -- which nearly bankrupted him when we collected buckets full -- and had Frederica running around the back yard (garden) with a container of salt, trying to sprinkle some on a bird's tail so it would let her catch it. Good with his hands, Wim was the one who built us a treehouse and made me a pair of stilts when my old ones wore out from constant use.
At first Wim worked with my dad, building exhibition stands, but he soon launched his own stand-fitting business. Although it would later become the largest stand-fitting company in South Africa, building up the business took time, effort, and expense. Frederica and I never lacked for anything, but during a learning-how-to-cook phase, I soon learned how to make a chicken last for three meals.
When I met British-born Albert, he was in his final year of medical school and hankering to move to the United States, having served a successful internship there. Soon after I married Albert at the tender age of nineteen, we moved to England and worked our way slowly through the U.S. emigration process. During this time, Albert worked as a psychiatry resident (houseman) at a country institution, and our daughters, Andrea and Bronwyn, were born a year apart. Although we lived in an apartment on the edge of the rambling, old mental hospital, salaries for housemen were pitiful, and I became quite adept at bouncing checks.
Three years later, we finally made it across the Atlantic, but salaries for psych residents in the States were not much better; no more bounced checks, thank goodness, but money was tight. Things grew still more tight after we divorced a year later.
Forced to return to work, I found a babysitter and got a job working as a dental claims rep at an insurance company.
I hated it.
I then tried my hand at selling advertising, but being still painfully shy, I hated that job even more, though I quite enjoyed the attention I received from many of my male customers. I actually received a couple of offers from married men to engage in some nooky at a nearby motel, which I declined.
The girls and I lived in a subsidized apartment complex. Although our apartment was huge, I didn't much like living there. The upstairs neighbors had two young children who delighted in racing up and down the entire length of their uncarpeted apartment, dropping heavy toys and moving furniture around at six o'clock in the morning.
Andrea and Bronwyn, on the other hand, loved it, and their social lives improved tremendously. Many children lived in the apartment complex, which was surrounded by playgrounds, plenty of grass for ball games, trees for climbing, and long, interconnecting paths for safe bike-riding. At the end of the day, mothers would stand at the back doors of the apartment buildings, yelling out their kids' names. Panting children, invariably grubby, but happy, would appear from all corners to be gathered inside for their supper, and silence would settle over the neighborhood with the approaching dusk.
Being subsidized housing, we also had a kind of unofficial single mothers' club going, useful for babysitting and sticking Bandaids on each others' children's scrapes, whichever mother's building was closest to the accident scene. Life also perked up for me, as I had started dating a man called Jim, who owned a hot tub and engaged in interesting hobbies like ham radio and flying model airplaines.
Meanwhile, life as a dental claims rep was not very lucrative. I was now thirty-one years old. It was time to better myself.
I took a couple of night classes at a local college, with a view toward embarking on a nursing career. But then Andrea slammed her finger in the louver doors of her bedroom closet, angry at being told to clean her room. As I watched the doctor maneuvering the bone back through Andrea's fingernail and stitching up the red, pulpy mess, I managed to reassure my daughter that the doctor was still waiting for the anesthetic to take effect, while my stomach let me know in no uncertain terms that I was way too squeamish to be a nurse.
I began scrutinizing the Sunday papers and noticed that the legal field offered pretty decent salaries. I began imagining myself as a kind of Perry Mason-type of legal assistant, helping wily attorneys solve interesting crimes and celebrating courtroom victories. By this time, my mother and Wim had immigrated to the United States so they could witness their grandchildren growing up. Regretfully, Frederica had to stay behind because of immigration laws. Although she had been ill for a long time with liver disease, she was holding her own, ran her own screenprinting business, and was involved in amateur theatre with Daddy, who was by now on to his fourth wife.
I found myself a half-day data-entry job so I could spend time with the girls in the afternoons after school, and Mummy babysat while I attended night school three nights a week. Nine months and one paralegal certificate later, I clawed my way into the first job that I interviewed for and settled down to a steady pay-check and a growing savings account.
In a couple of years, I had amassed enough money for a downpayment, and interest rates were low. Now was the time to buy a house, venture into the world of landlording, and hopefully earn some extra money. Visions of sugarplums emblazoned with dollar signs danced in my head at the idea of tenants paying me monthly rent that would amount to more than the mortgage payments. Whether I lived on the top floor of a two-family house -- no more living underneath people, thank you very much -- and rented out the bottom floor, or lived elsewhere, collecting rent from two sets of tenants, my bank balance should grow steadily. I was already imagining how I would spend all that money. Maybe I would even get rich. The sky was the limit.
By this time, I had been dating Jim for nearly five years -- madly infatuated the first year, simmering gently the next two, and then slowly declining. I hadn't felt able to break it off because of hurting Jim's feelings, especially as his ardor had been increasing whilst mine was cooling. It was quite a relief when we finally broke up after one fight too many.
The hunt for a house began . . . . . . .
