My fear is I will be stuck as a landlord in my older age painting walls chasing tenants for rent, hammer clean and hang things back up after these idiots destroy my stuff .

Act like a lawyer and let the lease be your hammer, if needed. 

In the master bath the walls around the tub and shower are tiled to the ceiling and one tile on the wall by the toilet has cracked and when we were building the house I dropped a mini sledge hammer off of a scaffold and chipped one of the tiles in the living area : (.  

Its the single biggest hammer we have in our toolkit.

And making her comply with the legal paperwork, would be my rubber hammer to her overconfident head :-)

At that point I realized what was off about him: he was hammered drunk.

You are the one that is going to get hammered when tenants cant afford to pay their high dollar rents.

Knowing you will do this before you purchase will get you deals other investors won't see because they're only running numbers on the property as a SFR, and not two or three units.Even though our west coast states have hammered the rental owner with rent controls ext.. the land use aspect has opened up wide for those with the knowledge and wherewhithal to maximize an existing home with rental in basement and build an ADU, in our town Lake Oswego, you don't even have to pay SDC's if the ADU is used by a family member .. and that's not a small number that's 30k plus savings.so govmit giviths and takiths away out here on the left coast :) 

Even when you do make a profit, people forget the IRS wants their cut too.Also some people don't realize the flip shows are scripted and the flipper only steps on camera to swing the hammer once or puts up the last tile.

We get hammered by a court system that thinks we're all evil.