As usual, I’ve done something that looks good on paper but is simply a ricochet of desperation hastened by the price of cheese. Who am I kidding? No-one can afford cheese. The price of noodles, then. This is just like that time I took a job in local government because all the magazines shut. Haphazardness disguised as a clever professional pivot; so are the days of our lives.
Tell people you are renting out your house, and you will be inundated with bad tenant stories. Crackheads burning down kitchens, impossible-to-evict-types exhibiting a level of entitlement akin to the National Party front bench. It’s terrifying, but I comfort myself with the fact that I rented for years and was an excellent tenant.
Things were very different then, though. The landlord lived in Hong Kong and sent a case of wine every year to say thanks for looking after the place. Rent was $120 a week for a four-bedroom apartment — the front quarter of an historic mansion on Arthur St with intricate plaster ceilings, lush gold and red Axminster carpet and a veranda so big you could skateboard the length of it. Every now and then, one of the ceiling’s plaster rosettes would fall down in the night, landing heavily on the carpet like a bloated spider made of horsehair and urine. There wasn’t any insulation, but the young are warm all the time anyway because of the drama.
Nowadays you have to do a lot of expensive things to make your house a government-certified Healthy Home (house: you are a very good house, there’s nothing wrong with you even if your roof is made of asbestos; nobody will be eating the roof). A bathroom fan, a new extractor in the kitchen, underfloor insulation. The house will be warmer and drier and less odorous, but you won’t get to enjoy it.
I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a landlord. I love my house. I might not be able to emotionally detach, achieve the kind of ruthless attitude necessary to view it as an asset. I worry that I’ll drive past and notice (because I’m craning my neck to see) that the tenants haven’t mowed the lawns or trimmed the hedges and be discovered later that evening with a backpack full of lemons off the lemon tree and my nose pressed up against the kitchen window, trying to see if they’ve chipped the Formica. There’s no way they’d mistake me for one of the neighbourhood’s Peeping Toms.
And what about all the little idiosyncrasies of an art deco house? Will they know to be gentle with the wood-framed foldout windows? That you have to check the snib on the back door has engaged properly? I wake at 3am to worry about these things. I make brave statements to jolly myself along like, "What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like they’re going to burn the house down," and then I worry about that as well.
"Should I leave some furniture for the tenants?" I asked the property agent when I was packing up. "Not if you don’t want them to take it with them," she said.
"I’m worried that they might wreck the place," I said. "Well yes, they will wreck it," she said, "but it won’t be so terrible that you can’t fix it."
Only a little wrecked, how fabulous. The property manager is a young woman. She doesn’t look like she could menace anyone into good housekeeping, and I won’t be able to because that’s illegal.
However, I have to be realistic: I don’t live in Oamaru anymore and can’t justify another six months of the house on the market and not selling. Ironically, the only way I’ll be able to cope with this is to dissociate from reality.
Shouldn’t be too hard, I work in local government.
