All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

@Mark S.

Golden opportunity to squeeze serious juice out of an incompetent seller for a triviality that they obviously think is a big deal. You can do basic steel garage doors as kits for under $350 each. You can do basic remote garage door openers for less than $200 each. Putting it all in is basic handyman work, should cost you maybe a hundred each in any market in the USA.

The slope on the garage floor is right for an external carport, the epoxy coating doesn't look like something that will react badly to UV exposure like the popular Rust-oleum RockSolid flooring kits, the light fixture looks rated for external use, but I'd still put those doors in within a month or two.

You're doing good, Mark. This is a live-and-learn minor thing, not something that's going to seriously hurt your bottom line.

Oh, it's like that, BiggerPockets censors?

@Al D.

Um, OK...I suspect that what you're TRYING to express here is that working competently with concrete requires some sort of multiyear professional training and/or insurance and/or God knows what to accomplish.

I would post a 3-minute YouTube video on how to use cement patcher here, but the Oberkommando der BiggerPockets won't allow it.

The specialized tools necessary to work with cement patcher are a margin trowel (cost 4 dollars), a bucket (cost, 2 dollars), a chip brush (cost, under 1 dollar) and cement patcher (cost, $20 per large bucket). And while I can say foregoing all modesty that I am pretty good at working with concrete because that's one of the ways I make money and cut down on operating expenses in this business, and while I do carry a million-dollar general liability insurance policy on my own work as a Pennsylvania home improvement contractor, I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation for every homeowner and landlord to understand the bare basics of what cement patcher is and how to use it instead of figuratively keelhauling silly tenants for what is ultimately a small, easily repairable bit of silly mischief.

@Kevin Hunter

Thanks for the wise advice. I suspect we'll be finding it useful in the future as we transition from local landlording as a business in C/D-class neighborhoods to the kind of hands-off setup you're doing well in.

@Michael Plante

Since I am a registered and insured home improvement contractor in Pennsylvania, I guess I should just let that go. And I will, because that works more often than not than jumping up and down on one's high horse. Good luck to you. Let's both of us make money in real estate in this big free country.

@Thomas S.

There it is again, an ignorance of how things actually works, and this cheap Puritanical insistence that JUSTICE MUST BE DONE!

For a busted window, no, you do not pull the trim and yank the buck. "New windows these days" are modular. Let's say it's a new double-hung window. You drop the sash, push one side down farther than the other, and the whole sash comes off. THAT's what a window repairperson will replace, NOT the whole window.

If someone scratched my car, I would take it to my friend who runs an auto body shop and get the repair done for minimal cost, probably free. I have quite a few friends in quite a few places, including BiggerPockets.com, where a quick look at your profile shows you have just one colleague.

So I'm sure you'd take the car to the auto body shop, where the guy would look at you with loathing and charge you the highest possible amount, and then you'd nail the bill to the tenant's front door and then charge him/her for someone to fill the nail hole later. The way the Chinese communists make your family pay for the bullet they execute you with.

But even at the body shop, the technician fills the scratch and buffs the panel with color-matched paste. S/he does not replace the whole fender. That's what you charge the tenant for.

But no, in your mind, if it's "less than perfect," then let justice rain down like water and righteousness flow like a might stream!

Something tells me you've never read "The Merchant of Venice."

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown;

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptred sway;

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God Himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God's

When mercy seasons justice.

@Thomas S. OK, fine. But you make them pay according to the scale of their stupidity and the real cost to repair the damage, not according to your inability to manage a property and ignorance of the upkeep and repair of basic building materials. This really is just a simple cosmetic surface patch job. The OP and several thoroughly silly posters on this thread have turned it into a traveling salvation show, complete with love offering collected in fried chicken buckets and some snake handling over in the small tent.

Did your tenants wear out a hinge in your place? You charge them for the epoxy to fill the holes and reset the hinge, not for a new door and frame.

They put a chip in your granite countertop? They pay to have the chip repaired, not to have the granite replaced.

Smash a pane of glass? Pay to replace the pane, not put in a new window.

Burned out a light bulb? You don't charge them to have the house rewired.

To date, the OP has brought in the sheriff, filed a police report, collected video footage, played mind games on the tenants, brought back a contractor, practically whistled up a medieval herald to read a proclamation and cry a condemnation over the concrete, "Hear ye, hear ye..."

The tenants are going to spend the next few days asking everyone they've ever met in person and over social media if all this was really necessary to get the concrete fixed. Sooner or later, just as the OP did, they're going to meet someone to introduce them to the subtle mysteries of cement patcher. And they're going to realize that the pitchforks and torches were all an unnecessary dog and pony show run by a ringmistress bent on extracting a great show of moral vengeance for doodling in wet concrete.

And the predatory advice the OP has gotten here...

Saw out a six-foot block of concrete!
Punish the evildoer!
Throw the baggage out on the street along with her family!

What's next? Make her wear a scarlet V for vandalism for the rest of her days? Fifty blows on the corner with the cane dipped in ink to tattoo the welts into her back? Perhaps the amende honorable or some crispy auto-da-fé action?

@Mindy Jensen

When all's said and done, smaller investors are always going to get shafted by contractors unless they're willing to pay top dollar.  This reality is worse now than it was ten or twenty years ago. There are simply not enough capable, dependable people choosing the trades to make up the difference between demand and supply anymore. You put an ad on Craigslist to find a helper for $20/hour for general renovation work, you may get one laconic response in a week, 50% of the time from a foreigner with questionable work status. You put a similar ad asking for clean-hands administrative office work, and you'll get emailed fifteen nice-and-neat resumes with mission statements all stating, "I am a bright, highly motivated self-starter..."

This is one of the major weaknesses of hands-off renovation today I don't think this site pays enough attention to this changing economic reality in the rush to tell people the old story, that they too can make it in real estate without ever swinging a hammer or hanging a piece of drywall.

@Adam Bordes

All right, good luck with that.

@Lori C.

Holy smokes.

Wait out the winter.

Get yourself a 4 or 4 1/2 in diamond cup wheel and mount it on an angle grinder. The rig will cost you less than 60 bucks.

Grind out the offending area. Using a cold chisel, chisel down 1/2 in into the concrete. Clean the area thoroughly.

Apply $5 of cement patcher to the area. Sackrete's stuff is better than Quikrete's. Broom finish it up all you want with a broom.

If it's been ground out already as you seem to indicate, just chisel down 1/2 inch, apply the patcher according to the directions, and run a broom over it in the correct direction. Good as new. Will the repair still be visible? Yes. Are you planning on selling the place next week? No? Well, when are you planning on selling your viable rental property? Oh, in twenty years? SO IT DOESN'T MATTER, RIGHT? It just offends your sensibilities and outsized sense of propriety.

You are really making a mountain our of a molehill because your basic property maintenance skills are lacking. You called a contractor back to fix a smile and pentagram. Did you give him an earful about the brazen little hussy next door?

You have the moral high ground. Congratulations! Bravissimo! You can stop clutching your pearls now.

It's a business. Tenants do stupid things. That's part of the reason why they're tenants.

Just what are you going to do when the daughter gets knocked up properly and her 35-year-old boyfriend moves in with his pit bull, his gun collection, and his penchant for sitting in his beater jalopy with his shady buddy-of-the-week and smoking it up every afternoon? Go over there and lead with some pursed-lip condemnation?

Maybe you shouldn't buy any more rentals, Lori.

@Alyssa Paros

This is where it gets hard, Alyssa. For us, it started getting easier after we acquired the second property. GOOD LUCK!