Landlord Blues: Renting out the house from hell

Over the next week, Adrian and Sheila continued to clean up after Nigel. Sheila tackled the kitchen and Adrian sorted out the foul bathroom and toilet, as he couldn’t ask a lady to venture in there. Then they both blitzed the living room. Towards the end of the week, Adrian and I continued the work, blasting Nigel’s old room free of the grime. We had to re-paint the walls, ceiling and skirtings, because everything was heavily nicotine-stained, and the curtains had to be thrown out. He also left rubbish including a large old TV that Adrian lugged off to the dump.

Whilst Adrian was there, Simon questioned him about dumping the curtains from Nigel’s room in the bin; surely Adrian could clean them?

‘Yeah Simon. Have you seen the state of them? Look at the nicotine on them. It’s so deep they’ve gone stiff as a board.’

Simon then did his usual annoying thing of hanging around and moaning.

Adrian interrupted.

‘Hey, instead of moaning, why don’t you pull your finger out and do some cleaning yourself from time to time?’

‘I don’t see why I should,’ Simon replied. ‘I never go downstairs.’

Bearing in mind that the kitchen and bathroom were there.

Adrian replied, ‘Well, you use the loo and you must have a shower, now and then’.

Gerald was also moaning.

‘Simon’s got the two frying pans full of fat permanently in his cupboard now.’

Gerald couldn’t take the initiative and either clean one of the pans or get a new one himself (probably a pound or two in a charity shop). I decided to take one there just to shut him up, although we didn’t provide these things for tenants in other houses. At least Gerald texted Adrian on the Tuesday night after we’d been there, thanking him for making the place once more ‘habitable.’ This was possibly the first thank you to come from any of them.

Then, toward the end of the year in which we’d evicted Nigel, it was Gerald’s turn to start to seriously misbehave.

At this time, I was trying to keep a record of these experiences as a landlord, hoping that this might turn into a book at some point. But a big problem with writing about these experiences as a landlord was that focusing on them could get me down. Sometimes it was cathartic, but it didn’t feel right to focus on all this negative emotion when I was in a good mood. I also felt guilty if I was sitting in comfort recording what was going on whilst Adrian was busy actually sorting it all out. I also sensed the feeling from Adrian that what I was doing wasn’t work and wasn’t going to bring any money in.
One particular morning, following Nigel’s departure, I was drinking my coffee in Costa Coffee, whilst Adrian was foregoing his; instead,he was cleaning up the rancid room left by Nigel and the stinking communal areas for which they were all responsible. He had taken up Sheila, a local woman who did some cleaning for us now and again. They had their rubber gloves, but could have done with nose pincers as well, with stinky Simon still there at this point. 
Gerald, the market trader (whose tenancy, in all its ignominy is described soon) had said he’d fish around for us regarding where Nigel’s alleged girlfriend was living in a nearby town, because that was the most likely place where he’d move (another time, Gerald had laughed when we mentioned his ‘girlfriend:’ saying, 'I think you'll find he's not that way inclined.' Their lives were a mystery to us; we only caught a glimpse of the chaos of their worlds). We were hoping to find out his forwarding address in case we pursued legal action against him for the arrears. 
So we popped to see Gerald on his market stall, paying £10 for an £8.99 t-shirt off him – that we didn’t need, to give him some custom; he was then immediately willing to rat on his ‘friend’. He’d gone off him now, thinking of him as dirty and messy, and to be fair Gerald was out every day working on his stall, whilst Simon and Nigel lazed around all day.  It also transpired that Nigel owed the others a few quid; other people were always frantic and furious when money was owed to them. Gerald told us what Nigel had been saying.
'He's mega pissed off that you keep asking for the arrears. He says it's really annoying.' 
At least Nigel would answer the 'phone from time to time though, which was very unusual for a tenant in arrears. It was far more common for tenants to be too scared (or ashamed?) to answer the 'phone. 
The week after Nigel had got out, I rang him.
‘It's great you've moved out,’ I said. ‘Now, what about all the money you owe us?’ 
‘I’ll pay it when I can.’ 
‘And when will that be?’ 
‘In a week or two.’ 
‘When exactly?’ 
‘Mid-February.’ 
‘Right, the 14th of February,’ I said, trying to tie him down to a specific date.  He chuckled then:
‘Oh, Valentine’s Day, I won’t forget that.’ A few weeks previously he'd finished a ‘phone call I’d made to him with ‘ciao’... like we were friends having a social chat, instead of him being one of the causes of the horrid kernels of stress I could feel in the pit of my stomach, which might lead to all manner of health problems later on. 
But the main thing was that he was out. And we’d also been given a £1,800 tax credit payment that week, after updating the HMRC with our abysmal annual income, so it wasn’t all bad.

