Really OT and long: House flipping--A Tale of Two Tommys

[ksoper]

I don't do the Instabook or Tik Taks like the kids do, so I'm going to bother you with it. Scroll to the bottom for the Tl;dr

 

In 1990, not quite a year after we got married we bought a house in a Nashville suburb for $67,000. It was a lot for us. For fourteen years we worked diligently, made good decisions ( like not spending a fortune on musical equipment) and in 2004 were able to move on up to a considerably larger house a little further away from Nashville. Because we were careful we were able to keep our first house with the intentions of renting it out and calling that money my retirement income.

 

We went through a series of tenants who behaved much like the succession of Caesars--crazy Caesar, good Caesar, crazy Caesar, as well as a few different property managers. (We did it ourselves for a while and it was not at all fun.) The last tenants had been there two years and moved out at the end of July, '19. Now, for about the last six or seven years we talked about selling it, retirement be damned. It cost us roughly three thousand dollars every time we turned the house between cleaning and repairs. A general pain in the ass. But the sale had to accomplish a couple of things--we had to pay off the note, and hoped to be able to pay off our primary mortgage. The market wouldn't allow it. Until this year.

 

What really pushed us over the edge was the condition in which the tenants left the house. Absolutely trashed. I don't get it. We were raised to take care of our own belongings and take double care of other people's stuff. Nevertheless, we were faced with a good twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars of renovation if we just did the bare minimum. We have a dear friend of thirty years-Trish, a landscaper, who had a carpenter working around her property. She said he did excellent work. We stopped over to her place and saw the work, which really was nice. She said she'd have him come up and look at our house.

 

She warned us that he drank.

 

One Sunday night at the end of August he and Trish and her ex-husband (it's complicated) came to look around. Enter Drunk Tommy. Bellowing, guffawing, braying drunk. But he seemed to know what he was looking at and thought that for five thousand dollars he could fix the problems in the second bathroom. There were obvious gaps in the tiles that needed caulk, but Drunk Tommy wanted to do a few more things to make it nice. And they were good ideas. We shook on it. A couple of days later he went into the crawlspace to look around and found eight inches of mud along the foundation at the front of the house. The shower needed more than caulk. The whole bathroom needed to be gutted as the galvanized pipes were leaking. Built in 1956, it had original plumbing and electric. Drunk Tommy wasn't daunted. Might cost a little more, but not a problem. Cool.

 

A week later Drunk Tommy shows up with two other guys, Forrest, a lovable dimwit in his twenties, and Old Tommy, short of stature with a sharp edge, a couple of months younger than me. Not ancient but older than Drunk Tommy. Trish had those two out to her place as well and vouched for the work. They showed up on time and worked all day. No fooling around. Drunk Tommy, we later discovered, was plastered by 9am and off the job by noon. On the few occasions he did work past lunch he was slurring and staggering. And driving! The house became an official job site and was filled with tools and materials.

 

The bathroom was almost done when Drunk Tommy announced that the job would cost $7500 not including materials. I wasn't happy about it but honestly it didn't surprise me considering all the rotten wood they had to tear out of there. Still cheaper than anyone else. We gave him cash advances along the way but reserved quite a bit. We're not totally stupid, just naive. The job now grew to include the bedroom that attached to the second bathroom. It needed to have the old cheap wood paneling torn out and replaced with new wallboard. We also bought budget red oak flooring that Old Tommy installed. Now the job was at ten thousand. And this didn't include fixing the rest of the house--refinishing the original white oak floors, replacing the formica counter top, the stove and dishwasher, tarting up the kitchen cabinets, replacing all the old warped windows with energy efficient vinyl, and painting, painting, painting.

 

We did a lot of the work ourselves, of course, and my wife bears the scars for it. Tearing out Pergo will leave a mark. Beth, bless her, loves the damn HGTV and Pinterest. "Oh, this is easy to do. You just do this, that, this...it's all on Youtube and Pinterest." To which I replied one night after a long, hot day, "Well, why don't you call Mr. Pinterest and tell him to get his ass over here?" The budget increased. The formica counter top turned into quartz. The white appliances became stainless steel. You know where this is going. What should've been a reasonable upgrade turned into a very expensive whole house renovation.

