November 9, 2006

• Domestic Reconstruction in the Suburbs: A Tale of Renting a Home in SoCal

  The Santa Anas were blowing hot and heavily, causing the temperatures to shoot up into the 90s, and scattering the wildfires up in the foothills of the San Gabriel and the San Bernadino mountain ranges which ring the city of Los Angeles and the South Bay. The top was down on my convertible, and I drove home from work, expecting our housing project to be a mess, as it had been over the past two months, owing to the new owner’s plans to add a second bathroom to each of the four three bedroom, single bath houses that comprise the project. He had been talking about these plans since the first day I met him, right after he bought the project from the previous owner, who had been trying to sell the place unsuccessfully for the past five years.

  
  

  I met Anwerd, the latest owner, after I had called the previous owner because of the small problem of a broken water main which had been pouring water into my dining room from the broken pipe in the concrete pad below the room which served as the house’s foundation. The previous owner had sighed, glad that these problems weren’t his anymore. Anwerd had come over with his handyman, Frank, and inspected the damage to the rug. Anwerd had been told that all four houses had recently been replumbed, which was a bald faced lie. This was not the first time the old pipes had given way, and although Frank did set to work to give us a “temporary fix”, Anwerd toured my home with me, and gave me a rundown of all the pie in the sky building projects he wanted to accomplish. Tear out the hall carpet. Put in new linoleum in the kitchen. Add another bathroom. I nodded and “um-hmmmed”, and told him the current problem was that water was filling up the dining room.

  
  

  Anwerd is one of those Middle Eastern guys of questionable descent. I think he’s Arabic. Perhaps Armenian. He bought the double duplex in which we and three other families live for 1.2 million dollars, and immediately, with my phone call complaining about the broken water main, realized he’d been had. He had planned to move his own family into one of the units as soon as it became available. But he didn’t want only a single bathroom. Hence his plan to remodel all the units, and add bathrooms to the master bedrooms, which are at the front of each house. This would entail “moving” the front door five feet into the middle of the living room wall, busting a hole in the bedroom wall, installing a door, and building a bathroom on the outside of the house with entry from the master bedroom. Grand plan. I figured he would begin building bathrooms when the buildings became empty. Each of the other three houses had a farily regular turnaround. My roommate and I had occupied our house, which was supposed to be temporary housing for each of us, for almost 12 years.

  
  

  As I maneuvered the convertible through the long driveway that accesses the housing project, I saw Anwerd and Frank, plus the two other day laborers who were doing the work, mulling around what had become a full blown construction site. It was hot, they were sweaty, and I was flabbergasted, and a little impressed at their progress. That day almost a year ago when Anwerd had talked to me about building bathrooms while I was standing in a puddle of water in my dining room had long passed. There was a vacancy in the middle house two months ago, and immediately the “construction crew” had punched a hole in the front wall, installed a door, laid foundation for  a new bathroom, moved the earth in front of the house, ran new piping both for input and output to the street, and started to construct new walls and roof for the bathroom. My roommate had vehemently opposed adding a new bathroom to our unit. Watching the progress on the vacant unit, which didn’t mind if the workers put up temporary plyboard in place of walls for the night because nobody lived in the house, both of us had cringed and hoped that Anwerd was not going to try to do the same to our house while we were living there.

  
  

  The owner told my roommate during a conversation in which I was not present, that the progress on the new bathroom for the middle house was going slowly, because he had to replumb the whole house. Again, he had been led to believe that had already happened before he bought the place, but he found himself stuck with the added expense of replumbing the kitchen as well as the adding the pipes for a bathroom. To add insult to injury, when his high school age children saw the area in which he wanted to move his family, from a much more upscale area in West Torrance, they rebelled, and his  plans for moving his family, and selling his previous more expensive home were now dashed. He accepted the next rental application with trepidation, and found himself in a bit of a bind. For some reason, the newer  tenants in the first house agreed to let him install a new bathroom on their unit. Learning from the mistakes made installing the first bathroom, which took almost two months, he had begun by pouring the concrete for the foundation on the second unit, and would punch the holes in the front walls last, while the tenants were away from the house. As I drove up the driveway to my spot, in which one of the pickups on the site had to move in order for me to park, work was being done on both of the front houses. I sighed heavily as Anwerd directed traffic so that I could park in my own parking space. I nodded to Anwerd. They were actually moving ahead quite rapidly.