Another morning, Adrian ‘phoned Nigel but got no answer. I said he must have Adrian’s telephone number stored on his ‘phone. So I telephoned him from my ‘phone a bit later and he answered. I told him he needed to pay £250 and it must clear in our bank account by Monday to avoid court action, and that he had to pay the rest of the arrears. He was unfazed.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he replied, casually. At 4pm the same day I checked the bank and it looked like he’d paid £100. I didn’t know what that was about, but I supposed it was better than nothing, if annoying.

So much for my being annoyed at the cheque from him being for only £100, when I had asked for £250. The next day, I realised the £100 was from his fellow-tenant, Gerald. Nigel had paid nothing! I wondered if he was making any plans to get out, as we might then save on the court fees. I texted the other housemates:

Hello there. Can you let me know if you see any sign of Nigel moving his things out?

Really, we should have been going up to the house regularly to check what was going on, but we often couldn’t find the energy to deal with it. Adrian wouldn’t lose his temper; he doesn’t, and can’t afford to. We have to be whiter than white, whilst our tenants can have countless County Court Judgements against them. We can’t afford to have one, or Adrian would lose his accredited landlord status, and we could be barred from letting out a House of Multiple Occupation.

Surprisingly, on the Monday, Nigel answered his ‘phone; he had had it switched off the day before, which had been the day when our ultimatum ran out. He was very laid back.

‘Hi Nigel. You know why I’m ringing. I just want to say how disappointed we are that things have got to this point. We always got on well before, didn’t we? How come you’re not paying up or getting out when you know we’ve got a mortgage to pay on the house and we’re paying all the bills as well? Are we supposed to support you? We’re going to have to pay £150 court fees as well now. Don’t you care how stressful it is for me and Adrian and all the bother you’re causing us? You just seem so blasé about it all. You know how we have to keep shelling out on the house – you’ve seen how often we’ve had electricians and other workmen up at there…’

There had been a steady stream of tradesmen at the house, fulfilling all of the council’s ridiculously unnecessary, yet expensive demands, like ‘painting the gate leading to the garden, because that would look nice.’ And how we had to do all this whilst Simon was pissing in a pot, and the men at the house had the most rancid looking toiletry bags with filthy toothbrushes on display in the bathroom. Every time a room became vacant (usually because we had to evict someone), Adrian would have to go in and clean all the communal areas as well as the vacant bedroom, or we’d never let a room there again. In fact, Adrian started going up there to do a regular clean, because none of them would get off their behinds.

Nigel’s story had now changed; he’d forgotten he had loads of money in the bank and couldn’t pay the rent because he would lose interest. The story had become: ‘I’m going to see my bank manager this week’.

‘What does that mean?' I asked. 'Does that mean you’re going to ask for a loan?’ I honestly didn’t know what it meant. I never went to see the bank manager. The only time I’d ever been was when they'd charged me for going about a penny overdrawn, to get the manager to refund the charges. Would a person go and see him or her to try and persuade them to extend an overdraft? And, if you did ask them and you were living in a rented room with no collateral, would they say yes?

‘Look, Nigel, just get out of the house, please,’ I asked. ‘Clear out your stuff and pay what you owe. At least then, the debt will stop growing, and we can get someone in who pays the rent.’

‘Oh, you want me to move out, do you?’ he asked, surprised, ‘Okay then, I will.’

The following Saturday, we were delaying issuing court papers and a possible waste of £150 court fees, in the hope that he might stick to his word. Adrian and I then visited the house to see if he'd gone – he hadn’t – and we couldn’t get our key to work in his lock. We were like detectives; Adrian couldn’t see into the room through the lock, leading him to believe that perhaps Nigel was inside, with the key in the lock, but the window was open (we looked from the back garden and his room was at the back, on the first floor).

It was a cold day, so he wouldn’t be likely to be in there with the window open and his car wasn’t in the street, and Simon said that he went everywhere in it, so we were perplexed. Both Simon (who was still resident at this point) and Gerald were quite happy to spill the beans about Nigel's behaviour, especially Gerald. He said that he thought Nigel was dealing in drugs, because he went out to different people in waiting cars at various times of the day and night. He didn’t seem the type to me. I then telephoned Nigel two days later and, amazingly, he said he’d left. Pester power at work. He owed us several hundred pounds, but he'd gone, which is always a tremendous relief.