 

The original bathroom was what one realtor called "Mid Century Modern." Blue tile, blue tub, blue sink, aquamarine tile floor. The medicine chest needed to be pulled out as it was rusted and just nasty. One day while my wife and Old Tommy were making LowDepot trips Drunk Tommy set about removing the medicine chest. When they returned from their errand Drunk Tommy was gone. There was blood. Lots of blood. On the walls, in the sink, on the floor, and a trail of drips into the kitchen. Laying on the kitchen floor was the open medicine chest filled with old double-edged razor blades. A couple of hundred of them. The medicine chest was old school and had a slot into which you shoved your used razor blades. They dropped to the horizontal 2x4 at the bottom of the chest opening where they remained peacefully until Drunk Tommy exposed them to sunlight and an unknown part of his body. Figuring that the guy was bleeding out, my wife, the nurse practitioner, called the local ER. Old Tommy called the jail. No Drunk Tommy. He came back two days later, explaining that when he cut himself he "twisted off the day," whatever that means to a guy who normally quits at noon. I looked at the bandage on his index finger. Nothing more than a standard Band-Aid. This raving drama queen squeezed his bleeding finger onto every surface for shock value. And since alcohol is a blood thinner it didn't take much squeezing. The chest became known as the murder mirror.

 

Now we're nearing the end of October. It's getting chilly and Old Tommy tells us that he needs to knock off early to go look at a sublet room in an apartment. His current sublet was rented out from under him and he was effectively homeless. Here sat our empty house. It was filthy from demolition but it had heat and running water. We wanted to be decent people and told him that he was welcome to slap down a bed roll until he found a place. Old Tommy was twitchy but deep down a decent guy and we grew to like him. A little trouble with the law, a couple of stints in the big house for marijuana-related felonies but we don't care about that stuff. He met Jesus and got his shit together. (There was an incident where Old Tommy had had just about enough of Drunk Tommy and lifted him up and slammed him hard onto the concrete. He was saved but still loved a tussle.) Old Tommy went to Dollar General, bought a few toiletries and prepared to move in. Drunk Tommy showed up with a mattress and box spring, headboard and a flat screen for Old Tommy's use. That's not what we imagined. Nor did we imagine that Drunk Tommy would also be moving in.

 

They filled our cooler with food and beer. They bought a small charcoal grill and cooked steaks. Drunk Tommy showed up with a puppy. A damn KOA campground. Now it's the two Tommys and a puppy, who would most certainly use my white oak as a toilet. We were quite clear that the puppy would have to stay outside in his kennel but it was freezing and my wife is a softy. The puppy was all over the house. Old Tommy was true to his word and went every day after work to look at places. A good dude, really. And his work was stellar. But now it's two weeks into November and Drunk Tommy hasn't completed the work. One sunny Sunday afternoon Trish came by to look at the progress and I bitched to her about the project taking way too long because Drunk Tommy couldn't keep it together. We didn't want to get Trish in the middle of things, but she really was because it turned out that she was sleeping with him. (Told you it was complicated.) While I was filling her ear Drunk Tommy sat on the patio listening to every word.

 

The next day all his tools and other belongings were gone. We still owed him money, but he hadn't finished the work so we called it even. Hell, he didn't do hardly any work--it was all Forrest and Old Tommy. Trish called us and asked if we cared if a client of hers came to talk to us about a project she had going. The lady, an interior designer, contracted Drunk Tommy to build a bookcase for one of her own clients and had given him a $1500 deposit. Yikes. Drunk Tommy absconded with the funds. She asked us if we would call her if he showed up again, she was going to call the police. We said we would. But he was gone and still owed Old Tommy $600 for his time. We gave him the money. It was only right. To repay us for our kindness when he was between homes Old Tommy worked about two or three days for free. After that I told him to start keeping a time card. Old Tommy, without question, gets the MVP award.

 

Our intention was to do a For Sale By Owner but after six months we were whipped. We got a recommendation for a realtor from a contractor who completed the work (sober every day) and signed the papers to have them list it when it was finished.

 

The sign went in the yard on Friday, March 6. It went on the market officially on Monday, March 9. There were twelve showings on Monday. Nine on Tuesday. They canceled the showings for Wednesday as they had nine solid offers. The offer we accepted came in on the first day.

 

Covid-19. And yet this deal still appears to be happening. People need a place to be. We agreed on a final price, four thousand over list. Things are nuts around here. We close on April 3.

 

So while we wait for the results of Beth's Covid test, we also sit on the edge of our seats during the daily press briefings, praying to whoever will listen that the banks don't close.

