Wax On, Wax Off

If I am ever feeling a desire to count my blessings, I can always find an abundant list after I visit my Grandma’s apartment house.

I’m not saying everyone in the building that my Grandma owns is financially challenged – some are just starting out. But somehow the cops show up about 50-75% of the times Rick and I come to clean. So I think I’m safe to say that several of the residents are severely legally challenged.

If you do the math, that’s a lot of uniformed visits -- especially when you consider we clean/mow the grounds twice a month, and clean out the occasional apartment once every couple of months.

Rick and I take care of the building for my 90-year-old grandmother who has alzheimers. We take care of the hallways and laundry, mow, collect the laundry quarters, clean apartments that are vacated, and do general maintenance around the place. We fortunately don’t have to collect rent or find new tenants. Grandma has a manager that takes care of the money matters. We just do the grunt work, literally.

I got a pretty good idea of what we were in for when we were cleaning our second apartment a year or two ago. I asked Rick why the apartment door didn’t fit and had so much foam stripping around the edging. “Um, yeah,” he said, “that would be because the cops had to kick in the door so many times on the last tenant.” I guess the couple that lived there had domestic abuse issues that involved several 911 calls. So it’s that kind of neighborhood.

The apartment house is a real challenge. The family is in the process of selling the building, so along with keeping it clean and maintained, we need to watch our costs because we don’t want to sink a bunch of money into a building that they will hopefully soon be selling. But they’ve been selling it for quite a while. There’s not a huge market for a six-plex apartment in one of the lower-rent areas in Lincoln -- especially one that has such an interesting range of tenants.

I am not supposed to go to the apartment house by myself. One of the tenants is on the sex offenders list, so Rick always comes along when I clean the hallways and apartments. He likes to tinker around with mowing, raking, branch trimming, light bulb replacement, and any other random thing that someone could spend countless hours working on. Before we can leave, there’s always one more thing he has to do. Ugh. Good thing I’ve got solitaire on my phone. And just so you know, looks do not kill. In fact, Rick is pretty good at being totally oblivious to them.

Besides the sex offender (the one tenant we know will never leave because he will have a devil of a time find another place to live), we know pretty much everybody who lives in the place. We are relieved that one of the tenants has moved out, the one who would steal electricity by running an extension cord from his apartment into the laundry room. Yes, we are well aware of why a tenant might want to camouflage their electricity consumption. That is why we are glad they are gone.

We are currently cleaning out the apartment of one of his neighbor/friends who had a gang insignia scribbled on the woodwork right outside his apartment door. We aren’t sure if the move was caused by the graffiti, but it’s good riddance. Unfortunately magic eraser doesn’t seem to do the trick. It may require the use of the electric sander. Oh shucks, Rick might have to break out his power tools.

Actually this apartment is the fourth apartment we’ve had to clean in the last four months. The manager fills the apartments about as fast as we clean them. But oh boy, have we had some doozies. There is nothing more yucky than cleaning up after other people -- especially people who don’t plan on getting their deposit back.

Rick is getting to be an expert at repairing large holes in the drywall and I purchase my plastic gloves in bulk. If you don’t have to actually touch it with your bare skin and if you can kind of remove your thoughts from what you are cleaning, you can clean up about anything. Then you just throw those clothes away when you get home.

And we’ve cleaned up about everything. I won’t go into the list, because the list is long and gross. If I was to try to decide who was the worst renter we’ve cleaned up after, I think two renters might tie for the worst. One guy never cleaned. Never. And I’m certain he didn’t own a vacuum. There was black mold all over the ceiling of the bathroom, not to mention the black furry stuff growing in the shower. He liked rice (which we had to vacuum out of every drawer and cabinet), beans (which I had to scrape off the walls of his bedroom, really) and he liked fish. Not the nice filets you buy in the frozen department. He liked to clean his own fish. And the scales were everywhere: on the walls and the ceiling and the cabinets and the drawers. And fish scales do not come up easily. Yikes. Plus, he enjoyed his knives. He liked to stick them into the cabinet doors and the walls. The holes were lovely. They matched all the lovely holes he liked to punch in the doors in the apartment. I think we were able to patch two of the doors; most of the other doors we had to have a handyman cut to fit and stain to match the apartment. And he seemed like such a polite man. Yep, just lovely.

