Victor and the Tree

[lolad]

it's one of the reasons our bushfires are famously dangerous.
[snip]
Oh, and then there's the dropbears.

They also don't let the water reach the ground in the way it does elsewhere, which is why the water bombers aren't as effective as they are in other places around the world.
Not that aussie innovation hasn't found solutions.

And don't tell them about the drop bears. The tourists will stop coming and we'll have nothing to feed them

[Seshat]

I got my house about 15% lower than listing price, in large part, because the prior owners were told by their real estate agent to paint everything white. I think he assumed they would know what drop cloths were and how (and why) to use them. Nope. All the carpets had white edges, white droplets, and white lines (from where the doors were).

Our house has painted-over light switches, power points and doorhandles. Another cosmetically yuck house that's structurally sound. OURS!

And don't tell them about the drop bears. The tourists will stop coming and we'll have nothing to feed them.

Oops.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

I think those are closely related to the snipe, are they not?

[Pagan]

Also a close relation to the wild haggis!

[protege]

What got me is the people who won't spend the time to even pretend they're doing it correctly. I got my house about 15% lower than listing price, in large part, because the prior owners were told by their real estate agent to paint everything white. I think he assumed they would know what drop cloths were and how (and why) to use them. Nope. All the carpets had white edges, white droplets, and white lines (from where the doors were).

I'd like to smack whoever painted my house. The entire place is white, including the garage. There are spots on the basement linoleum floor, on the carpet in places, and even on the glass! Oh, and the idiots didn't even bother removing the hooks in the walls, including the cheapie "cloth hook" thingies. They simply painted over them...which means not only do my living room walls look like shit, but removing the hooks is now a major job...which includes filling holes and repainting the room!

[Gurndigarn]

I'd like to smack whoever painted my house. The entire place is white, including the garage. There are spots on the basement linoleum floor, on the carpet in places, and even on the glass! Oh, and the idiots didn't even bother removing the hooks in the walls, including the cheapie "cloth hook" thingies. They simply painted over them...which means not only do my living room walls look like shit, but removing the hooks is now a major job...which includes filling holes and repainting the room!

Gah! They're everywhere!

OK, my natural competitiveness has risen to the forefront... anyone had a prior owner do anything quite as stupid as have downspouts run into what was supposed to be a storm drain... but made a quick 135 degree turn and bury itself at the corner of the concrete driveway and the concrete slab? IE, with no place for water to run out at, except the crack that developed in the slab, and therefore into the house? Oh, and this is a former wetlands area? Very little actual drainage, at least before the city (THANK YOU!) put in real storm drains?

That topped the former landlord who ran electrical wires through the basement... without staples, backing, conduit, or anything to keep the wires dangling like an indoors clothesline.

The most interesting one... annoying at the time, but lots of fun in the retelling... was the 1910s house that was remodeled around WWII. Anyway, it had one tiny room that was probably originally a closet, but I decided to turn into a nursery. Bright green walls, new awesome-looking stained-glass light fixture, new trim... and a new light switch instead of a pull cord. I spent an hour or so in the attic, adding in the necessary wiring, making sure it met code, all that. Turn the breaker on, turn the switch on... nothing. Spent five minutes wiggling stuff, getting ready to pull out the multimeter, that kind of thing. Headed into the bathroom, flipped on the light... nothing.

????

To make a long story short, with the remodel, they ran new electrical up to the second floor, to the light with the pull cord, then to the rest of the lights in the house. But left the conduit from the original wire in place, so it wasn't obvious what they had done. So as I wired it, my switch turned off every light upstairs. It was an annoying afternoon as I got additional parts and rewired everything again. But, as I said, now that it's several years removed, it's a great memory.

[DexX]

More tales of Victor

Victor did a lot of dumb stuff in the time we lived there. There are plenty of "little" stories, many involving his habit of getting his incompetent relatives to do repairs (my favourite is the idiot cousin who concreted in the new clothesline after the old one was squished by the tree - he didn't bring sand for the mix, so he used a shovelful of soil from under the bushes, packed with leaves and twigs) but we have two big stories that often get a retelling at parties. One is quite short, and other very long. Short one first...