While we were having all the trouble with Simon, one of the other housemates, Nigel, had seemed to be a model tenant. When you’re very focused on one bad tenant, it’s easy to ignore issues that are developing with others. When Nigel moved in, he said he was unemployed but looking for work and he let us see bank statements showing that he had in excess of £13,000, so the rent wouldn’t be a problem. The first year of his tenancy passed without incident. When I met him for the first time one day, we had a pleasant chat about cooking as he was attending a cookery evening class. He also said that he spent Sundays helping out the market-trader, Gerald, who occupied the room next to him, and who took his t-shirts and sporting memorabilia to car boot sales to boost his income. Nigel had a car and would drive Gerald to these sales.

So, it was a bit of a surprise when Nigel started under-paying the rent by £20 every month. This £20 was supposed to cover his share of the council tax; we had taken on the management of this as the tenants were incapable of sorting it out. He would promise to make up these £20 payments but make us wait for months. After five months of underpaying, he would pay £100 in one lump sum, so we weren’t too concerned. However, eventually, he stopped paying anything at all and when Adrian confronted him at the house he said that he hadn’t answered, when we were chasing the rent because he doesn’t ‘do’ texts.

Adrian said, ‘Well, in that case why haven’t you answered either the letter I sent you, or the note that I pushed under your door?’ The ‘phone not working and the ‘no credit on the ‘phone’ were common excuses, as was the letter that never arrived. We always got a proof of postage for important letters; this is free, just a pain because you have to queue at the post office.

By January of his second year at the house, things had deteriorated and one morning I ‘phoned him regarding the fact that he’d stopped paying his rent apart from £40 out of the £200 due the previous month, and nothing yet for the current month; he now owed a total of £520. The reason, according to him was that he had his money in savings that were tied up until the end of the month. I said surely it would be preferable to stomach a penalty on his savings (£50? £100?), rather than risk losing his accommodation and being taken to court over £500? I persisted.

‘Look, Nigel. We need a substantial payment within the next two weeks.’

‘Mmm, I could pay you maybe £45 a week. I think I could manage that,’ he replied.

‘But that’s not even going to cover your current rent, never mind pay anything off the arrears.’

‘Well, I am sorry I haven’t paid in anything recently, but I’ve had a cold.’

I said: ‘Yes, Adrian’s been ill too, but we’ve still had to pay our mortgage and the mortgage on Hill View.’

‘I’ll definitely pay £50 later,’ he promised. When I checked the bank later, he had paid £45. Paying slightly less than promised is a common part of the game. After I hung up, I posted his 14-day notice, as he was more than two months in arrears.

The following week, I rang him again. By this time, he would have received his 14-day notice, but it is rare for tenants to leave when they receive this notice, not least because, according to the law we have to serve them a notice which informs them of all their rights and tells them that they don’t have to move out. We would now have to issue court papers on the 25^{th if he hadn’t paid up (we had sent the notice on the 8th and we allowed three days for the post, to be on the safe side with the judge).}

^{During my next conversation with him he said, ‘I paid £45 in last week,’ and, ‘no, I haven’t seen the letter giving me my notice, because I’ve been up a friend’s, ill. You can probably still hear it in my voice that I’m not yet fully over it; probably the swine flu, I think.’}

^{It was like an old record; the person has been in arrears for three months, and the reason is that they’ve been ill for the last two weeks, and instead of me laying the law down, I should slip into nurse/social worker mode, whilst also paying to keep a roof over their heads; even in his case where he reckoned he had plenty of money in the bank.}

^{I had actually thought he was a nice bloke, albeit a bit of a saddo as they always were in that house; we had talked about how he was making a new meal every week in his cookery class. Despite not having a lot of work on, he had mostly paid his rent (minus his council tax). Then he suddenly decided he wasn’t going to pay any more. Once more, a seemingly good tenant, who has paid on time for a few years even, just stops. They decide they’re willing to move out or be moved out, and want to save up as much money as they possibly can before being made to leave. Around this time, my sister asked how we felt about having to be tough with tenants whom we liked. Adrian put her in the picture immediately, saying: ‘Nice is as nice does.’}

Peter, a new tenant, was invisible; his mother, Grace, paid his rent, and presumably he slept at the house, but we never saw nor heard from him. Grace was just relieved that he was away from the mother of his two small children, as she was apparently a user and a waster. The charming Grace sent the rent cheque every month on the dot, always placing it in a pretty card or notelet, wishing us all lovely things, and may God bless us. Peter was the ideal tenant and at least he went out to work, as did Gerald, doing stuff, not sitting on their arses like Simon and Nigel.

