Time for an update.
We had to go to tribunal to get rid of the tenant. She would not budge and finally only left a day before the Sheriff was to come to change the locks. That was not a surprise to us at all. Surprisingly she could not find anywhere else to live despite applying for multiple properties at multiple agencies.
She paid no rent at all from the moment she got the first letter from the PM and when the PM spoke to her about it the response was "I can't afford to pay rent because I have to save for my bond for the next place"
Just gotta love them don't you.
Once out, we were presented with a house that had a disgusting smell and was completely filthy. Rubbish everywhere. The toilet from another thread was the one from this property. Lawns overgrown, the garden a huge mess, rats, mice, cockroaches.
Behind the shed was a dumping ground for a lot of the stuff that the tenants didn't want together with lawn clippings. Hubby was busy cleaning this up and he discovered, under a bed frame, a litter of kittens. They must have been only about a week old. Still had their cords attached. I spoke to the neighbour, who is a vet nurse, and she took them in. The mother lives next door to her on the other side. Apparently the mother is in the habbit of having kittens in strange places and this lady frequently houses them then finds homes for them.
The smell, we discovered, was not from a mouldy kitchen, but from grease, of the cooking variety. It was everywhere. Once all the rubbish was removed, the smell got less intense. Removed the carpet and the big black grease spot in the loungeroom had penetrated through the underlay to the floorboards below.
This I was removing with a chisel yesterday.
The walls were covered in it too. Not just the kitchen, but the dining, lounge and some of the bedrooms.
So now the walls have been cleaned, some of them painted. A new wall put in to change it from a three bed to a four bed house and it is starting to look a lot better. To do a complete reno on this house would take forever as it has nasty wood panelling that has been glued to a lot of the walls and some fake bricks on some of the others, so they have been left. The priority is to get it back to tenantable condition, not to a condition that we would want to live there.
We were going to pull the kitchen out, but have decided to do a patchup this time around. The insurance payout was dismal to say the least, so we have done what they suggested, despite the fact that a whole lot more should have been done. A new kitchen will probably go in at the next vacancy.