Victor and the Window

The house we rented from Victor was old and crappy, made crappier by the fact that he failed to look after it properly. The bathroom (Australian talk here - I actually mean the room with the bath in it, not the toilet) had an old-fashioned wooden-framed swinging window that had been painted probably twenty times and was swollen by moisture, so it no longer fit neatly into the frame.

We demonstrated this to Victor once, thus:

DexX: See, this is how we have to open it... [Bashes window very hard with heel of hand three or four times.] ...and this is how we have to close it... [Slams window very hard. It fails to close, so slams it even harder.]
Victor: So, you can open it and close it?
DexX: Well yes, but...
Victor: It's fine then.
DexX: Okaaayyy...

Not too long later, the inevitable happened: my wife had been showering and (since we had no exhaust fan in our mouldy bathroom) had the window open. When she was done she slammed the window as per usual, and it shattered. It really is amazing that she wasn't seriously injured - one jagged shard the size of a dinner plate was resting flat on top of her bare foot.

We reported the breakage, and after a fairly reasonable time it was fixed, with a nice new wooden frame that opened and closed effortlessly. We were very pleased. Then came the phone call...

Victor: My insurance company says you have to pay for the broken window.
DexX: [Choke] Uh... what?
Victor: They say you did it so you have to pay for it.
DexX: Sorry, but I'm not paying a cent for that window. We showed you what we had to do to open and close it, and you said that was fine. As part of this "normal usage" it broke. You said that usage was fine, so no, this is your responsibility.
Victor: At least pay for half ot it!
DexX: No! This is 100% your responsibility! We reported it to you and you chose not to fix it. This is your responsibility, not ours.
Victor: But my insurance company-
DexX: They are your insurance company, not mine. Their demands of you have no bearing on me, and I don't have to do a thing they say.

That ended it. He stopped arguing. Of course, what he meant was that his insurance company said "We're not paying for that!" but he chose to paraphrase somewhat... Tight bastard...


Victor and the Bond (aka Rental Security Deposit)

Ahhh, the joys of getting the bond back, the most treasured life experience of all renters! Even more fun was getting it back from a tightarse like Victor.

Now, we knew we were going to lose some of it. We were evicted pretty much at Christmas, and had to move in a big hurry. Rents had gone up so we had to head right across town where rents were cheaper. The move was a real strain, and we didn't leave the old house in as good a condition as we would have liked. We told Victor about the damaged fly screens on the front and back doors where the cats had gotten their claws in, and we told him about the scorch mark on the carpet from a hot pot I unthinkingly put down on it. I figured a hundred bucks would cover it, as the carpet was awful and heavily damaged anyway, and flyscreen cost a few bucks and took minutes to put in.

Victor called us a few days after the move was compete, and I was all psyched up for it. I knew he'd want to haggle, so I thought I'd concede a hundred and let him talk me up to $150. He flat out demanded $500 from a $700 bond. I was stunned into silence. He ranted about how he had to replace all the carpet because of us (three million year old carpet, so stained we had no idea of its original colour, with cigarette burns and coal burns from an open fireplace we never used) and that he had to get the back yard landscaped because we made such a mess of it. I was taken aback, but wouldn't be bullied - no, I said, I would not give him $500 under any circumstances. His reply? "See you at the tribunal!" [Click!]

Fine, we said, see you in court. In Australia, each state runs its own mini-magistrates court, going by various names, but known in Victoria as the Residential Tenancies Tribunal. We chose not to waste money on legal representation, consider a maximum monetary loss of $700, and we knew the rules pretty well and did plenty of research. When our summons arrived, he had gone the whole hog - he wanted every cent of the bond.

On the day, Victor showed up walking with a cane I had never seen him use before (kept in mothballs for generating sympathy at court, eh?) and with his horrific wife in tow - god, she was a horrible woman. He then proceeded to humiliate himself hilariously in front of the tribunal. Some sample exchanges:

Victor: The carpet was in perfect condition when they moved in!
Tribunal: Perfect?
Victor: Yes! it was spotless!
Tribunal: But this condition report, that you signed, lists its quality as "poor".
Victor: Well, it wasn't perfect, but it was perfectly fine.
Tribunal: The condition report says it had heavy staining, cigarette burns, and holes right to the floorboards from the open fireplace.
Victor: Uh... well, it had a few marks...

