Some years back my father called me one day to say that he was not giving me a mobile home and he hoped I wouldn’t be upset. Well that was the gist of the conversation anyway. Instead he gave it to my brother. There are some who call him…Tim.
This dispatch is about Tim and his trailer. It is not about a tornado and you shouldn’t have even let your mind go there even if it is alliterative.
Now to back up a step: real estate entrepreneur is to my father what sanitation engineer is to janitor. Dress it up how you will, the facts on the ground are still the same. For Christmas last year we re-worked a Monopoly game with each property re-named according to a street where he owns a mobile home or an old mill house.
The trailer in question is an especially run-down old single-wide set against some regrown pineland so low that it won’t pass perc. For liability reasons Dad decided to pass this beauty on to my brother.
I still laugh when I think of my father asking on the phone that night: “you don’t think Belle will be mad do you?” I replied that she would think it a great favor if he did not give her a shambles of a mobile home in swamp in South Carolina. So that part of the patrimony passed to my brother who, just starting out at the time, had fewer assets to be seized in a law suit or so the thinking went.
About a year ago the trailer’s long-time renter abandoned it due to an inconvenient jail term and Tim, for the first time in his career as a landlord, had to go inside Moby-ile Home. He and Dad entered it and quite a scene awaited them.
On the floor in every room of the house lay clothes piled over a foot deep. Moby-le Home came with its own special smell too, but we will leave that to your imagination. As the two generations surveyed the main living space Tim noticed a hole in the kitchen floor big enough for a child to fall through and another in the wall that could allow a squirrel to come and go with ease. I would mention the hole in the ceiling, but I don’t want you to think I’m exaggerating. Every light fixture had been removed and replaced with naked bulbs on job wiring.
My father looked around and pronounced: “it’s not as bad I feared.”
Tim, mouth agape, snapped his head around to look at the old progenitor and thought: REALLY?! Because this is the-worst-thing-I-have-ever-seen! Only gas and a spark could fix this!
It took a full day and a half just to clean out the clothes before actual repairs could begin. Once they commenced Tim discovered that the bathroom floor had rotted through. In fact, the floor had disintegrated to such a degree that the bathtub would have fallen through to the ground except that one third of it rested on one of the two big steel I-beams that run the length of a single-wide mobile home like a great double keel. The renter had inventively propped up the other end with an old go-cart tire.
While working on the bathroom Tim’s co-worker on the repair project, Kenny, had to go out in the yard to hurl.
Dad also figured it would be cheaper —and cheaper is always better with him— to clean rather than replace, in Tim’s words, “the quarter inch layer of grease off the crappy counter that held the kitchen sink.” Fixing this according to our enterprising landlord meant, “I had to start with a putty knife and a bucket: eight hours later it wasn't too bad.”
The holes all have been repaired with a bowling-alley laminate. My father buys seconds of this iron-hard faux-wood from a local plant for all his repairs now because it is nearly indestructible and impervious to water damage. The laminate also comes with little arrows which we often cut off. Although, I think the arrows add a bit of charm.
My only questions was, “how could you let a renter live in a property like this?”
His reply: “Well I didn’t know. Because in the years he rented it and occasionally paid rent he never called to complain or ask to have anything repaired.”
Happy Ending
A renter came along who wanted the place although he found the rent a little high and moved out this fall. The silver lining for everyone is that the original renter, let's call him Ishmael, moved back into the trailer a few months ago! Either he loves the location or he approves of the extreme makeover.
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