Rental Issues

When we first moved into this AirBnB a month ago the front doors were very sticky. Both the storm door and the main door had to be yanked or pushed fairly hard to open. We lived with it for a few days and then, tired of the kicking and yanking, complained to the host. She promptly relayed the issue to the owner and within a day he came over, tightened the screws on the storm door and shaved some of the front door to make things right. Both doors were then just a little tight, not perfect, but a darn sight better than before.

The dishwasher was never screwed into the counter top. Donna tried to live with it, but after a week of the thing tilting dangerously every time the door was fully opened we contacted the host who contacted the owner who showed up a day or so later and added the screws. Not long after that Donna asked them to see if they could find a silverware basket that had bottoms in more half of its compartments. It took a few days, but the host did deliver a complete basket.

The main source of heat in the place is a large gas heater centrally located in the main room. It has a rudimentary thermostat control that consists of a dial numbered one through ten. It has an electric fan to circulate the warm air controlled by a knob with 5 settings, low & high constant, off, and low & high when the gas is lit. We would manually control the thermostat and left the fan on low at all times to create a white noise to cover the traffic sounds of the street out front. About three weeks in the fan quit. The gas burner part still worked, so we weren’t going to freeze. We notified the host who passed it along to the owner and a couple days later he came over and “fixed” it.

We were not home while he was working on it, but arrived back just as he was finishing up. He told us he oiled the motor and it was fine now. Later that evening when the heat kicked on, the fan did not, even though the knob was set at Low/Auto. I tired various settings and the fan would never start running. We miss the white noise, but as long as the fire works we will just let this one ride.

Then there was the infamous power outage day – Wednesday the 13th

Yesterday morning after throwing a load of clothes in the washer and adding detergent, the washer wouldn’t start. I went outside to see if a breaker had tripped. Nope. Came in and tried to plug it into a different outlet, still not coming on. Tried a different cycle with still no joy. Contacted the the host who got back to us an hour or so later to say that the owner would be over shortly. He came over and fiddled with something and couldn’t get it to work. He said, “We’ll get you a replacement later today.” “We have several used ones in storage, we just have to find one that works.” Late evening we get a text, that it will be Saturday morning around ten before we get a washer.

This morning at quarter to 10 we get another text, it’ll be more like 11:00. We had a couple of morning things planned so we opted to head out and do one knowing we’d be back by eleven. When we got back to the AirBnB a few minutes before eleven o’clock the host and owner were muscling a washer in through the front door. It would go through the storm door, but they had to take the main door off its hinges to get the machine in. Even though they knew the washer worked before they brought it over, they hooked it up and ran it through a complete cycle here just to check everything out again. While that ran, they took the old washer out, loaded it onto their trailer and put the front door back on.

After they had packed up and left, we closed the front door and it took a heavy shove to get it closed. Somehow just taking it off and putting on the hinges, we are right back to where we started….sigh.

One Month In

We arrived in Klamath Falls a month ago today.

We are still stuck in that awkward time between agreeing on a price and actually taking possession of the house and the big hold up is the bank’s appraisal, there is a 4 week backlog. At this rate we will have to get lucky to get into the house by Christmas. We have agreed to extend our stay in the AirBnB until 12/21. The Host wrote back saying she was going to block off the place until the 5th of January, just in case we need longer.

Both the rental car and the Mini were returned to their respective homes this afternoon. On further troubleshooting it was determined that both the #2 and #4 cylinders were reading bad. Because we had the coil pack on #1 replaced in May and now #2 & #4 were acting up, we agreed to go ahead and change the coil pack on #3 because sure enough in a couple weeks that probably would have started acting up as well. Add in the cast of the rental car for a week and are out over $600.

Over the weekend I developed some pain in the upper left of my mouth. It really didn’t feel too bad, until this morning when the pain increased to about a 3 of 10. I though maybe it was time to see a dentist. There were 10 listed that were in our dental insurance network. Several were a little too far away so I eliminated them. There were two practically next door to each other, not far from our favorite grocery store, so I called one of them hoping I could get to see the doctor this week. The receptionist said, “We just had a cancellation for 4:00 PM. Would that do?” I said, “See you then.” They took x-rays. After the dentist took a look them, she then poked and scraped and prodded around the two bad teeth. She said’ “I don’t see anything obvious, maybe it is just a sinus infection.” She prescribed an antibiotic and said if it doesn’t clear up in a week, call me. Then she added, “And call me if it does work.”

We have had a fairly mild November so far here, but things are about to get real with highs in the 40’s and lows in the upper teens to low 20s. And next week leading up to Thanksgiving there is a good chance of a bit of the white stuff.

Quick Sat/Sun Recap

  1. We spent some of Saturday morning standing around in the chilly Washington rain watching the nieces play around in a skate park.
  2. We spent most of Saturday afternoon standing around in the chilly Washington rain watching the nephew and the nieces burn American flags.
  3. We spent a bit of Saturday night eating generic pizza with the whole fam damily while one niece had a football party and the nephew and Troop 28 celebrated the flag retirement ceremony.
  4. We spent most of today driving home from Granite Falls, Washington.
  5. We spent almost all of the afternoon and most of the evening watching the NFL on TV
For items 1 & 2 see my Instagram feed @mistermiata. Re: #4, we did what we used to do when coming back from Florida, about the same distance, leave at 5:00 AM on a Sunday, making the trip bearable.
 