 

Tl;dr We spent way too much money, we hired a drunken idiot, and somehow things turned out ok. We think.

[George88]

Great story! Please submit to Story Core (Corp?) or the Moth. Wishing you and Beth the best.

[Adan]

I have a little experience owning a rental property-- enough to never want to do it again. What's so strange to me is that whenever I've rented a place I treated it as if it were mine. Hard for me to understand the mind of someone who take the opposite approach.

 

And contractors . . .

 

Anyway, good story. Someday I'd like to understand how so many southerners are born writers.

[Doerfler]

hope it all works out, Ken.

[AUSSIEKEYS]

Struth that waz a great yarn.

 

Dont worry its no different in Australia. We had a plumber like that. Problem is his work was not even sub standard.

 

I finished off what he didnt do in the outside laundry. Glad to get rid if him. But it was the major plumbing work we didnt realise he really stuffed up till much later.

 

Years later we found out that the yard plumbing (for rainwater tanks the council forced us to install) that was burried the length of our quater acre was not glued before back filling.

 

Needless to say every rainfall we had created a swamp in the low end. I used to think it was just that intersection of plumbing there. So told the new owner what was happening there and hecwas fine about fixing it.

 

 

Years later those new owners told us they had to dig up and glue every piece of the full quater acre. Lucky our old neighbour offered a small excavator and they fixed it themselves. We had only thought it was a simple fix of a an intersection.

 

Needless to say this plumber was smelling of alcohole every day.

 

I learnt from that experience that alcohol and tradies is a bad mix. Much worse than putting up with the plumbers crack. Hee hee

[MAJUSCULE]

I saw the length of the OP and decided against reading the whole thing. But as I scrolled up to hit "The Keyboard Corner" and leave this thread forever, my eyes caught the name "Drunk Tommy". Hard to look away after that.

 

Great story Ken. Hope it all works out for you. Thinking of you and Beth, hope to cross paths again soon.

[KuruPrionz]

I worked for Windermere in Association (Condo/HOA) management. The other department in our office was Rental Management.

 

The stories from both departments were horrifying. The Maintenance crew had their own grisly tales.

As a brief example, my own tale (provided by a landscaping crew) about the "Poop Cup" was completely obliterated by the Rental Dept. story of the "Poop Box." I'll say no more.

 

I have a room in my own 2 bedroom unit I could rent - rents are high here and I am in a good location for access to the Uni.

If/when I consider it a move of desperation even though (and possibly because) I would be a resident landlord.

 

The other thing I've learned that may or may not be helpful is that a Buyer should always hire their own inspector and make sure they engage somebody who has an infrared scope for the inspection.

This could also be useful for inspecting the quality of any contract work.

 

I was home when the Inspector for a buyer came to my home, I was friendly and he let me tag along. The infrared scope showed rot in the main beam supporting the ceiling, illegal and potentially fire hazard wiring coming into the circuit breaker box, etc. Somehow, he missed the cracked toilet.

 

Still, it could "see" through walls, etc. A good thing to be aware of if ever needed. Cheers, Kuru

[o0Ampy0o]

Well told/written story.

 

Drunk Tommy does not sound like a guy you want crossing your path while there is a virus pandemic we should all be keeping a distance from.

 

I would not trust your dear friend of thirty years-Trish and her endorsements.

 

Best of luck hoping you see the finality of the sale.

[Sospiri]

An interesting story, but one with which us old 'uns are well familiar. My only direct experience of renting out my property through a rental agency was not good either. I'd bought a house in the north of England complete with basic furniture, but not with refridgerator or washing machine, and had never lived in it as I needed to move south again and didn't want the problem of having to deal with a tenant when I was over 250 miles away. Barely a month went by when the agent phoned me and said that the tenant was complaining that the washing machine was leaking. He knew full well that the house didn't have a washing machine, so I asked him why he was bothering me. "Oh, it's her own washing machine", he said so I asked him what exactly he was doing for his fee and he put the phone down. Doh!

 

When I had my cabinetmaking business, I always considered myself a fair employer, but found that the employees that you thought were the most trustworthy turned out to be the biggest crooks of all. One that I fired for being basically useless had been secretly hiding away nice straight lengths of expensive kiln-dried teak up in the rafters of the workshop ready to spirit them away as soon as he had an opportunity. He was another one that was recommended by a friend. A plague on all their houses, but I hope your sale goes through OK, Ken.