The worst lease house

Another stroll through the canyons of my mind brought forth the memory of an outstandingly awful lease experience.

The house was a great old country cottage on acreage.  It leased quickly to a tenant who paid well for the first few months and then...

We went through the eviction process and the tenant came to the office to illustrate her incredibly nasty vocabulary skills.

When she had actually vacated the house we had a toxic waste dump to deal with.

She had animals all over in the house and there was animal soil everywhere.

Cleaning the place up took days.  We had an agent working with us whose day job was janitorial duty at a hospital.  Even with his help getting us chemicals to kill germs and odor the work was intense.

We finally ended up using full strength Clorox on one room where the hardwood floors had absorbed cat odor.  The smell was indescribable.  Many applications of Clorox and the use of a floor buffer did finally net us a liveable environment.  

In the end it cost us about $1000 in materials to do the repairs.  This was with us doing the work ourselves. Labor was just us but we could have been doing more productive things.  We knew the owner could not afford the loss, and her home owners policy had a large deductible.

After that experience the little old widow who owned the house decided to sell it rather than risk another destructive tenant.! We thought that was a wise decision.

We learned our lesson on this lease.  After that we tended to visit every lease property fairly regularly to be sure they had not exceeded the animal provisions in the lease.