Damned absentee landlord

Absentee landlords can be a pain in the wretched butt. So now I have my next door neighbor and his landlord at each other’s throats and I support the tenant. Landlord is mad at both of us. Why? If I have to replace the stupid fence that the wind blew over, I want a 3 foot high picket. I do not want a 4 foot picket which would stick up a foot above the rest of the 3 foot picket fencing. Why does he want to install the 4 foot picket fencing? Why...because he has a friend who has some extra....blah, blah, blah. Replace old fence with old fence on the cheap and charge me brand new prices? I don’t think so.

It’s times like this that I wish I still had a truck. I’d just go get in it, drive to the fencing place, buy what I wanted, and bring it home. End of story. But I don’t have a truck any more. So I trusted the landlord to do what we’d agreed to do. Only, he lied to me tonight. He told me that he’d checked with the fencing place and they told him they are out of 3 foot high picket fencing. All they had was 4 foot picket fencing.

I went next door to talk with the tenants. Told them I absolutely refuse to put in a 4 foot high fence and they should be aware of that if the other guy tries to pull something while I’m not around. The tenant said he had checked with the fencing place a day or so ago and they had plenty of 3 foot fencing. He also added that ‘a little bird’ told him that the landlord has a friend with a load of stacked picket fencing and it happens to be 4 feet high.

You know, this sort of thing frosts my cookies.

The tenant said he’d hop in his truck tomorrow morning and go get the fence himself. And he will also replace the fence that runs across the front of my property if I want him to. “Wouldn’t take very long,” he said. I like these people. They are really, really nice and very generous with their time. And very conscientious about how their place looks. I wish they’d buy it.