However, he also left the house owing money as he had paid none of his share of the £1,400 electricity bill that built up over the course of a year. It was the norm with that house to leave owing money, but we decided to forget his debt as a favour to his Mam/Grandma (he called her Mam but she was his Grandma, and had taken him on, because his mother had been no good). If his Mam/Grandma had known he had a debt of several hundred pounds and that we were taking him to court it could have made her ill and she'd always been so good. Rather than chase a few hundred pounds, I suggested to Adrian that we write it off as a reward to her – although she didn’t know she was being rewarded with one fewer worry – he gave her enough worry as it was.

So, we regularly had vacancies at the house and then Adrian would have to always go up at least half an hour early to make sure the toilets and kitchen weren’t disgusting. Despite Adrian having done a big clean-up around this time, steam-cleaning the carpets, making several trips to the dump with the rubbish that Jason (more of him later) constantly accumulated, and scrubbing and cleaning to within an inch of his life, we could never be sure that it wasn’t abysmal again within a couple of days. We’d never have let another room again if he didn’t do this work. Having said that, the ones who then moved in always seemed to adjust to living in filth very quickly; the house seemed to attract an unhygienic set of characters.

Simon also had the habit of ‘phoning the Housing Office and asking to be paid the rent directly. After he had previously spent a Housing Benefit payment, we had had the payments switched so that we would receive the money. One Friday evening I arrived home to find a letter from the Housing Office saying that as Simon had asked for the money they would be acquiescing in his request as he was no longer in arrears.

So I rang Simon.

‘Why have you done this? The only reason I can see is that you want to get hold of the money so you can spend it. This is the last straw. You’ll be getting your notice now. I’m sick of your games.’ The call ended with us both raising our voices. A great start to the weekend.

We often received these troublesome letters on a Friday and if we got home late, it was impossible to ring the relevant offices and sort it out. Or the letters would come on a Saturday morning and we’d have to wait until Monday to deal with the issues. I was so mad this time though that I decided to act immediately, rather than think all weekend: 'I'll say this and I'll say that, in the letter.' So I spent half an hour of my Friday evening writing to the Housing Office:

‘It’s only because we have received the money directly that Simon has got out of arrears. As soon as the payments go back to him, he’ll withhold the rent like he did before.’ I asked them to reconsider as they were only going to cause problems for all of us.

After getting all aerated on the Friday evening, I also decided never to open post on Friday evenings or Saturday mornings in the future.

A week later I received a brief letter stating they would pay him directly.

'That's it!' Adrian said, 'he's going.' And we issued his notice. Some new law had apparently come in, however, whereby we could now be accused of ‘retaliatory eviction.’ According to this brainwave from Government, if a person winds you up, defrauds the system by claiming a benefit for rent which they have no intention of passing on; all of which affects your state of mind and you then evict them, you've broken the law.

The day he received his notice, he was straight on the ‘phone.

‘How can you do this to me? What have I done? I don’t understand it. I thought we always got on well.’

It turned out he was oblivious to how difficult we’d found him over the years and didn’t comprehend that we'd run out of patience.

A few weeks later Adrian was at the house with the gas engineer, when Simon came downstairs and started moaning about something. Adrian cut him off:

‘Simon, don’t speak to me because it ends in a row,’ to which Simon said:

‘Have you reconsidered my notice? Do you still want me to go?’

Adrian replied, ‘No, we haven’t reconsidered. We definitely want you to move out.’

The day he left, Adrian was his usual soft self, even giving him a lift to his new house with the last of his belongings. This was out of Adrian’s way and made him late for an appointment, but Simon expressed his appreciation and promised to pay the several hundred pounds he owed us. We never saw the money nor did we hear from him again.

Another day, Adrian complained to the tenants that they never put any money in the gas meter, which meant that the ground floor was going to suffer from damp. He also said to Simon and Jason:

‘Look. I’m sick of you continually making the communal areas filthy! Why can’t you pick up a cloth and do some cleaning?’

Because these grown men wouldn't lift a finger, Adrian would have to go up and blitz the house himself. He said to Simon he knew exactly why Simon would never even wash a cup:

‘You’re shitting yourself you might do something for someone else, aren’t you?’

Simon said: ‘Well I might be handing my notice in anyway. I’m applying for a £40,000 job 60 miles away. I'm pretty likely to get it.’

It never came to anything. Another time he was employed for a short time as a labourer by a Christian building company but was given the push for mysterious reasons. Even people trained in forgiveness and charity were willing to shove him out into the cold. Adrian knew why they would have got shot of him.

