Meet the Landlady

I didn’t plan to become a landlady. Does anyone? 

A landlady is such a untrustworthy creature, a lipsticked lady who slips arsenic in the tea, a lovesick widow who stalks the young men who rent from her, a shrieking shrew with curlers in her hair, or something else mean or pathetic.

At least, that’s how landladies are shown in books and movies.

Becoming a landlady was the last thing on my mind until one day when I was 32 I noticed how much rent I was paying my landlord. And what was he doing for me?

I could fix my own toilet, thank you.

Why, I should be paying myself rent!

Now the wheels were turning. If I owned a small apartment building, say with 3 units, I could rent out two units and live in the third rent-free. I could quit my teaching job! I could spend all my time writing!

That’s all I really wanted to do: write. I wanted to write exquisite short stories for the New Yorker. I wanted to write witty and insightful newspaper columns. Most of all, I wanted to write a novel.

So, I poured my life savings into a down payment and bought this 3-family Victorian apartment house next to a college campus.

The rents did not cover all the expenses of fixing up the place. But it was great house, and I wrote a story about it for Old-House Journal.

A few years later, my tenant Abbie and and I decided we needed to do something about the noisy neighbors across the street.

They blasted music all hours.

Also, they had tattoos and a pet python.

So, pooling our resources, Abbie and I bought their house.

 After we got rid of the noisy tenants and fixed up the place, I got restless. The neighborhood was looking shabby. Rusty cars parked in mud puddles on the front lawn of the brick building next door.

My friend Pat agreed with me—the view was intolerable.  So we took out loans and bought the place.

The brick building had six apartments. It took several years to make them habitable. And  once we did, we weren’t satisfied because the rest of the neighborhood still looked shabby. 

Pat thought we could boost our property values if we bought the Dutch Colonial style apartment building at the end of the block.

We took out another equity loan.

While I was at it, I picked up a rattly little cottage on the adjoining lot.

The the place had none of the charm or appeal of our other building, but I was on a roll.

I pulled off the vinyl siding to find a jewel. 

I left my long-time apartment and made the cottage my home. I launched a Web site called  PrettyApartments.com. The rental business was humming. Better yet, I was writing!

I wrote about architecture for About.com and house styles for Realtor.org. Those jobs led to two books on interior design,The Healthy Home and The Stress-Free Home.

For a couple wonderful years, I  wrote a monthly column, The Fix, for my all-time favorite magazine, House & Garden.

Then House & Garden canceled my column and  folded. (Maybe they should have kept me?)

Then, after a long illness, Pat died.

I asked myself what I’d been doing all these years.

Sure, there were books and articles, but what happened to my literary aspirations?

I traded two of the rental buildings for a condo in a converted schoolhouse.

The plan was to sell off everything, move into the condo, and write something serious. Now, at last, I could get that novel rolling. Or at least whip out a few short stories.

But instead, I found a tenant for the condo. I started eying an abandoned house across the street.

Looks like I’m a landlady for life.