by Kathy Brasby | Jul 29, 2022 | House rehab, Humor
My sister and I own a small business together. It’s so small we have one employee and she’s not an employee but a subcontractor. We’re that small.
But we want to act like a routine business, so we take our subcontractor out to lunch once in a while. Makes us feel like employers.
We met at a small Italian restaurant with an atmosphere. Brown pottery. Checked tablecloth and sparkling goblets. Earthy colors on the walls. Paintings of ships and canals. A large wine rack of reds and whites.
Soft jazz floated through the room. What a great place for lunch.
We settled around a square table, leaving an empty chair to my left.
Between bites of bruschetta and baked ziti, we exchanged stories about our families and the latest news—maybe gossip—of our town.
Finally, the lunch ended. We were stuffed as stuffed as the ravioli and even resisted tiramisu.
We kept chatting, waiting for the waiter to bring our bill. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the padded check sleeve lying on the table beside me. A soft brown binder to conceal the bill. Classy.
How did I miss the waiter? Obviously, the conversation had been too rich to see the bill arrive.
So I picked up the folder. “Here. You’ll probably need this.” I handed the sleeve to my sister because she always pays these bills.
This is what regular businesses do, right? Delegate to the appropriate branch. She was the credit card bearer.
She didn’t take the folder. Instead, she stared at me with a look that I interpreted to mean, “Oh, no, I forgot the credit card in the car.”
I figured I’d be gracious, so I smiled, giving her time to get up and get that credit card. I’m pretty patient that way. We’d met to act like a big-time business, so a little professional courtesy was in order. Even to my sister.
Well, professional courtesy had nothing to do with the bill. Her look had nothing to do with a forgotten credit card, either.
She said, “Why are you handing me the wine list?”
It wasn’t her who had forgotten how to handle a business lunch. It was me.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Feb 3, 2020 | House rehab, Humor, Stories
Sometimes the worst of duties can trigger the funniest of stories. You know how it is. You had to scoop six inches of snow from your driveway and met your future husband in the process.
That didn’t happen to you? Well, another story, another day.
This story involves evictions. Yeah, those worst of duties. Bear with me, though, because this one is funny.
My sister, Ann, and I have a small property management company. One of our duties for our landlords is being sure the rent is paid on time.
A tool we sometimes have to use is called “Demand for Compliance,” which basically means, “You have three days to pay your rent or move out.”
We call those three-day notices, and they have to be hand-delivered to the rental unit. We used to be brave and knock on the front door to present the paper to the tenant. If nobody answered, we’d then tape the notice to the front door.
So, on this particular day, we had a three-day in hand. Ann drove, so I got to go to the front door. I knocked and, when I didn’t get an answer, taped the notice to the door.
Then the front door flew open, and the tenant, a fire-plug sort of person, stormed out, ripped the paper down, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it on the ground. “I don’t accept notices on my door.”
It was a much longer sentence, but I washed out the four-letter words for you.
Then the tenant bolted into the street after a little dog that had escaped from the house. The tenant was still turning the air blue with ugly words. The clean ones were, “Hey, get back here, Foofie!”
The tenant wasn’t supposed to have a dog in the house, either.
I was still standing at the front door, coughing from the blue air, and watching the tenant darting around the street like a defensive safety trying to tackle a quick-footed halfback. Foofie was the running back, with a good head of steam toward the end zone.
This was a pretty entertaining romp in the street, but then I remembered that my vulnerable position on the front step.
I smoothed out the page, re-taped it to the door, and sprinted to the car. I was ready for a fast get-away, but Ann said, “I’m not moving until that dog is gone. Just what we need is to run over the dog, too.”
We did finally escape in the blue cloud.
We still have to post 3-days occasionally. But now, if this worst of duties comes up, we flip a coin to see who goes to the door this time. We’ve learned a lot. No knocking now. We do a tape-and-run.
And we’re as fast as little Foofie.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Nov 25, 2019 | House rehab, Humor, Stories
I haven’t told a story about our property rehab projects in a while. My sister Ann and I have done almost 25 different rehab projects in the last 5 years, and the tales go on and on.