‘They must have got sick of the sound of his voice,' he opined.

As time went on his behaviour deteriorated further; he developed a routine of spending entire days, slobbing around in his room, pissing in a saucepan. He was obsessed with ‘gaming online.’

‘I’m now one of the top players in the world,’ he declared. ‘Please don’t try and get hold of me between the hours of 7 and 11 in the evenings, as I’m busy on the internet.’ Well, good, because we don’t want to talk to you anyway, mate.

He went to the police station because he reckoned someone in the street had damaged his car. The police asked for his documentation and the MOT had expired, so they told him he shouldn’t be using the car anyway and to take it off the road.

'Ah, you don't understand,' he explained to the officer. 'I don’t need an MOT because I know the car's roadworthy.' He then parked it on wasteland so that it wasn’t on a public highway, eventually scrapping it, because he couldn’t afford to get it fixed.

'Well, I'll never be able to find work without a car,' he said, giving up on ever looking for a job again. As far as he was concerned, people who could be bothered to get a job and pay their taxes could support him for the rest of his (able-bodied) life.

It reminded me of a man in his twenties who rang Adrian up, looking for a house to rent for himself, his partner and his sister.

'Who amongst you is working? Adrian asked, not unreasonably I thought.

'None of us,' the man replied.

'Well, what are the prospects of any of you getting a job soon?' was Adrian's follow-up question.

'None of us.'

As far as he was concerned, he was now permanently disabled, having damaged his hand by falling down some stairs after a night out.

‘Oh. You had too much to drink, did you?’ Adrian asked. In our society a person could injure themself through being drunk and then live forever more on the State, probably even getting extra benefits because of their disability.

Simon was a six foot something northerner, who would not stop talking. Initially, he paid the rent from his wages as a labourer, but after a while, the payments became erratic. He would sometimes come down to our house to pay. One time I was making lasagne;

‘Ooh, that smells delicious,’ he said.

I nearly offered him some until I remembered he owed us over two hundred pounds; so I stopped myself. I’d let him have some next time, if he’d paid his rent.

‘How many houses have you got?’ he asked Adrian, adding, ‘I’ve got a rich uncle who’s like you and lets houses out. He’s absolutely stacked.’

‘Actually, all our houses have high mortgages on them’, Adrian answered, refusing to be drawn on how many we had; it being none of his business.

‘God, that man stinks to high heaven,’ Adrian said, after he’d left. ‘I can still smell it now. He’s left the stench in the whole house.’

After I’d had my first child, I’d mysteriously lost much of my sense of smell. The stink of Simon was so pungent, however, that even I could detect it.

Another day, he ‘phoned to say the light on the stairs in the house wasn’t working.

‘Does the bulb need changing?’ I asked.

‘Yes, it’s probably that’, he said.

‘Well, can’t you do it?’ I enquired.

‘No’, he replied.

‘Is it too high for you to reach?’ I asked.

‘No’, he answered.

‘So’, I summarised, ‘you’re asking us to come on a 20-mile round trip to change a light bulb?’

‘Yes.’

So Adrian went and left a whole box of low-energy bulbs there, which should have lasted for the next ten years (they didn’t, because we had the same request to come and change bulbs a year or two later; because we were paying the bills, they left the lights on day and night). That was one of the only houses where they ever asked us to do something so small; four grown men were living there by then, and not one of them would pay for a bulb and reach up and change it.

Simon was naturally argumentative, moreover, and I reached the limits of my patience one day.

‘Don’t ‘phone me under any circumstances,’ I told him. ‘If you have something to tell me, put it in writing.’

He paid no attention; he would ring and say: ‘It’s Simon. I know you said not to call you, but I just wanted to ask you…’ and then he would start up a conflict-ridden conversation, I would tell him I wasn't going to listen and I would hang up.

At one point, the house was once more looking tatty, because none of the tenants would lift a finger to clean it. Adrian arrived there one day to move in a new tenant, Jason. Jason had arrived early and Simon greeted Adrian with: ‘Ah, here’s the landlord,’ in a derogatory tone. He then started declaiming that he wanted a rent refund because he was slightly in credit, for the first time ever, after a Housing Benefit payment.

Adrian said, ‘Can you wait a bit, Simon, because I’m busy?’ but he wouldn’t go away, instead standing in the doorway of the room that was being let as Adrian was trying to fill in the Tenancy Agreement. In the end, Adrian snapped.

‘Simon. Look. Get lost and go and get a life. I’m busy.’ He then apologised to Jason for being rude, but Jason was unfazed (we maybe should have taken that as a warning about the kind of person he was).