July 14^th, 2002

Last week I finished one of the apartments. I think it came out pretty good and I managed to stay in my budget for the most part. Then the realization sank in that I was actually going to have to rent it out to someone. For the last few months being a landlord has always been a concept but now it was going to become a reality. I waited a week before I put an add in the paper hoping that somehow the perfect tenant would just appear at my door. I found myself having anxiety attacks thinking that I may get a bad tenant or even no tenant at all. What if no one wanted to rent it!

Well, yesterday the add appeared in the paper and the phone has been ringing off the hook. I get a lot of messages on the machine while I’m at work. Many of them I don’t bother calling back because I don’t like the way they sound. I’ve shown the apartment to 6 people and 5 of them say they are interested in it. Three are woman in their mid 30s to mid 40s, the forth is a married couple in their mid-twenties, and the last is a female college student going to HSU. All of them seem nice and I would be willing to rent to any one of them. So now my problem is which one do I rent to. At this point it is a problem I’m happy to have.

I took a week off from working on the apartments to try and get my own house in order. It is still a mess but at least it is livable now. The previous owner and the renters before them have all left stuff in the attic. I decided long ago that while working on the inside of the house I would start at the top and work my way down so I’ve been try to get the attic cleaned out. There is some usable stuff that I am thinking I can sell at a garage sale but most of it is garbage.

The main part of the attic is quite large and has very high ceilings so you can stand up and walk around. Going off of this main part there are three gables, 2 on each side of the house and one on the front. The gables each have a window that was boarded over. I decided to remove the boards to let some light and air in. After I removed the boards I realized I could easily get at the asbestos shingles on the outside of the gables by hanging out the windows. The asbestos came off quite easily. Underneath I found fish-scale shingles that are in beautiful shape. I’m really encouraged. I really want to start pulling the shingles off the rest of the house but tomorrow I’m going to start work on the other apartment. Very frustrating.

For the most part the trim and molding inside the house is still intact. I am missing a few feet of baseboard in two of the rooms where they cut it out long ago to install some cabinets. The straight baseboard is fairly easy to replace from local mills. The doorway molding is another problem. It is made up of three parts. There is the casing, the base blocks (also known as plinth blocks), and the corner blocks. Upstairs all of the door molding is in good shape except I am missing one base block on one door. Upstairs the corner blocks are simple bull’s eyes. The downstairs part of the house has fairly elaborate corner blocks on all of the doors and windows. They are 8.5 inches high and extend about 3 inches above the top of the casing. At some point someone decided to re-do the walls in two of the front rooms. Instead of cutting the drywall so it fit around the tops of these ornate corner blocks they sawed off the top 3 inches of the blocks so it was flush with the casing. What idiots! Considering this place was a rental for 80 some-odd years this was undoubtedly a cost-cutting decision made by a thrifty landlord. The corner blocks are on all of the door and window casings. They butchered 19 in all in these two rooms. Fortunately all of the other rooms still have the complete corner blocks so I know what they should look like.

Although you can find nice corner blocks in some specialty hardware stores and lumber yards the style that are in this house just don’t exist anywhere. I found a place on-line called Vintage Woodworks in Quinlan, TX that does nothing but reproduction Victorian Gingerbread. They do both interior and exterior elements. I contacted them by email and they say they can probably do the work. They have a production shop that makes things for their catalog and then they have a custom shop that works on projects like mine. They only sell direct to the public. I’m working with their custom shop now to try and get a price on replacing the damaged corner blocks. They asked me to send them pictures of one of the good blocks.

Since I had to buy a roll of film to get close-up pictures of the corner blocks I decided to take some pictures of the apartment to show you what it looks like. Most of the work was pretty straight forward. I laid carpet for the first time, and boy was that hard work. I have new found respect for people who lay carpeting for a living. The vinyl flooring was also a challenge because of the built-in dinette and all of the doorways in the little hallway. I decided to go with the 1 foot square vinyl tiles instead of sheet vinyl. It was still a lot of work but I think it made it easier. The bathroom floor is interesting. I’m not sure exactly but I think it is cement or some type of mortar. The floor and baseboards are all one seamless piece. I sanded off the old paint and repainted it. The plaster walls are kind of in rough shape in places but with a fresh coat of paint they look OK. And surprisingly all of the picture rail is still there. I have to explain to every person I show the apartment to what picture rail is and how to use it. I think that is the reason it is still there. No one knows what it is so they never used it. Unfortunately that means they drive nails into the plaster.

Finally, last week I was walking through Old Town and I passed by an upscale Antique store so I stopped in to see if they had any sofas or chairs similar to the ones in Tampa. She didn’t have anything at the time but she had pictures of an 1890s set of sofa and 2 chairs that she had just sold. They were restored and looked nice but they were kind of on the plain side. She said she sold the set for $900.00. She said they were appraised at a higher value but in this area the old Victorian era sofas are a hard sell because “quite frankly, they aren’t very comfortable to sit on”. She said in larger markets with a lot of older homes, like San Francisco or Boston, this type of furniture fetches top dollar. She had an antiques price book and we looked just at sofas. Sofas from the period of 1870 to 1900 were valued at between $1200.00 and $3400.00. This does not include the matching chairs. We both agreed, though, regardless of the appraised value, the furniture’s intrinsic value goes way up considering it belonged to my Great, Great, Grandmother. My feeling is it could be appraised at $200.00 and I would still want it more than any other set.

I talked to her about shipping the furniture and she said the prices you were quoted seemed about right. She gave me the name of shipper in your area called Vintage Transports that she uses to ship antiques around the country. I’m going to call them next week and see what they charge. I’ll let you know what they say. I’ve included their name and address below.

Vintage Transport

24341 Wilmington Ave.

Carson, CA 90745