  
  

  As I walked back to my own home, situated in the back of the complex, I noticed Frank wheeling a wheelbarrow full of concrete into my front yard. “Well, you’re next” he declared.

  
  

  “W-W-Wait a minute, Frank” I somewhat stammered the words. “My roommate told me Anwerd wouldn’t begin work on our house for another year. Joel is threatening to move out when work starts on our unit. He doesn’t want to live in a construction zone.”

  
  

  “Well, you’d better talk to Anwerd” Frank smiled as he lifted the bags of concrete out of the wheelbarrow and positioned them to the side of Joel’s bedroom wall.

  
  

  I opened the front door to our house, lay my mail down, hung up my hat, and then went out to the front house to confront Anwerd, who always had a smile on his face. Exasperated, I asked him if he was actually going to begin work on our unit. We began what turned out to be a rather long conversation, and we walked back to my unit as we talked. The expense was a bit more than Anwerd had expected when beginning, even though he was doing the work himself, and the added embarrassment at not being able to sell his own home because his children didn’t want to go to Narbonne High, was depleting his pocketbook. He figured that he was learning from his mistakes on installing the first bathroom, he was almost ready to put up the walls on the second, had rented a cement mixer and a trash container, and just figured that doing the other units in stages, would save him in the long run, since the material had already been purchased.

  
  

  I didn’t really mind that his schedule was malleable, and he was changing his mind all the time. I’m somewhat tolerant of the fact that things don’t always work out as planned. I was a bit upset that this was “happening” and Joel had already threatened that he would move out when and if work began on our unit. Anwerd and Joel had not spoken together since Joel was told the work would not be performed for over a year from now.

  
  

  Anwerd assured me that none of the work would bother Joel and I, who both work days. First the bathroom foundation and plumbing would be accomplished, and the door wouldn’t be moved, which entailed punching holes in the walls, until last, and then it would be done quickly while we were at work. We wouldn’t be disturbed. Promises Promises.

  
  

  “Have you talked to Joel?” I asked.

  
  

  “No”

  
  

  “Well, do you see him?” I might be asleep by the time he comes home, as I arise at about 3 am every morning and am usually in bed early. I figured I’d make sure I was awake when he came home this evening.

  
  

  “I’ll talk to him” Anwerd promised.

  
  

  “If Joel moves, then I have to move. I don’t want to move. I don’t have the money saved to move, and wintertime is coming.” Even though the Santa Anas give us a “false summer” late into October, soon it will get cold, and rain might start falling. The last two years have been exceedingly rainy, which is not “normal” for California, but who knows what will happen this winter?

  
  

  “Oh, I don’t want you to move”, the owner clucked. We pay the rent on time every month. Owners like good longtime tenants, which are a regular source of income.

  
  

  “Anwerd, I don’t want to move, either. It’s my roommate. He’ll force me to move if he does. He’ll be angry at this. If he moves out tomorrow, I’m in a bind. Would you please assure him that we won’t be disturbed.

  
  

  “Yes, Yes. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.” We parted ways on the pathway leading to my front door. I went into the house. Anwerd retreated to the  construction zone. While we had been talking, Frank had piled a new front window and the large plastic water pipes for our new bathroom outside Joel’s bedroom wall.

  
  

  When Joel  came home a few hours later, I felt as if breaking the news to him would be similar to giving him bad news like if one of his cats had died. I was hesitant a bit, but I gave him the complete story after he settled in. My roommate is a procrastinator, and he is the type of person to say he’s going to quit smoking for six months before he actually does (and then he’s smoking again a month later.) He moved his mountain bike into the house from the garage two years ago during the summer, as he was going to start bicycling again after his first round of chemo, but the bike has stayed where he put it, gathering dust and cobwebs, which he never clears away.

