Today I got to regretfully educate a tenant that when the lease says no smoking on the premises it means no fucking smoking, not even when daughter's pothead boytoy got kicked out by his parents and he's now using daughter's bedroom as his ashtray, and doubly not so when he's actively lighting up while I'm doing their yearly walkthrough in prep for renewing the lease. It's one thing to latch on a non-party adult resident -- I think I'm pretty nice about that stuff and they were good with letting me know so I okayed it -- but it's another when he's apparently been doing this for a few months now and I already gave written notice about the smoking issue back after I followed up on the water heater repair back in January.
I technically am in my rights in throwing a three day at them on Monday and chimping the fuck out since they already had written notice of breaching the lease, but in the end I'm just going to give them an informal notice that I do not intend to renew the lease and they should make plans to move at the end of the current lease at the end of June (thank god I always do these more than 30 days out from renewal, but this one was cutting it mighty close I'll admit). I'm also normally really lax with giving back the entire deposit when a lease is over with, but this time I'm going to itemize the shit out of anything having to do with smoke/ash/whatever cleanup, because it's important enough to me that I bold that provision in my lease agreements and it's obviously not normal wear-and-tear when the agreement is being broken. Thank god this wasn't the house with the fire sprinkler system, at least, I guess, or else I'd probably be having joyous fun with insurance companies instead by now.
Now I get to do the song and dance of getting the ducks in a row so I can try and have the place on the rental market hopefully by mid-July, totally my (not) faaaaavorite time of the year to be showing a house to prospective tenants. I'm not keen on a full house carpet replacement or anything, since I just had one put in when this set came in three years ago, so barring something horrifically defective it should be doable but it's still goddamn annoying. My lazy internal voice is telling me just do all the work and let it sit until October or so in order to get the lease renewal schedule at a time of year when it won't annoy the crap out of me, but that's saying no to a few months worth of rental income just so I don't have to sweat a little so I won't.
Wow, that turned into quite the rant. CATHARSIS!
