It took me hours to move from the chair to the bedroom, where my laptop was plugged in. When the laptop turned out to be running slowly, I was content to wait a long time for it to freeze during restart, and then take a long time to wake up after a hard reboot. I don't have the energy to write, but then, I haven't really had it in a long time. I can clearly see what is taking up all of my attention and ATP lately, and I am pretty sure I still smell of it. I've been painting and cleaning and cursing boy cats who did bad things to the MDF baseboards in my condo. We will be replacing two of those crappy baseboards (would have done already, if the 3 1/4" size were not standard -- the big box stores sell 3 3/8 or 3 1/2), and I spent hours on the floor this afternoon with vinegar, baking soda, peroxide, and crushed dreams.
It startled to me to realize just now that it really did absorb my entire day working at the condo. Yes, we didn't leave to go over there until noon, but that was because I was trying all morning to convince myself to work on it again. We packed up a ton of stuff to keep cleaning, wasted a bunch of time in Lowe's wanting someone to explain to us where we could find the right size of baseboard, and then we toiled in Boulder for hours. It was all we could do to chew when we stopped for dinner on the way home.
Once upon a time, I imagined that we would be great house flippers. We know what we are doing, and have great taste and skill. If we were still in our 30s, it might have been possible to make money at that. We aren't kids anymore, and this is not a job for used up bodies that have more than a passing familiarity with chronic pain. (That applies to both of us, to be fair.) This condo is tiny, and it was already in pretty good shape when we started messing with it last week. The kids hadn't polished it to a gleam, but it was generally clean. We have discovered that the tradesmen who did the restoration did the laziest, crappiest job they could get away with in 2014-15. We have found window handles, heater vents, and plenty of other removable objects covered with a layer of cheap white paint. They went wild with the paint sprayer, but only enough to jack things up. So here we are two years later, "flipping" a recently restored unit, in order to get enough money to be worth our time. I am trying to get out of the business of renting to college students. I've been doing that since 2009, and while it was fine when my own kids were that age, I'm ready for one or two professionals who will want to stay in place a long time. Other than my own kids, we've gone through roommates like each condo had a revolving door. The kid who had never written a check in his life, who skipped out in the middle of the night on the eve his 3rd rent payment was due was interesting. I'm over that now. I want to play up the fact that it's biking distance to the new Google campus, and find a refugee from Silicon Valley who thinks my Boulder-level rent is a steal.
Once we are done, I will hold an open house and see who walks through. They can expect to provide references and let me run a background check. Until then, I need to go pick paint off of heat vents and hope that something actually neutralizes cat pee smell.
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