It Take Five Minutes

Are you kidding me? I heard a radio announcer say the other day that keeping a blog takes no time at all. He claimed it took five minutes, yet he confessed he only made weekly entries. Then he read one of his entries. He was off to Disney World with his wife and kids, and thanked several people who made it possible. Okay.

I must be doing something wrong. I thanked Raymond Brody the other day for making my RV trip a bit easier and it took me two days to write that entry.

I have been distracted for the last five days. I had not planned to return to Knoxville this week so this was an unexpected turn of events. Since everything else about this trip has been a series of fateful events, I accept the surprises and don’t get upset when the realities of life catch up to my fantasy lifestyle. I accept it as my tuition for living my life in the manner I choose. I have the freedom to travel and write, but it comes at a small price of the inconveniences of being responsible for a few things. When I step back and review the details, I gratefully thank the Lord for the opportunities He has given me. I can afford to graciously pay the price when duty calls.

I am a landlord, a debt-free landlord. All rental income is at my disposal. I am a landlord with an investment in rental property and I expect to capitalize on the dual dimensions of my real estate: rental income and property appreciation.
Therefore, I maintain my property by reinvesting in maintenance and expect my tenants to respect the property.

I have good tenants and like good employees to any employer, that makes all the difference. However, I have had error in my judgment in selecting a couple of tenants and I paid for my error. I don’t have stories like the time one of the tenants repaired his motorcycle in the living room and proceeded to ride it up the flight of stairs to the second floor. True story, but fortunately, not mine.

I lost two tenants this month and decided to protect my investment by returning to Knoxville to assure the apartments were in good order and to secure new tenants. Managing rental property long distance is a challenge, but I have done this for twenty years, so I know nothing but the hardship of long distance management. I am an idiot.

For the past few days I have cleaned walls, touched up paint, and tackled minor electrical and plumbing problems. I have no vast wealth of knowledge about these things, but I can read and I can problem solve. Most of my skill comes from days of pondering the problem and reading reference materials and then slowly applying my book knowledge to the issue, such as when I remodeled one of the kitchens this past winter. Most of the time this works, especially if I do a bit of praying. I’m serious. And when things work out, I praise the Lord for giving me the talent.

I probably was a bit over confident when I tackled a minor electrical problem. I had two Hunter ceiling fans with lights. Both lights and fans were operational, but the pull chain switches to the fans were broken and neither could be turned off. I have made these repairs in the past, so I climbed the ladder and wiped out my electrician tools. Snip, snip, strip a few wire ends, reconnect and back into business. After replacing the pull chain switch I now have two ceiling fans that don’t work and two lights that also don’t work. The good news is that whatever mistake I made on one I duplicated on the other, so once I figure out the problem, I can fix both.

So this has taken me forty-five minutes to write and I have not proofed anything, nor have I taken any photos, cropped them, uploaded the photos or the text to the blog so, I think the five minute theory is nothing more than a passing comment to an uniformed audience.

Meanwhile, I am living out of the RV. Unlike when I can run around town in my Jeep taking the back streets, I must carefully plan my routes as not all streets are accessible due to the low clearance on the RV’s rear end. My trips to the hardware stores are planned to reduce the number of times I have to cross town. Therefore, I multi-task my projects, something I hate because I like to stay with one problem until I get it worked out. In the past I have frequented Home Depot enough times that the contractors as well as the store employees thought I worked there. Now maybe I think I should just park the RV at Home Depot and get a job there.

In the end, I rented out one of the two apartments and hope by Friday to have the other rented and have the electrical problem fixed (even if I have to call an electrician). I have little nicks and cuts on my hands and they are all dried out. My hands hardly look like those of a writer--more like a boxer. I have bruises on my ribs from crawling under the bathroom sink to replace the lever in the pipe. I banged my leg on the oven door when I was cleaning it and took three chunks of skin out of my shin. Ouch. And while working on the ceiling fans I got into the light’s insulation and suffered a day of pin-prickling torture when fibers dropped on me from head to toe. Yes, it is time to get back on the road. RVing is less hazardous.

Was this more interesting than letting you know about an upcoming trip to Disney World? Probably not. It took two hours to write this, another half hour to get photos done, uploaded and document proofed and look up links.