  
  

  When he first threatened to move, he had just received his inheritance from his mother after she passed away. He had money, and was going to buy a house. For over six months, I was on pins and needles, not knowing if one day I was going to come home from seeing a movie on a Saturday and have him announce that he would start moving out the next day. I need preparation for a move. I don’t know how or what he was planning, just that he wanted to move.

  
  

  I complain about Joel, but I was all set to be his caregiver if the chemo treatments had done more damage. I don’t like living with him, and moved myself to the back part of our house three years ago to remove myself from him when he started smoking in the living room, which I can’t stand. But I tolerate his presence because splitting the rent on a $1500.00 a month house is about all I can afford to do right now. Trying to find new housing in Southern California, especially for a single renter, is quite expensive. I’ve seen studio apartments rent for upwards of $1200.00 a month. Since I never know if he’s serious or not about actually doing anything he says he’s going to do, since procrastinators “plan” for long periods of time, and seldom “act”, I qradually realized that he was not really serious about moving (I don’t think he could get financing, or even tried to get financing, even with the inheritance.) until Anwerd started talking about adding bathrooms.

  
  

  It looks as though the construction is not going to really hurt us that much, and the “new” bathroom would be Joel’s, since I made the mistake of giving him the master bedroom when we moved in 12 years ago. I retired to bed that evening, knowing that Joel would be having a conversation with the owner, and hopefully he would not move away, leaving me in the precarious position of maybe becoming one of Los Angeles’ vast population of homeless.

  
  

  The next day, when I returned home from work, the walls of the second house’s bathroom were already in place, and the door had been installed. If this would have been our house, which is scheduled as “next” then we wouldn’t even have seen the holes punched in the walls. We would only see the completion. This looked good to me. But I didn’t know if Joel had talked to Anwerd at this point, since I come home a lot earlier than he does.

  
  

  At around 6:30 pm, Joel opened the front door, which I heard from my “living room”, the “media room”, a converted bedroom in the back of the house. I immediately opened my door, and greeted him. “Did you talk to Anwerd?”

  
  

  “No”. As if it were normal for him not to have spoken to him.

  
  

  “Well, did you try to get in touch with him?”

  
  

  Again, “No”. Joel is not one of those people who act, he only reacts, so he began to tell me that he was really upset that the owner, who has every right to do whatever he pleases with his property no matter how long we’ve lived there, was actually starting to build the add ons. Yet he would not try to get in touch with the owner himself. I asked Joel outright. “Are you going to move, then? Do I start looking for new lodging?”

  
  

  My procrastinating roommate stood silent for a few moments. “I can’t move out now. I don’t want to move while he’s doing the work” I could hardly conceal my glee. At least I had another couple of month, and then even though I know the rent could be raised, possibly to $2000.00 a month, which I still can’t afford, perhaps the owner will “work with me” as he had promised when I had my talk with him on the front lawn the day earlier.

  
  

  A day passed, the Santa Anas howled hotter than ever. More and more concrete, two by fours, and copper piping piled up and was installed in the front house, whose tenants are silently accepting the fact that the owner is adding a new bathroom to their unit. I haven’t even seen too much of them since this ordeal began.

  
  

  Now it’s early moring, the air is cool from night. The birds are chirping, and I’m backing my car out of the driveway, swerving around the various cars and SUV’s owned by the tenants. The first two houses are in a state of construction, which looks to be nearly finished. I’ve been promised that I will not have to live without water. No holes will be punched in the walls while I’m home. I’m all for the renovation, which will also see my kitchen replumbed, and hopefully new linoleum laid in the kitchen, which has been torn up since the water main broke. Joel is upset, but he’s realized that you can’t “move” just because you say you’re going to do so. I don’t know if he’s even looked for other lodging like I have. Right now it’s calm and quiet. Right now I still have a home to which I can return. The plants and trees in front of my unit were torn out yesterday.

  
  

  I wonder what I will find when I return this evening.

  
  

  The day is dawning and the Santa Ana winds are about to blow anew.

  • 10:33 am
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