Victor: They ruined the lawn in the back yard! I had to get a landscape gardener in to fix it.
Tribunal: What condition was it in when they moved in?
Victor: It was perfect!
Tribunal: According to the conditino report, which you signed, it was seriously overgrown with weeds, and looked as though it has not been mowed in months. Also, your former tenant's testimony states that the ground was very uneven and it was very difficult to mow.
Victor: They planted a vegetable garden and ruined the lawn!
Tribunal: The former tenants have admitted they made a vegetable garden, and they filled it in and put grass back over the top long before they moved out. According to them, the ground was left no more uneven afterwards than it had been before.
Victor: But it was in perfect condition!
Tribunal: If so, you should have ensured that condition was accurately reported in the conditions report that, I remind you, you signed.

On and on it went. The tribunal's finding? $75 for the screen doors, $50 contribution toward the replacement of the carpet, and not a f--king cent toward landscaping the bombsite of a back yard. $125 total out of our bond.

Want to know the real punchline? It cost him $25 to lodge the case with the tribunal. His final net bond recovery? $100, exactly what I offered him initially, when I was quite willing to negotiate up to $150. The idiot had gone to great effort, wasted his time, my time, my wife's time, and the court's time, and ended up short changing himself fifty bucks as a result.

Ahhhh, what a joy it is to own our own home now, though ironically when we bought this place we had been renting for two years from the only good landlord I ever had, a really lovely old Italian bloke named Jack. He was the only landlord I was ever sorry to serve notice to, and he was really nice about it too.

[Shabo]

Wait... you put your bath in a separate room from your toilet?

[Geek King]

Wait... you put your bath in a separate room from your toilet?

Makes perfect sense to me. Do it that way, and you don't lose a toilet for use while some one's in the shower. At least, I don't like people using the crapper in the same room while I'm in the shower.

[Shabo]

The newer dorms that I've lived in had the sinks separate from the toilet/shower area, which was nice, and it was rare that both bathrooms were being used for a shower at the same time, even with 8 girls living in the suite. Worked out just fine for us. Of course, in that instance only one person could really be in the br at any given time just because of how small the brs were. The communal brs in the older dorms were fair game. Everything was open. A toilet stall, a few shower stalls, and a couple sinks.

[Emrld]

It isn't just Australia . . . .
Some homes have open bathrooms/ water closets where you see sink, shower, tub, and toilet . . . some have them with the toilet in its own closet, some you walk to either side and there is your sink and even closet . . .between the two is the tub on one wall and shower and toilet on the other . . . some baths have two seperate sink/ vanities with the tub/shower combo and a toilet across . . .

It all depends on the designer. The reason so many tubs/ toilets share space has to do with plumbing and saving money.

[DexX]

In Victor's house, the bathroom also had a toilet in it, plus we had a genuine old-fashioned outside toilet, which was always fun.

[Rahmota]

Wow the more I see stories like this the more I'm glad I have my own place and don't rent.

As for getting someone else's problems. When we replaced the old mobile home with the newer larger one we had to get it used as the new ones where way too much, so I've taken the time to upgrade and improve things. Like putting in shut off valves. When the guy who had the mobile before us redid the plumbing he used all PVC but no shut off valves. The only shut off valve there was is the one on the well intake we put in during installation. *sigh* So I've been goign along redoing all that. Of course by the time I get done the place will probably be unrecognizeable to its designer even.

[Dreamstalker]

I think those are closely related to the snipe, are they not?

At my college, there is a plaque near the science building designating the campus as a snipe sanctuary I have a pic of it somewhere.

[Geek King]

At my college, there is a plaque near the science building designating the campus as a snipe sanctuary I have a pic of it somewhere.

Now that's funny. I would want to know the story behind that sign going up.