Also! Yesterday I received a voicemail from The Absent Landlord informing me of a walk-through in my apartment for an appraisal.
I inquired of my boss's wife as to what that might mean. She said either he's selling or applying for a home equity loan to make improvements on the house.
Either one would be welcome. The yard is in a general state of gone-to-seed, the shingles are rippling all over the roof, the gutters are sprouting trees, and the windows are cracked.
Plus, there's the question of heating for the winter (since colder weather is imminent): Last year, freaking out about gas costs, The Absent Landlord declared that he was converting us to electric heat. Okay, we said, thinking he meant to change the central heating from gas to electric.
But no. He essentially shut off the gas and brought us space heaters. As many as we wanted, he said.
Well, Mr. Landlord, how many house fires would you like this winter? I'll have heaters in direct proportion. Thank you.
Besides the fire hazard (because an older heater that I had from college, and which I was using to heat the bathroom, caught on fire one winter morning this year as I stepped out of the shower, making fire more than a statistical probability), it's simply illegal to cut off a tenant's heat.
Now, I and my fellow tenants are more than prepared to fight for central heating this winter. We don't care if it's electric, as long as it's central. But it would, perhaps, be really nice if we had a landlord or landlady for whom such a circumstance is not an issue.
Either way, we win.
2 comments:
Landlords are a peculiar breed all to themselves. Peculiar indeed.
My first landlord insisted that I 'share' a heating meter with the tenent upstairs. And because the house was so damned old and leaky, we ended up sharing a $450 heating bill one month. Convinced this was surely a mistake, I called the electric company who was appalled that I was sharing a meter, which was apparently also illegal and constituted some kind of ... fraud? They switched the bill to the landlord's name, who I had to contact to let him know what was up. I then convinced him to split the bill with us in 1/3's, but was still jipped because my 2nd floor apartment wasted very little heat, but my neighbor's attic level apartment was, as she put it, 'tear inducing' when the wind blew through. You could feel the air blowing between the slats in the faux wood siding.
So I decided to get a free apartment at a boathouse, instead.
Now I just rent a house. And dig gardens.
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