This is one of those stories.
Patricia Valerio at Unsplash
The backyard in this account looked like the county dump except the dump is better organized. The best way to handle this, short of tipping the earth and letting the garbage slide into the alley, is to get to work with trash bags and rakes.
We always don safety glasses and gloves just in case. It’s amazing what you can find in a heap.
The backyard of this project had some promise. It was small and could be charming except for the bags of debris along the back fence. Well, and the litter all over the grass. Well, assuming there was any grass left under the junk. But you get the idea.
We started clipping hedges and trimming evergreen limbs that swept the ground.
And there we found a trash can, completely hidden behind the canopy of branches.
The trash can was overflowing, of course.
I grabbed a handle, but the trash can was too heavy for me to move alone. “I need help,” I said.
So Ann gripped a handle, and we lifted. We pretended to lift, I mean. This trash can must have been full of concrete.
We drug the can to the alley, leaving nice trench marks behind.
“Huh, it’s full of water,” Ann said. So, not concrete, as it turned out. All the rubbish was marinating in rainwater.
We decided to tip the container onto its side to let the liquid flow out. If this had once been rainwater, it had been transformed into swamp sludge. We hoped nothing had died under the junk, but it sure smelled like it.
An hour later, our nostrils had cleared out enough to return to the project.
Seizing both handles, we started our dragging strategy again. The trash can was lighter, and we were able to get it to the dumpster in the alley.
This trash dumpster was a metal monster with a wide-open mouth hungry for garbage. We hoped it didn’t gag when we added our treasure to the feast.
The fact that the front jaw of the dumpster was about four feet tall presented a new problem. We couldn’t lift this trash can that high.
But Ann had an idea. There were brackets on the front of the dumpster where the truck could grab and pour the contents. “Let’s lift the cab up and set it on that bracket,” she said.
We were confident we could hoist the container halfway up, to the bracket, reposition our grip and tip it over into the dumpster.
Maybe the trash can fumes had done something to our brains because this idea seemed totally doable.
And so we bent down and lifted.
Somewhere between the ground and the bracket, somebody’s hands slipped, and the trash can fell to the ground.
I was now convinced there was concrete as ballast because the trash can landed square on the ground, sending a geyser of bog sludge over both of us.
There we stood, baptized in marshland mud.
But all was not lost: we should be inoculated against every germ known to mankind.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Aug 27, 2019 | House rehab, Humor, Stories
I am beginning to embrace the unique vibes of retro nerds. Retro isn’t necessarily my jam but you gotta try new things, right?
Besides, those sweet people are passionate about their favorite retro item, and I might be able to use them. Er, learn from them, of course.
I’m talking about CRT TV nerds. For the rest of this post, TV equals CRT TV so don’t be thinking of today’s refined thin TVs.
My sister, Ann, and I do some property management, so occasionally we get to empty out a house that was abandoned by a tenant. This doesn’t happen much, but we have cleaned out a lot of junk over the years.
Junk including those TVs. It almost seems required to leave old TVs behind.
When tenants move out under less than great circumstances, they leave behind TVs like crumbs or mouse droppings.
One house had four TVs left behind, ranging in size from 16” to 60”. Do you know that a 60” TV can weigh over 250 pounds? How on earth do tenants get those into basements? The narrower the stairs, the more TVs in the basement.
I assume they bought beer for the entire fraternity.
We lugged all four TVs out of the basement with help from two high school boys who overestimated their muscles. They needed a fraternity, too.
Perched on my pickup bed, the TVs looked kinda like Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear on my pickup bed.
I am told that there are nerds who love old TVs. Playing games like Super Mario All-Stars is fantastic on a old TV. Watching VHS is also a rush, too, I guess.
Woohoo.
We didn’t know any retro nerds, though. We considered leaving the TVs on my pickup bed until someone stole them, but that was only one of we. The other considers our town’s people way too honest for that. Or too smart.
So we went to Plan B. We could haul them to the county landfill.
