9 - Maintenance

Just like the home you live in you need to have a comprehensive consistent plan in place to maintain your property regardless of tenants.  One has to have an understanding of what breaks and how, keeping specific tools and materials on hand even if you plan on hiring someone else to do the work.

Familiarization with common issues that occur take you a long way into treating common problems as part of the process not part of a pain.  

Issues are generally as follows:

Plumbing: water supply lines, faucets, tub faucets, shower-heads. The water flowing through these will corrode or contaminate.

Everything has stuff flowing through it.  As a property owner your primary job is to keep stuff flowing through the pipes, from water supply to electricity supply stuff flows through the pipes and your goal is to make sure these lines do not get blocked, do not leak and do not get overloaded. 

Do your own inspections. If you have a pair of eyes and fingers to touch you can do most of what you pay others to do.  Too many TV shows try to pretend how hard or easy it is to build and break up, from relationships, cars and buildings.  Unfortunately this has created a generation that perceives some mystery process in buying, renovating and selling a home, generally in 20 minutes or less or however long the TV show is.

Take a deep breath to understand the basics as to what runs any building and makes it work or not.  

Here is how to see your building:

• Foundation
• Shell of Frame
• Outer shell: brick, siding, stucco
• Inner shell: Sheetrock
• Plumbing
• Electrical
• Mechanical

What causes the biggest ongoing issues with being a landlord is usually plumbing.  It appears to be the number one reason people avoid getting into landlordism.

Plumbing and how to avoid jeans that fall in the cracks.

Plumbing is easy.  Plumbing having to do with water supply and waste consists of generally two parts: Water supply lines and sewer or waste lines.  That is it!

Drainage plumbing consist of small pipes in your house that lead to bigger pipes which tie into the city street or sewer system.  The pipes above a sink or toilet let air in from above, so whatever goes down into the pipes can easily flow further down.    Along the way, some of the pipes are shaped like a U so the smells of waste don’t come back up and welcome you when you are brushing your teeth.

Why sinks “back up” and how to clog the plumbing.

Pour grease or fat of any kind down the sink.  Oil and water do not mix.  For some reason, some people think they do mix when they get poured down the sink or toilet.  What happens is when grease or oil is poured down the sink it gets trapped in the trap, (the U-shaped piping) and just stays there.  After a while enough stays there and now your tenant suddenly says “Oh no!! The sink clogged itself up!”

Hair, and more hair.  As with the grease, for some reason tenants think that their hair disappears once it goes down the sink. It doesn’t of course!  Hair goes to join the grease/fat/makeup with oils in it down there in the P-trap and they have a party!  There is never enough water to flush out the caked oil reinforced with hair so you get the call “I didn’t do nuthin...ever! It’s all clogged up!”

Foreign objects / hard objects: Usually metal, plastic or other bits and pieces get stuck when they fall into the drainpipes.  These often form a trap and as hair or grease come on down, they check-in but don’t all checkout.

The three C’s: Cat litter, Cigarette butts and Condoms form the worst of the worst havocs on any plumbing system. You cannot avoid them, but you can have a special page to the lease that specifically itemizes these and other sanitary products that some confuse with being flushable.  As one seasoned plumber once said, “If you can’t chew it don’t flush it”

Water supply lines: these are your cold and hot water lines that bring water into the property.  

Common plumbing maintenance issues – what and how to repair.

Faucets, tub faucets, shower heads. Pick them up on sale when they show up. The water flowing through these will corrode or contaminate and are usually easy to change.

The insides of the toilet: Flappers: inexpensive to buy, 3 minutes to change.  When you get the water flowing continuously it is usually the flapper that got hard and doesn’t go down the way it should.

Main guts of the toilet insides: The “mechanical system” of the toilet is essentially a valve and a mini pump that when you flush allows water to drop into the toilet while letting the water supply lines open up and refill for the next flush.  This is a little harder to change and requires turning off the water supply valve, draining the water in the big container in the back of the toilet, and changing it out.  It is not usually very hard to do and does not require many tools.

Kitchen sink drama: Leaks.  The number one culprit that causes the leak under the sink is from tenants stuffing stuff under the sink, from grocery plastic bags, containers, body parts to chicken parts.  You name it / you can smell it.  Usually an easy fix to tighten the piping back together if it is plastic.

Kitchen sink – water leaking underneath from the “basket” in the sink where the water comes in: generally the same tenant will have the same problem, and basically they did something stupid such as put something down the drain. Then they tried to use a plunger and the sink basket, (the part where the liquid goes down) will come loose at the nut that tightens it to the bottom of the sink and to the drain piping.  Happens once…your bad…happens twice…charge ‘em!

Hot water not hot or none at all.  If you have a gas hot water heater, it is usually a pilot that goes out.  If it is electric, it is the breaker that got tripped.  If the water is not getting hot enough the simplest solution is to turn the temperature of the water hotter (its in that little panel in the front…follow manufacturers instructions!!) The only other bits and pieces on a regular hot water heater are the elements that get corroded after a while and require draining then changing.  For instantaneous / tankless water heaters they either work or they don’t.  If they stop heating it usually means you hit the reset button (electronic) on the unit or on the remote thermostat that connects to the heater.

Dishwashers – Some tenants think when you put something down the drain the object will magically disappear.  They think the same with dishwashers and somehow they think a chunk of glass from the cheap wine glass that smashed that they put in incorrectly in the dishwasher will magically melt in the water and go down the drain.  Just like their security deposit.  Not so much!  

When a dishwasher clogs up with water at the bottom one or both of these things happened: 

1) Whatever the dishwasher tried to pump through the little hose got stuck in the hose and is right behind or under the dishwasher or stuck at the disposal under the sink or 

(2) The dishwasher hose got squeezed somewhere and stuff has now built up and voila! Clog city! 

The solution with both is to carefully unscrew the dishwasher connection right under the counter and ease it all out to get to the hose.  Replace the hose at the dishwasher to the drain / at the sink disposal.  Remember to disconnect / turn off any breakers / electric power source to both disposal and dishwasher.