16,000 Gallons of Water Spray

This morning we got up early in Longview, WA to finish our run to Granite Falls to visit family. It was dark and raining which in itself doesn’t make for a fun drive, but add in a very busy highway with trucks on I-5 and it was miserable. The spray coming off all the 18-wheelers felt like about 16,000 gallons.

An hour or so into the drive, even though it was getting light, we decided to get off the interstate and loop around Olympia, Tacoma and Seattle on two-lane roads even if it meant it took us a couple hours longer.

Just outside Yelm, Washington the Note passed through the 16,000 mile mark.

On That Note

Our rental vehicle for the week is a 2019 Nissan Versa Note. It has a little over a hundred horsepower and it is mated to a CVT which makes it seem even slower than that. Yikes. The interior is noisy and, at least on this particular car, there is some real prevalent wind noise and air intrusion on the drivers side. They claim it has great gas mileage, but I’ll let you know.

There is a lot of space in this thing, compared to the Mini, it has a ton of rear leg room and two more doors to get you into the back seats. I suppose that if you wanted an inexpensive, yet new, car this would fit the bill. I just hope you don’t want the hatchback version, because for 2020 they have stopped making them.

Wednesday the 13th

We got up at 5:30 this morning to go to the YMCA (The best time for lap swimming is between 5 and 7 AM.) When Donna went to turn on the bathroom light, it didn’t come on. She used the hallway light as a guide to do her stuff. When I went in I thought it might be a burnt out bulb, but when I tried to turn on something we had plugged into the outlets where the switch was, it wouldn’t come on either. We headed off to the the Y and I’d further troubleshoot when we got back.

The poor Mini has to sit outside uncovered and that means before we can go anywhere, the windows have to be cleared of dew or frost each morning. This morning it was frost on one side and dew on the other, with the windshield it was dew that turned to frost when swiped… We got underway fine, buy a half mile or so down the road the Mini started to hesitate when I shifted. While waiting on the next stoplight to turn green the idle became sort of rough. Accelerating away and shifting into second it bogged down a bit and a giant yellow half-filled check engine light popped up in the middle of the tach. The car ran OK the rest of the way with an occasional hesitation on the 1-2 shift. On the way home it ran mostly better, but still not perfect and the light stayed off.

When we got back to the AirBnB we discovered that not only was the bathroom effected, but every kitchen outlet was not working. Including the one for the refrigerator! So we frantically texted the owner (we had his number because we had been in contact before to repair the dishwasher and fix the very annoying sticky front door.) We also messaged via the AirBnB app the host. After about 45 minutes we started getting calls, texts and messages about our issue. Eventually the owner showed up around 9 AM to start trying to solve our issue. He tried flipping breakers on and off. He tried shutting off the main breaker and turning it back on with little success. We left him physically swapping breakers around inside the box as we had that other bug-a-boo to deal with.

I had gotten a Mini service place recommendation from a fellow Y member just the other day and when I called them they said they could read the code, but wouldn’t be able to do anything today because they were slammed. So we headed over there to see what was going on. The Mini on the way over was doing well under a mile or so from our destination when it was running crummy and the half-filled light came back on. They ran the code and it came back as P0302, cylinder #2 misfire. They asked if I wanted to set up an appointment, went I said yes, they asked how about next Tuesday. Uh, OK.

It really wasn’t OK, we were planning on leaving Thursday morning to go up to Granite Falls, WA to visit the Morrison clan. Having already cancelled on them once because of the house buying stuff, we decided not to repeat it. Solution, rent a car, there is an Enterprise office in town, so we headed there after the car repair place. Bad news there too, they didn’t have any cars to rent. The good news was that they were expecting some returns by 5:00 PM, so they entered our info and said they’d give us a call.

Returning to our home away from home, we found our landlord/owner just finishing up. He finally figured out the issue, a previous tenant had decided to keep his stereo equipment in the hall closet and as a precaution he had replaced the normal outlet in there with a GFCI one and for some unknown reason it had tripped.

For the trifecta of bad news all we needed now was the the owner of our prospective house to turn down our counter offer to return some money at closing so we care afford a new roof for her old place. Sure enough around 4:00 PM our realtor emailed to say that it was a no-go. At this point we both thought maybe this was the universe telling us it was time to tuck our tails between our legs and move back to Aiken.

Well, our realtor and the sellers realtor (not wanting to lose a commission) had talked and suggested an alternate offer might work. Ask for a reduction of the house sale price to match the amount we wanted at closing.

So by the end of the day our AirBnB was back to it’s normal mediocre self, we had a rental car to do the traveling to Washington and we had made a counter-counter offer on the house.

If a Wednesday the 13th was this troublesome, I hate to think what will happen a month from now on Friday, December 13th.