Accommodation

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One Day In the Life of an Apartment Complex Manager

In which I try to sum up a fairly typical day for me…

9:55, I come into the office. I check for mail (ah, a payment from a tenant and keys from a moveout). I check my fax machine for a security patrol report and glance over it while I listen to the messages. I open my inbox and then glance at my list of to-dos. Ah, I need a couple of purchase orders, so I call head office for those, then I call for a repair on an exterior plug a tenant drove over and an oven that won’t turn on. I’m promised repairs on both by the end of the day.

My cleaning gal is in today, so I see how she’s doing and then I go to the vacated apartment to do a move-out inspection. A tenant comes with her rent and we catch up while I prepare a receipt. Next, I get a set of keys ready for my flooring guy.

Around 11:00, a couple of potential tenants, brothers, come in with the missing piece of the puzzle for their application. I approve them and send them off to get their damage deposit and first month’s rent while I prepare their lease. I’m interrupted when the father of another applicant comes in to find out what can be done to get his son approved. I have a brutally honest chat with him as I am leery of the candidate and the father puts my mind at ease.

It’s past noon by this point and I know I won’t get a lunch break, so I run upstairs to get last night’s leftover pizza, some juice, and a container of yoghurt, then munch as I finish up the lease for the two brothers. My maintenance guy comes in while I’m doing that and we shoot the breeze in between my getting updates on the work he’s done since yesterday, what he will get done today, and what I’ll still have on the list for him tomorrow.

The two brothers return and I accept money from them, sign receipts, and walk them through the lease. They are fresh off the boat from Kenya and have poor English, so this takes a little longer than usual, but I’m used to it since the majority of my tenants do not speak English fluently.

I finish up with them and my flooring guy arrives, so I give him the keys to the suite in which he’s putting new flooring tiles. The floors were actually done recently, but the last two tenants in that suite were terrible and wrecked everything. I’ve convinced the company to spend a little money on the suite to get a better quality of tenant and was able to compromise on new flooring and counters in the kitchen.

Moments later, the appliance guy arrives, so I take him to the suite with the problem oven. Thankfully, the stove is fixable; I’ve ordered enough appliances this week!

I return to the office to find the other candidate waiting with his father. They finally have everything I want, so I accept money from them and go over the lease. As we’re finishing up, I see another tenant waiting outside to pay his rent. He comes in and we chat for a bit. Done, I close up to bring tenants on the other side of the complex the new key for their mailbox and a rent receipt.

I’m back in the office just in time to get a call from another tenant moving in this week wanting to confirm that we can make an appointment for Friday evening for signing his lease and doing the walk-through on his place. So much for getting an early start to the weekend!

I do some bookkeeping and prepare a deposit and as I finish up, the previous manager comes in to see how I’m doing. We chat for two minutes and are interrupted by a tenant who comes in the rest of her rent for January. I have had issues with her and she knows that she has lost any chance of leniency with me. I chastise her again that her disorganization has cost her a substantial amount in late fees. She is one of those people who needs that sort of kick in the pants; I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t productive.

The previous manager and I chat for a few minutes then she heads out. By this time, my flooring guy is done. I head over to check his work but am interrupted when I see people hauling construction materials out of their truck and placing them in our dumpster. I inform them that the dumpster is private property and that I could have them charged with trespassing. They couple is suitably chagrined, thank me for letting it go this time, and promise to never do it again. My flooring guy says that I handled that well and that he couldn’t do my job. I reply that I never would have guessed I could do my job either!

The flooring looks great, so I sign off, then I return to the office only to find my electricians waiting for me. I tell them where to go and head out to meet them (it’s faster to cross the complex on foot than to go around the block by vehicle) so I can give them access to the boiler room where the electrical panel is located. I make sure to grab a pen because my cleaning gal is about ready to clock out and she’s going to need me to sign her time card. Sure enough, I cross her path and she has her time card in hand.

It’s 3:30 by this time and I need to go to head office, but I decide to hang out for a bit in case the electricians need me. I see them pull out by four, my usual quitting time, so I pack up and go to head office to drop off my deposit and move out report. When I get back to the complex, I remember that I forgot to fax my maintenance report for the next day, so I go back to the office to do that before going home.

This was a busy, but very easy, day in that I had no conflicts with tenants nor any nasty issues to deal with. I do promise to reveal some of those nasty issues in a little while. 🙂

(*with all due credit to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for the title of this post)

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Vinyl Flooring Is Great

Remember how The Apartment’s tile floor broke my French press recently? These are not ceramic tiles but rather the kind I dub to be school tiles. I’m not sure what they are made of, but they are 12″x12″ and very thin.

Anyway, I was in Miranda today rearranging some things on the top shelf of the cabinet above the sink when I dropped this mug:

(this cabinet doesn’t look like that anymore!)