But it ties with a young woman who left her basement apartment abandoned. We weren’t able to get inside for a month after the electricity had been turned off. When the electricity goes off, bad things happen. Especially when you leave food in the fridge and you leave the toilet plugged up for a month. Needless to say, it was very, very bad. Plus, Rick had to repair a large hole in the wall in the kitchen that was just about the right size for someone to have been thrown into, about shoulder high. And if that wasn’t enough, she obviously had a dog. She left the dog’s shampoo under the bathroom sink and sprinkles of his food in the hall closet. Just delightful, especially for a pet-free apartment.

The new manager told Rick that this last apartment – the one we are cleaning now -- is going to be a hard one to get ready. Rick checked it out and said, “na, we’ve had much worse.” The guy left the place full of broken furniture and mattresses, old food in the fridge, and an incredible patchwork of stains in the carpet. It took the good part of an afternoon to take out all the furniture for three guys. But the beauty of the neighborhood is that you just leave the furniture out by the dumpster and it will be gone in 30 minutes. Sometimes it’s gone before you can make your “Free” sign to put on it. Fantastic.

I know, I know, I paint such a pretty picture of apartment ownership. But we do have parts of our caretaking that we enjoy.

There is always, ALWAYS something going on there. Like I said, the cops show up about 50-75% of the time we are there. Sometimes they are simply serving someone some papers. One time they were bringing home a little girl who lived with her dad and was out wondering the streets alone. I know, nice. One time I was cleaning the basement apartment and got a front row seat for an altercation. I was actually cleaning the front basement window blinds when a police car comes screaming up the street with the blue lights blazing. They pull up on the curb directly in front of me and go running into the house next door. I could almost hear “Bad boys, bad boys” booming over the air waves. I stood there for a minute wondering what was going on, and then decide I probably shouldn’t be standing by the window, just in case any shooting will be taking place. Eventually they bring somebody out and put them in the back seat. Cool. Another time Rick and I were cleaning the hallways when we realized we might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A girl and her family were moving her things out of one of the apartments. Apparently her boyfriend and his mother were not ready to move out just yet. It got a little intense and we quickly wrapped things up and got out of there before any shooting or fighting could begin. It’s just a laugh a minute.

Actually there are tenants that we really enjoy. There is a pair of Iraqi gentlemen who are SO meek and SO nice. I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of them when they first moved in. I was vacuuming in the hallway when one of the guys opened his door and started visiting with me. He asked me if I was there by myself. Whoa. Just whoa. I quickly told him that my large husband was just right outside the front door, mowing. I later realized that he was asking this because he was looking out for me. Rick has fixed a few things for them, and they invite him in to eat supper with them. They bring him a water bottle when he is out mowing in the summer. They are so nice. They told Rick that they moved to the United States to escape the jihad back home. We hope things work out for them. We always offer them first dibs to any furniture left in the apartments because they have been living without almost anything and sleeping on the floor. Super nice guys.

They make me laugh too. Apparently the sex offender and the gang member had an altercation in the hallway outside of the Iraqis’ door. The Iraqi gentlemen called the police and held their phone up to the crack in the door to let the 911 operator hear what was happening because they don’t speak English fluently. They then called the manager and said that someone had made a hole in the hallway wall that we might want to patch. The next time Rick and I went to the apartment, I checked the halls as I was vacuuming and didn’t see anything major, until, of course, I got to the very bottom of the stairs. A little hole, HA! There was a hole in the wall that reached from my ankles to above my shoulder. Someone evidently got thrown through the wall into the space under the stairs. And someone thought this tiny area under the stairs looked like a good place to sleep. So they moved in a blanket and a jacket and some other random items. It almost looked homey, as if you might want to curl up and take a nap. You just have to be sure you can sleep with one eye open.

Yep, you just don’t know what will happen next around that place. There is always something happening.

But, like I said, it makes me pause and count my blessings. First of all, I am grateful that Rick and I are able to house and feed our family. I am glad we have a yard for kids to play in with their dog. We are glad that we have never had a child returned to us after wandering alone in the street.

It makes me grateful for the invention of SOS pads and magic erasers. I am glad that Clorox bleach comes in big gallon jugs.

I am also grateful for the solid biceps I am building up from all the cleaning and wall washing I’ve been doing. (Rick never thinks the walls need painting. He always says we can just wash them. I’ll give you one guess who does the wall washing and who does the painting.) Granted, I may not be able to punch very hard if I ever need to defend myself. But, mind you, I can wax on and wax off with the best of them.