The House On Saint Andrew Street

My previous post was about my dad’s laundry business. He invested his money and a lot of sweat equity but ultimately the business failed. However, that didn’t end his dream of making money with his own successful business, and it wasn’t long before dad tried a new business venture. This time his inspiration was taken from a book titled “How I Made A Million Dollars In Real Estate – In My Spare Time.” (Really.)

The gist of the book was this: you buy an old house – a “fixer-upper” in sound condition but in need of minor repairs. Because it needs repair work, you can negotiate a good deal on the price of the house. You make the repairs, rent out the property, and you have an asset producing a revenue stream. You then sell (or trade) the property for a larger property, or multiple properties, and do the same thing with them. And so on and so on until you’re a real estate tycoon.

So dad bought an old house in a nearby city. It would become known in the family as “the house on Saint Andrew Street”, and it was most definitely a fixer-upper. I was a teenager and I learned a few things about rental property, house repairs, and government bureaucracy.

The house had two floors and dad rented out each floor separately. Who do you suppose wants to pay rent for rooms in an old house located in a not-so-good neighborhood? People with little money, mostly. Collecting rent was an ordeal. Every month, tenants wanted to pay a portion of their rent with a promise to pay the rest next month. And every month they would get farther behind on the rent until dad had to evict them. The first time dad evicted a tenant, he gave him 30 days notice to pay or leave. When he didn’t pay, dad asked the sheriff to move him out. The sheriff said he couldn’t make the tenant move unless he was given 3 days notice. Dad pointed out he had given him 30 days notice, which is even better than 3 days. The sheriff said that wasn’t good enough – “the law says 3 days, not 30 days”, so dad went back to the house and put a new eviction notice on the tenant’s door. This time it was for 3 days.

It seemed every tenant would wreak damage to his apartment before leaving. They punched holes in walls, kicked out windows (“the room was hot”), clogged toilets with kitchen waste (“taking out garbage is a hassle so flush it instead”). Dad and I were frequently at the house on Saint Andrew Street to make repairs. I hated that house.

I especially hated repairing the old galvanized plumbing that rusted from the inside out. Removing a leaky pipe or fitting would inevitably break an adjoining pipe or fitting that had rusted to the point of failure and was waiting for the slightest extra stress to fail.

One summer, dad decided to renovate the upper floor by removing all the plaster and wood lath and replacing it with drywall. He enlisted me (I was 16) and my brother Ken (he was 11) to do most of the grunt work. We took hammers and pry bars to the walls and ceilings; we broke the plaster and pried off the lath. Then we shoveled the plaster and lath into a large steel washtub. Full of plaster, the tub was heavy and required two of us to carry it. My brother and I carried the tub to the stairwell, carried it down the stairs to the first floor, carried it through the front door out onto the porch, carried it down the porch steps to the yard, carried it around the side of the house and to the back yard, then to a ravine at the far end of the back yard, and that was where we dumped the contents of the tub. Then we walked back to the house, up the stairs, and filled the tub again. At first I counted the trips we made to the back yard ravine. After 200 trips, I quit counting.

When the plaster was finally gone, dad and I hung drywall. We hung drywall on every wall and every ceiling on that floor of the house. We measured and cut drywall. We measured and cut holes for switches and outlets. We covered joints with joint compound and paper tape and more compound. We installed metal drywall corners and covered them with compound. And we did a lot of sanding (joint compound today is so much easier to make smooth). I tied a strip of cloth over my mouth and nose to help me breathe air that was thick with dust from sanding joint compound. Even so, it got in my nose, it got in my ears, it got in my hair. Every day was more hard work, a summer job with no paycheck. Finally came the easy part: painting the walls and ceilings. Two coats. Dad used oil-based paint and the odor of petroleum solvent was strong enough to kill brain cells. (One of my chores was buying the solvent at a gas station when we needed it.) Thinning paint with solvent, cleaning brushes with solvent, cleaning paint off my hands with solvent – it was like washing my hands with kerosene. And how was your summer vacation?

After several years of struggling to make a successful business, dad sold the house on Saint Andrew Street. By then the bottom had fallen out of the market for old houses, and he got only a fraction of what he had paid for the house. If some branch of my family has a coat-of-arms, I’m sure you will find blazoned on it the phrase “Buy high and sell low.” It is the way of my people.