McLean is a hard-nosed, battle hardened, experience driven Section 8 landlord turned author.The books are easy to read and entertaining.

How is the average husband (or wife, for that matter) going to defend you against a hardened thug?

One is to fix things up really nice to hopefully attract better tenants and the other is to harden the rental,  leave out as much as possible that can be easily broken so there's less things to fix and less headaches.

I'm going to assume that @Jacqueline Peterson, you've experienced some bad apples and have hardened your approach because of it.

When it hardens (after 45 minutes), you should get a standard hand sanding block (where you cut the sheet into 4 long strips) and a piece of 1-inch thick foam cut to fit under it and wrap good-quality 100-grit sandpaper around that.

Go purchase a brick house on the west part of Chicago, rent that out, it will definitely stand longer, with little to know effort.Don’t put your money in styrofoam, chicken wired houses, slapped together with glue and painted, hardened oatmeal.

So for example I'm very conservative and don't want any debt on them because I feel this hardens them in case of a severe recession.

You have to be hardened and impenetrable.

On the maintenance side: a great deal depends on how good you are at locking a property down, hardening a rental, to start with.

i just removed 6 fans from two homes. i dont want them to break down.but i still install garbage disposals. just last weekend i got my first "clogged pipe" in 4 yrs. turns out it was garbage disposal clog.also - http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/52/topics/68041-how-do-you-harden-your-rentals