Off we went with the TVs and a few other choice items: a table with a broken leg, a floor lamp that didn’t work, half a couch.
The attendant at the landfill gate directed us to the area for broken furniture and then to the building for electronics. Um, who was there to help us? Nobody.
So we had a 250-pound VW Bug TV and just my sister and me to unload it. One of us wanted to use leverage to push it off the pickup bed. Nope. The other we said we had to unload it gently or we’d have broken glass everywhere.
So we broke out all our load straps and wrapped them around the TV. Then Ann found a plastic stand and pushed it into place behind the pickup bed. We planned to lower the TV onto the stand and then onto the floor.
She was in charge of guiding the TV onto the stand. My job was to release the straps bit by bit. Quit laughing. This is a serious story.
We managed to get the TV to the plastic stand. The TV settled on the stand, which immediately collapsed.
The TV crashed to the floor. Huh. No broken glass.
No wonder those retro nerds loved these TVs. They’re indestructible.
“Are we going to leave it there?” Ann said, studying the crashed TV.
“Unless you know a CRT nerd, we’re out of here,” said the other we. I won that time.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Jul 15, 2019 | Family, House rehab, Humor
You may know that I have helped rehabilitate several sad houses. My sister and I work together sometimes, and other times I help out my husband, the construction genius.
We have bought some forlorn houses together and given them new life. It feels good. Most of the time.
But buying an old house is a little like the first vacation you took together after you get married: you’re not really sure what you’ll discover.
Photo by Tania Melnyczuk on Unsplash
I’m not going to tell you about our first vacation together. It wasn’t as wild as this story.
The house was a foreclosure followed by an eviction – the ugly kind of eviction where a crew entered a packed house and emptied it.
The crew was instructed to remove everything from the house and deposit it in the garage. They left the garage door open, which was a signal in the city to come and take whatever you want.
This house isn’t in the city. It’s in a small town that’s pretty honest. Nobody took anything. Lucky them.
For six months, nobody touched that stuff in the garage. When we bought the house, we got the garage contents, too. Yippee.
The garage was literally (and I am using this word properly) full, floor to ceiling, front to back: overstuffed. We didn’t know what we’d find in there. Treasures, we hoped. Maybe expensive gems? Antiques?
We didn’t really hope for that. We assumed the eviction crew would have pocketed the good stuff.
Still, we needed to get the garage emptied out. So we started tunneling.
We found an end table with a broken leg. We found a brand-new starter that my husband nabbed. We found an old trunk that went to our daughter-in-law.
Some of the kids got to help. Under protest. They called themselves servants. We called it paying off their room and board and clothes. No digging in the garage, no birthday cake. That kind of enticement.
We were on an archeological dig but without the little brushes and shaker screens. We found the obligatory metal bed frame. Those seem to be left in every garage we’ve ever acquired.
We uncovered an old wedding album and a big envelope of x-rays. I might have an imagination, but I couldn’t make that up.
As the kids dug toward the back of the garage, they picked up a scent.
“Maybe it’s a body,” said our son. He’s always hopeful for creative bloodshed.
His sister wasn’t intimidated. “I hope it’s on your side of the garage,” she said.
They tossed aside more trash and kept digging deeper into the garage. “Think we can get this finished today?” I asked. I’m about using conscripted help for all they’re worth.
They ignored me, but they did keep excavating.
The smell morphed from a faint scent to a definite stink. When it crossed over from stink to stench, the kids bailed.
“Your turn,” said our daughter. “You said you wanted to get done today.” Kids are so good at throwing your words back in your face.
I could say I took a deep breath and started in, but I didn’t. Would you take a deep breath with that stench? Me, neither.
I put on a mask and gloves and goggles. I pulled junk out of the way and discovered our treasure.
Some yo-yo (and I’m saying this in the nicest way) had pulled a frozen turkey out of the freezer at the eviction, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and dumped it in a trash can at the back of the garage. For six months.
Foolishly, I compared buying an old house to going on your first vacation. It is nothing like that.
Buying an old house is like an excavation site with a tomb curse.
Like this:
Like Loading...