I broke another mug this week while rummaging in the rig (hint: do not hit the handle of one mug with the handle of another), but this one would have annoyed me. It has a ceramic lid, so it keeps beverages hot longer and it’s also great for taking outside. Anyway, I caught the mug, but the lid hit the counter then jumped onto the floor where it bounced twice before landing safely. It made such an awful racket that I was certain it was a goner, but nope!

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A Touch of Cabin Fever

The week has been bitter cold, with day-time temperatures dipping into the mid negative 20s, with the windchill nearing -40. I don’t even want to get into the nighttime temperatures! I went for a quick walk on Monday afternoon, but heeded the frostbite warning the last two days and limited my outdoor time to running around between my buildings. I’ve also had a huge transcription project the last three days that ate up the rest of my days. So I haven’t had much of a change of scenery for four days. Today, it’s a balmy-feeling -18, so I’ve decided to walk the two blocks to Montana’s for dinner!

In the RV, having to do several days of hard work with no real opportunity to go outside hasn’t made me feel claustrophobic. I get to prepare and have my meals in another room and at the end of the day, I can retire to the front room to decompress before moving to the loft. In The Apartment, I have to stare at the same four walls all day. It’s slowly becoming an insufferable situation. While I am thrilled to be in a warm place this week, I am very glad I only have about eight weeks left to go before I can move back home. This winter has proven to me that it is the number of rooms in my home, not the square footage, that determines how happily I can live there. If I had to stay on in Lethbridge in The Apartment for any longer, I would be quite content to remain there, but I would get furniture that would allow me to separate my spaces. Not that I need to think about that!

One of the things that I will doubly appreciate when I return to Miranda is the fridge. Do you housebound folks have any idea how LOUD a compression fridge is?!

In other news, a tenant must have noticed that I was working late this aftenoon and brought me a cup of tea and a slice of banana cream pie. There are perks to working here. 🙂

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Am I Glad This Week is Over!

Next week won’t be any less trying than this one has been, but at least I’ve got two days to recuperate before the next battle!

I promise to share this whole story in the spring, once it has reached some sort of conclusion. I am learning a lot about being a leader, maintaining respect while being disliked, and living with yourself when you have to make impossible decisions.

In happier news, I had another appointment with my doctor this week and he’s fairly certain he has nailed down what has been ailing me! It wasn’t easy getting him to listen to me (I’m now firmly convinced that all but three Canadian doctors have no business being in medicine since they don’t actually want to practice medicine), but he finally came to a conclusion that makes sense. If he’s right, that I am simply suffering from sleep apnea, I will rejoice! I’m waiting for the sleep clinic to call me to get the ball rolling on getting a firm diagnosis and treatment plan. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get this wrapped up by April because I’m ready to get out of here. The road’s siren call is very loud these days. 🙂

I am shocked by just how homesick and tired of this apartment I am. Living in a single room that isn’t my home is getting more and more intolerable. I am fed up with the loud refrigerator, hearing people come up the stairs, knowing that people in the hallway know what I’m listening to, and having to traipse up three flights of stairs with my groceries. All that said, I’m impressed that I’ve lasted this long before cracking. 😀

The weather is supposed to be warm on Sunday, so I aim to spend the afternoon puttering in Miranda and using my new jigsaw! There’s a home store literally across the street, so I just may find the motivation to knock a few items off my to-do list.

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My Lethbridge Winter, So Far

We are well into the end of December and thus far a Lethbridge winter has been about a gazillion times more pleasant than were any of my winters in British Columbia

We did have one cold snap of a few days, but every B.C. winter has had at least one of those. Thus far, I haven’t experienced anything that would have made me unduly comfortable in a properly prepared rig in the right place. I would have needed to be in an RV park with 30A power plus an extra 15A circuit where Miranda could have been skirted as well as sheltered from the wind.

The major difference here is that there is SUN, so the rig would have warmed up considerably inside even on the coldest of days. I went into Miranda during the cold snap where we hit about minus fifteen during the day and even with just one heater running, Miranda’s interior was well above the freezing mark so I don’t think I would have spent any more on heating here than I have in BC where I had to fight the damp.

Of course, it’s only December, but I landed here in late March last year when the weather was already much better than that on the western side of the Rockies, even with that April 1st snow storm. So we really are getting over the hump towards spring.

I frequently have to run between my buildings and not having to put on a coat is great. I just keep the heat down in the office so that I don’t experience a shock when I step outside. I wear fleece or wool and if the wind is particularly biting I’ll add a pashmina shawl. This is so much less cumbersome than what I expected; having to pull on boots and full winter gear each time I have to go outside!

As for snow, it has been negligible and has kept on melting. I decided to not get snow tires for the car and have avoided going out during inclement weather. The four season tires  I bought in Whitehorse have been more than adequate so far. I really agonized over this decision, but as the weeks marched on and I saw no need for them, I decided to spare myself the expense. If I had to drive every day regardless of the weather, then, of course, the tires would have been purchased.