No Longer Landlords

On Tuesday we inspected our unit, found it in acceptable condition, and wrote our tenant three checks: one for the second half of the buyout amount we agreed to, one for the entirety of his security deposit and one for the remaining days of January. Then he handed us our keys, and left.

Seven and a half years, three tenants, bedbugs and a buyout agreement later, we are no longer landlords.

I have to admit, I felt lighter than I expected after he left. I really did not like him, and I did not like sharing part of my house with him. I’m glad he’s gone.

I don’t like how much lighter our bank accounts are. We’ve decimated our emergency fund, and we’ll be on a VERY tight budget until August when we’ll have our car paid off (we took out a three year loan but have been making extra payments on it so we only have seven months left). Once the car payments are done we’ll be in a pretty good spot, as far as our monthly finances go, but obviously we’ll need to keep a better handle on our money for a while to rebuild our emergency fund.

And of course, there is the question of what to do with the space. At this point we just don’t feel comfortable with anyone we don’t know being down there, so we’re not even going to AirBnB it. That would require buying furniture anyway, and we need to do a lot of work to ensure there aren’t still bedbugs – I would never let anyone sleep down there until I am as sure as I can be (with bedbugs, it feels like you never can be entirely sure).

So yeah. We have this space, but… it’s not currently connected to the rest of the house. We used to dream of incorporating it into our house by making it a “master suite,” but honestly I’m struggling to get excited about the idea. I used to want those extra square feet so badly, but now, after seven years of reading about minimalism, it just feels like more that we don’t really need. Mostly it just feels like more to clean.

Except it’s not just more to clean. The second bathroom would be amazing (and that one is SO MUCH BIGGER than ours, which is so tight that you can’t open or close the door if you’re using the toilet). And having an actual wall between us and our living room?! That would be incredible (our current bedroom is supposed to be the living room and the only thing separating it from our actual living room is a Japanese shade). So yes, it’s still exciting to think about that space being ours, but I’m guessing building stairs to connect the two living spaces will cost WAY more than we’ll have any time soon, so if we’re not willing to take out a HELOC, well then… I guess that space will just sit there.

It’s frustrating because space is at such a premium in this city, I hate to see it go to waste. But when the city refuses to protect homeowners who aren’t really interested in being landlords but have space to share, well then I guess we have to just sit on it.

Or live above it. Empty. For quite a while.

So yeah. It’s nice not to have a tenant anymore. It’s nice not to have to worry about when he’ll email with some cryptic request that is barely comprehensible. It’s nice not to have to wonder when he’ll be demanding we spend thousands of dollars on another bedbug treatment when he clearly takes no steps to manage the problem in the ways he can. All of that is very nice. But it’s not nice to have this source of income pulled out from under us. And it’s not nice that now are financially strapped because we had to pay someone else a considerable sum to leave our own home. None of that is nice.

I don’t know. We bought a house with an inlaw 7.5 years ago because the ones with asking prices in our budget were going for $150K more, in cash, and they didn’t have inlaw units. So when we found this one at $100K over our budget (which was only still on the market because the kids of the original owners tried to sell it without buying out the previous tenants in the inlaw unit, which left it on the market for over a month – a death knell in a city like San Francisco), we went for it because it felt like “buy this house or buy no house.” I guess in the end we should be happy because renting the unit allowed us to pay our mortgage when we made less and were spending crazy amounts on childcare (and health care!) and now we totally can afford our mortgage without a tenant, we’re only strapped because of the buyout. And I al happy, and I recognize how fortunate we are. It’s still a bummer though, and I’m working through those feelings.

{It also doesn’t hurt that our home is worth considerably more than we paid for it – Bay Area prices are always going up.}

I don’t know if I even mentioned here that our tenant accepted our buyout agreement in October. We gave him six months to leave (because he had 45 days to reneg on the agreement after he signed and we worried that if he started looking too quickly he’d decide not to leave without a protracted legal battle) and expected him to use all of those six months, but then he left in three, which still surprises me. And I didn’t want to talk about it until it was all said and done, so here we are, now, with maybe a surprise announcement…

I am trying to focus on the positives, because there are plenty. Who knows, maybe we’ll make it work incorporating the unit without stairs. My husband seems content walking through our garage and down the long hallway to get to the unit, maybe some day I’ll get there too. Who knows, maybe this summer we’ll be making the big move.

But right now, we’re just going to sit on it.