The plumber is here to fix a drain in our tub and he told me it is nice we kept this house up, most houses in the city are ripped apart. He would never live here anyways though cause the "neighborhood is garbage."

Just when you think it is the worst it can be, our ghetto trash tenants can top it.

You have no idea how much I resent social welfare. I was always such a liberal pay your taxes, help out your neighbor kind of guy until we started actually dealing with the fucking trash that lives off the system.

When the last tenant left the upstairs ones asked to move downstairs. We let them figuring upstairs is easier to rent out. We told them to have it clean. That was April 1. At the beginning of the month we got the half of their rent that comes form social services. To this day they still haven't paid their half. Some lame ass story about how some other social welfare had her address mixed up so they didn't get their money. How about you get a job you fucking lazy ass. So we called and called no response. I can't really deal with it during the week because I am working and then today we go there and no one is home.

We go to check out upstairs where they used to live and it is disgusting. Also , they heat is at 80 degrees. That means it has been at 80 degress for 17 days. Serioulsy, but who cares they probably aren't paying for it - your taxes are. Not only that but you can here in their apartment that the TV is on, the radio is on. The basements light are all on, the back hall light is on.

Then the kicker - the new upstairs appliances are missing. Yes the appliances we just spent a $1000 on are gone. They decided to move them downstairs. Great! The old appliance from downstairs are in the back hall blocking the door. This is definitely not okay to with fire code or with me as I would never let such careless people move our new appliance around. I don't want to have to move huge appliances between floor and hook stuff up.

The room used to look like this with a brand new refrigerator and stove (e:paul,45020) now it looks like this.



Then they broke the front screen door.



And added this totally ghetto trash couch to the porch.



Now we have to evict them too before it gets worse. I am going to start over with a property manager.

Her "check" was "stolen" so she has like half the money. We didn't have a lease for her until she paid the first month's rent. Now she is saying its not really convenient for her to have a lease. I think its time for her to go which brings us back to no tenants. Serioulsy, that house is making me bankrupt.

So after more than a month of missing in action and being evicted, the tenant calls while I was leaving the botanical gardens today to say she is "so sorry about the inconvenience but her baby was sick and someone stole her phone." Serioulsy, think about it, you disappear and stop payng rent and never contact you landlord for over a month. The last time we heard from her was the beginning of February.

She says she will need a couple week to get the stuff out, something about her SSI stopping and having to switch to welfare. What does it take to get one responsible tenant.

So many things were happenng on friday. The nice part was getting new furniture. The upstairs looks a lot different now. Best of all, the den is comfortable ;)

While we were at the tenants, cleaning up in the attic we discovered just how much exra junk the last couple tenants left. I never thought to check th eback of the basement. I just assumed that no one had gone down there. Then I found they used it to store old broken appliances. Something I really don't get considering both appartment came with appliances that were of good quality, if not new.

So now in the basement I have so many scrap metal appliances. I hate it. I am sure all the metal is worth money but not enough to have to haul all the shit out. I knew about the old furnace, and two hand crank washing machine from another but not there is a broken refrigerator, a broken stove and a broken washing machine, argh. I also found like 4 probably broken small televisions



There is just an overwhelming amount of junk with that. I seriously need another two ton day at the dump. Next time all of our stuff is pretty much out so it will be easy to see if anything is left by tenants.

There was also some sort of garbage dump going on in the backyard, which is especially weird considering there were two empty ultra large size garbage totes.

It was filled with bags of diapers and stuff which cats or rats decided to pull apart. Fun. People are such scumbags.



Next step, now that we won the eviction proceding: we get to go pay the City Of Buffalo $105 to have them officially tell the missing tenant who abandoned the property, that she is out by pinning anotice on her door. Why that costs $105 is a mystery, considering she is no longer there. If we don't pay its not yet official.

After she is offically evicted, we get the pleasure of changing locks and cleaning up her ton of shit.

The best part of the whole thing was my aquisition of baby jesus in a coffin. If animatronic, old school style with a wind up key.

So we are at court today to evict one of our tenants who doesn't live
there anymore and hasn't paid rent in months. The thing is she left
lots of stuff in the apartment and you can't just remove it without an
eviction proceding. If she actually shows up i might end up on court
for something else, lol. It's not just inconvenient, it costs money
to evict someone. The thing is if this ever happens again it is no
longer a mystery process and I will jump on it sooner. For example
with our new tenants that have not paid march rent yet - what the fuck!

So our sheet says the court case is at 9am but now that we got here
the courtoom we in in actually says the court opens at 9:30. Thanks
city of buffalo?

The real problem is that at 8:30 we put one dollar in the new style
parking meter. But now, because it's just a printed receipt instead
of a meter, there is no way to add time until later. I find that
super frustrating. You should be able to feed you old receipt in and
add money.

Ya, another tenant I should have never rented to. We had/have this tenant named Nicole Clemmons who seemed like a perfectly good tenant at first. She didn't have a lot of stuff so we gave her a bunch of things that my mother had stored in the attic. Like a bed and a TV and a bunch of other stuff, curtain, etc.

It started out good. She paid her rent for the first two months. She was really pregnant with her third kid and I figured she would probably try and continue to pay rent with a new baby and all. Plus she got some sort of public assistance that helped her with her rent. It wasn't section 8 though, becaus ethen I wouldn't be having this problem.

