All Forum Posts by: Bob H.

I like the french drain, too, and I don't see why it would need to be inside. I had a similar situation, with one major difference. This was a house in California, which like most there was built on a slab and had no basement. It had a hill in the back that sloped toward the house.

When we bought the house, the sellers disclosed drainage issues that had led to a lawsuit. They sued the owners who had sold to them for not disclosing the problems. When the people who sold to me lived there, they experienced wet floors in some rooms in the winter. There also was quite a bit of efflorescence on the garage floor and driveway, causing the surface to be crumbly. The diagnosis was that water seeping through clay from the next-door neighbor's house, uphill, and from that hill in the back would build up pressure in the winter and push through the concrete, making the floors wet.

The previous owners settled their lawsuit and built a french drain on the side of the house, where the hill was closest. We hired an engineer who recommended extending the drain around the back of the house, and we took that advice. We hired a company to come in with equipment to tear out the back patio and sidewalk, which were pretty ugly anyway. That company dug a trench for the drain to go out to the street. I built the drain, with the perforated pipe at the bottom and a solid pipe for downspout water higher up. Then I rented a Bobcat to regrade the back yard and added a short retaining wall at the base of the hill. Then came a new sprinkler system, a deck just off the ground, etc.

It was a big deal, but it worked! In the 17 years of owning the house, we never had any problem with wet floors or other drainage issues. So I'm a big believer in french drains.

You might want to tell the tenant the approximate cost of replacing the whole mirror and explain that, for small things, you have to stick to a practical solution, which in this case might be no glowing ring. I fix a lot of things, so if it were my rental I probably would try to take the light apart and figure out what's wrong with it.

As for the warranty idea, I try to buy with a credit card that provides an extra year of coverage on items that come with a warranty.

Ideally, you use bullnose tile along those edges, and you choose field tile for which bullnose is available.

I am not a fan of this, but I also have seen this problem solved with wooden, painted moulding on the edge of the tile, outside of the shower door.

I like @Lee VanDenBroeke's suggestion, but I have little expertise in this area. One caution, though, about deciding to install LVP and just live with the wavy floor. We bought a new house with a slab foundation last year. It's a nice place, with engineered hardwood in the main living area. There are a few places, though, where apparently there were low spots in the slab, and the flooring was installed right over them. It's annoying when I walk on the floor, because I notice those spots every time.

Possibly unrelated, but the floor also had some places where the hardwood planks separated at the ends, which has been solved by a tool I posted here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/84/topics/704056-vinyl-plank-flooring-is-separating

Theoretically, you should use caulk, not grout, where one plane joins another, such as where the wall meets the tub and even where two walls meet. Grout will crack if there is any slight movement, so you're better off removing anything that's deteriorating.

Despite that, I have used grout successfully on vertical corners in showers. I'd never use grout between a tub and a wall.

If you want to get a nice look at a small extra expense, buy "grout caulk," which is caulk made by grout manufacturers to match shades of their grout.

You didn't say this was a single-family home. Consider this scenario, which happened on the first property I bought, many years ago. My townhome was an end unit in a newly built row of four. Another single guy lived in the other end unit.

When I went on vacation, I had an unexpected water bill. As it turned out, the meters had been marked wrong after construction, and the two of us paid for each other's water for months -- maybe a year. Only the vacation made our bills different enough for the error to be discovered.

If the meter clearly was yours, consider a leak between the meter and your main valve. To check for this, turn off the main valve again in the evening. Then read the meter carefully. In the morning, read the meter again before turning on the valve. If you see any usage, you must have a leak.

Also, the meter itself probably has a valve, which may not be the one you turned off. You could experiment with the result of turning off that meter valve.

Your sump pump should be expelling ground water that has migrated to the basement or crawl space. Barring a leak in a pipe, that water should not be coming from the water utility, so it should not affect your bill.

Based on my experience with engineered hardwood, I doubt that you need to remove baseboards. After seeing a video somewhere, I made the tool in the photos, using wood, some screws and stick-on rubber safety tread from Harbor Freight: https://www.harborfreight.com/self-adhesive-rubber-safety-step-tread-98856.html. Just put the tool on one of the boards that has a gap and hit the slanted end with a rubber mallet. It took about five minutes to close the gaps in my floor. A few of them opened up again, so a few months later I repeated the process but put a little wood glue in the cracks first. Not enough time has elapsed to tell if the glue will be a permanent fix. 

I don't know the cause of this problem, but in other areas of this floor you can feel low spots where the concrete slab was not completely level before the flooring was laid.

You don't need a property manager if the property is in good condition, you can visit occasionally and you are willing to use online recommendations and find maintenance people as needed. Make lawn maintenance part of the tenant's responsibilities in the lease. For occasional repairs, people you find on your own may cost less than maintenance people hired by a property manager.

Showing a vacant house to prospective tenants is one thing you have to do yourself or with local help. After the house is occupied, the best, most cooperative tenants may be willing to show it to replacement tenants that you screen if you make that part of your agreement when the initial tenants being leasing. Without a property manager, you still will need to visit or use local help to inspect and make repairs between tenants.

For indoor spraying, particularly, consider the extra masking work needed to protect everything that you aren't painting.

Many years ago, I had a Wagner "Power Painter" with a backpack for carrying paint on a ladder. I used it to paint the exterior of three houses. It worked OK but was a lot of trouble to clean and finally wore out. One thing you might not realize: I don't know about modern models, but the old Wagners were very loud -- much louder than sprayers that use a separate compressor. 

On a more recent project, I rented a sprayer from Home Depot to paint the outside of a house with a lot of siding. That was easier to use than the old Wagner but still a lot of masking and cleanup.

Termite companies in California typically charge ridiculous amounts for repair work. There is an implied threat that, if you don't use their repair service, you will have to pay again for an inspection after the repairs. It's a racket. In other states, termites are no big deal -- just a routine problem that comes up occasionally and can be dealt with economically. In California termite inspection is more like extortion. Make your own repairs or find another contractor.