I'm Selling The Place

Most Recent Townhome - End Story

The Front Door at the Townhome, Illustration by Matt Murray

This is my last story where I talk about what happened in the most recent townhome. We only lived there for 1 ½ years.

This is all about our landlord. I’ll call him H for this story. He lived in New York City. His brother lived locally and he told us if we ever needed anything that his brother could come over. We never saw him.

The Dryer

One day the clothes dryer started making a weird noise while drying clothes. I tried looking into the drum to see if I could see anything loose. I didn’t see anything. I put my hand into the drum area and tried to manually move the drum while it was stopped. (Don’t tell him I did that!) Bad idea! It was really done now! It made a worse noise when I did that and then it wouldn’t work at all.

I emailed him and he had a technician come over and look at it. The technician told me that we needed a brand new dryer. I emailed H and told him. A few days later, we got a new dryer.

Hurricane

We had a vicious hurricane that hit the area. It was Hurricane Matthew of all names. It brought wrath to a lot of people and the name was retired. My Mom and I stayed up all night on the couch worrying about it. This was a category 5, the biggest. We were supposed to get a direct hit but at the last moment, it turned north. I fell asleep during the storm. In the morning, I went upstairs and looked out the office window. It was still raining out. I couldn’t see the tree that was between our building and the next. There was a good reason why I couldn’t see it. It was gone! Once we were able to see outside, the giant tree had fallen over.

Photo by Matt Murray, October 2016

The white plastic fence that surrounded our backyard on the west and east sides had some damage. The one on the east side had some of the pieces of fence blown out. I worked feverishly to get the fence back together. I got them all put in but I couldn’t get the top piece in. I was sweating and getting frustrated because it wouldn’t go back in.

So I left it for the landlord. I took it apart because I didn’t want it to fall when the lawnmowers came.

Photo by Matt Murray, October 2016

Arrival of Landlord

When he came to the townhome, he didn’t even ring the doorbell and let us know he was there. We happened to look out the sliding glass doors and saw an unknown man out there. He was already working to get the fence put back together. We figured it must be the landlord. We had never seen him in person. We walked out the front door and back toward the fence. We shook hands with him and talked with him. When we met him, he seemed surprised that we were the tenants. He had a weird reaction to us. I don’t know why.

Selling

After he was done fixing the fence, he came into the townhome. He wanted to see the new dryer he bought for us. We walked into the room where it was and he said, “Well, I’m glad I got this for you now.” I don’t know why he said it that way. You should have heard the tone of his voice.

Then we went back downstairs to talk. He asked us if we were going to stay and when we signed the lease. He didn’t even remember when we had signed. We told him that we had signed 2 months ago. We said we weren’t sure if we were going to stay or not because it was hard for us to keep going up and down the stairs. It was getting hard for my Mom to ascend the stairs. And there were no windows on the ground level to look out of, except for the sliding glass doors and one window in the back. There were windows in our bedrooms and the home office but those were upstairs. If we heard something, we had to run up the stairs to look outside. This got to be complicated. I had slipped a couple of times running up the stairs and you’d be out of breath by the time you got up there.

And then he threw this in. He says, “I’m selling the place.” We were totally blindsided by that. Instant worry ensued. As soon as he left, we wondered what to do.

I started looking on the websites that I had used when we found this place. We ended up contacting our original Real Estate Agent and he helped us with finding the next place.

Conclusion

When we applied for the next place, we used this landlord as a recommendation. The listing agent for the condo told us that he talked glowingly about us, even saying he didn’t want us to leave. If that was the case, then why did he tell us that he was selling the place?

Until next time, happy reading.

-Matt