So when January rolled around, we had finally finished work on the downstairs apartment. With the new baby she wanted to move downstairs ebcause their were less stairs to go up and it also had a nicer bathroom. We agreed because we are nice and felt bad for her having to go up the stairs and all. It kind of sucked because downstairs is easier to rent out and we lost out on two months rent because of it while trying to find someone.

When she left upstairs she left a mess, piles of clothes, garbage, carpet etc. This was aprt of the reason that we couldn't rent it very easily. She kept promising to take her stuff and didn't. I continued to feel bad for her because she just had a baby etc.

Then she stopped paying rent and disconnected her phone.

On like Feb 10th we gave her a motion to evict notice. When delivered it, she was not home but the heat was set to 82 degrees. Seemed like she hasn't been there in a week at 82 degrees. I mean (e:terry) had stopped by everyday for a week and not seen her. How is it that I a would never turn the heat up that high and I am not on public aassistance. Maybe that is why. Anyway, we couldn't get ahold of her so (e:terry) taped the notice to her inside apartment door.

In the meantime the upstairs apartment got rented but they wanted her stuff out, so today, not only has she not paid rent in a month, we had to finsih her moving for her.

I took this one giant pile of clothes she left on the floor upstiars and had to transfer it to her apartment downstairs. Serioulsy, look at this pile. How on earth could you leave your closet like this when moving out? Did she really not want them. Legally, we can't throw them out - so I had to transfer it all to her new apartment downstairs.



That plus tons of other gargabe a carpet, pizza boxes, shoes, a lamp, a TV, chairs, etc. (e:terry) was nice and threw out the pizza boxes instead of transfering. If it was up to me it would be a straight tarnsfer.

This makes like 5 people in a row that I helped out only to have them screw me over in one way or another.

Has anyone gone through the eviction process before?

Its not often that i am totally broke but right now I am mega super broke. One of our rental appartments bathroom and kitchen cost like $3000 unexpected dollars to fix. Hopefully, now after working on it a bunch this weekend, we can actually rent it out again. Having two apartments rented will be a big help to the brokeness. I feel like that place sucks the life out of me.

I wish we just had our house to deal with. Even after all the problems were fixed at the rental prop I found an attic window that was rotting out. Should be a fun weekend of painting, fixing and cleaning. It should be great as I am still sick.

It really sucks to be broke. Luckily, I bought a turkey on super clearance at the lexington-coop so even though we have no more grocery money, we will have 20 pounds of turkey once I get a chance to cook it. It was like $16 instead of $70, the original price but it was frozen and I had to defrost it for 3 days now. The turkey comes from Stonewood Farms In Vermont

On the work front
I worked way late into the evening twice and still have two hours of personal leave I have to use right now before it expires so I figure that tomorrow, I am leaving early in order to cook the Turkey, ya right. We will see how that goes.

I have been programming like mad but its never enough to keep up with the crazy number of requests we have now. I am supposed to be working on one new project but everyday its something else. I hope we et new people before there is a hiring freeze.

I am so confused about the housing market. My friend bought a house of the lower west side for $137,000 that was like $20,000 last year before it "got its hair did". I thought those flip days were over.

I thought housing prices were slipping. Then I was looking at Zillow to see if our house's estimated value had change. In fact it had. The value went up a lot. Our house is now estimated at $279,000 a good $100,000 more than we bought it for. I guess that was a good investment. I mean I put some money in, but nothing like that. Imagine if it had a new exterior paint job and new roof. I don't think this value will hold when the depression starts but I really have no interest in selling or moving. Its proximity to my job is worth well over $100,000 - especially over a lifetime in travel costs saved.

The creepy part is how did they know we went form 3 bathrooms to 2 bathrooms. I used to say 3.

Today I went on the Elmwood Village Kitchen Tour with my mother and (e:matthew). I liked seeing people's kitchens - it gave me a bunch of ideas. I don't usually get to see many people's kitchens because of my animal allergies. The theme this year was green kitchens.



I would say maybe like 10% of the kitchen's mentioned anything that had to do with green. One lady had bamboo floors and recycled glass counter tops. Another one used a certain kind of tree that grew faster than usual trees. The rest pretty much did not mention anything. Oh accept the one kitchen that had all reused stuff (green) left their shower on during the whole thing to show how awesome it was. It was awesome but serioulsy we could just trust you dude.



I saw some really nice woodwork.


Including this turtle at the Elmwood Village Inn at which (e:drew) was a tour guide.



Sorry the picture sucks, stupid iphone is really bad with snap shots.


We saw (e:janelle) along the way and ate some Italian Nougat at Delish which was in fact super delish.



In the end we toured the Gilda Radner house which was cool.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE
I really thought showing the two empty houses with half done kitchens that were both for rent on Bryant was tacky. I mean I just paid $18 per person to see kitchens. I don't need your lame ass advertsiement pushed in my face. Especially not if your kitchen isn't even all that. Is there no oversight committee of these kind of things. I felt the same way on the Linwood home tour four years ago when an apartment building showed an empty apartment for rent.

Unrelated but along the way:

I also saw these panties outside Delish and wonder what the story behind that is.