Cellar Exchange Visit!

[casimendocina]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

Tree fell on your house? did I miss that? Sorry.

That's nice of you. Thanks.

I was up there yesterday looking at the extent of the damage. The tree issue is not so bad-the tiles on the roof have been fixed and the hole in the ceiling can be fixed too and it is forcing me to do something about the insulation (see cross thread to missing cellarites ). I will need to get an arborist out to do some serious lopping as there are many dead branches on very tall trees relatively close to the house.

Now I'm just venting as it is all fixable, but what was worse and I find much more difficult to accept is the mess that the house was left in. The tenant basically did a runner, leaving the key in the letterbox. Yesterday we filled a skip with the stuff left behind (bags and bags of rubbish, 3 televisions, a couch and armchairs with no cushions-WTF?, a teenage child's entire wardrobe including underwear-WTF again?, new expensive sunglasses, shoes in perfectly good nic, silverware, old children's toys, half opened packets of food, a mattress etc...etc..). Clarification here: the stuff that is in good order will be donated to charity.

The carpet was absolutely putrid-i.e. cream carpet turned black; I don't think it had been vacuumed in the whole 18 months that she'd been there. The curtains in the backroom had obviously been flapping out the backdoor when it was raining and had dirty water marks in the bottom half. The fireplace hadn't been cleaned out and I think she'd been burning plastic in there as plastic wrappers on the surrounding bricks. Luckily, it's not my responsibility, but there was also a $3000 unpaid electricity bill and who knows how many other unpaid bills.

We'll be getting another skip and putting the rest of the rubbish in there early in the week. I am used to mess (I grew up in a very messy house), but this is/was the kind of stuff that you see on tabloid "news" programs (i.e. Today Tonight). It's also where I am very, very grateful that I have landlord's insurance and that it's my holidays so that I have time to actually deal with it without having to delegate to my folks/friends. I'll be up there again today cleaning the bathroom and kitchen. The carpets, curtains, walls have to wait until the insurance assessors come in.