Going courtin'

Just the other day, I noticed that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was on some classic movie station. I really liked that movie, and have hummed the "Sabin Women" song more than a hundred times, complete with the knee slap. I can still name the brothers, and the baby, but I can't remember any of the women's names. There just wasn't a rhyme or reason to remember.

Not that that had much to do with my week, and going to court. I was glad to get it over with. No matter how prepared you are, there are always those doubts or fears that the judge or the plaintiff's attorney will ask you a question that you have no clue on. So we went over the material time and time again, and familiarized ourselves with time lines, work orders and legal agreements until we were sick of em'!

The tenant of our nasty house began to complain about a smell that was coming from her pipes back in April, just as I was beginning my new job. I placed a work order for the property and the drain in question was in a bathroom. There was a pea trap missing, so the handyman put one in. Several more calls, several more weeks and we put pea traps on every single pipe, but the tenant could still smell something bad. After 8 weeks of this, she mentioned that under her house was wet. Well, now. We had just gone through a very wet rainy season, so I told her to watch it for a couple of weeks to see if it was drying out. Didn't hear from her at all, until the property manager emailed her to see how things were going, and she mentioned it was still very wet. At that point I made a call to a friend of mine, who is a stellar plumber, and told him what was happening. He told me, based on the information about the pea traps and wet ground, that there was probably a sewage leak under the house and no plumber would touch it without a bio-hazard clean up first.

I called a couple of companies to get estimates for cleaning the underneath mess, and we begin to set up a place and time to move the tenant out of the house, temporarily, and clean and repair whatever plumbing issues were under the house. Three times we offered her a home larger than what she was in, pool and moving costs to and from the temporary house. Three times she said "yes" and then she said, "no". Finally, we had to pull all the offers from the table when she began to use the phrase 'I spoke to an attorney'. She quit paying rent, so we then had to post a 3 day notice and then we got a call from her attorney. We then posted an eviction notice and she sent us a complaint to the city for her uninhabitable home. I would agree with her, I wouldn't have lived there, at all! But she wouldn't move! The city called, talked with the boss and closed the case. We told him we were trying to fix the problem, we offered to move her, pay her expenses, reduce her rent and she refused to move and we were not able to perform the repairs while she was living there.

So, we then get a court case sent to us from her attorney stating a case number and docs. We began to prepare with all our evidence. Boy do we have evidence! Nothing like having everything in writing! We get all the ducks in a row, and her paper work comes back that we are going to civil court, not small claims, and she will be pro per. What a weirdo! Civil court is where you want to have an attorney present to try your case.

We arrive bright and early for court, go through the screening process to enter the court house, and by the way don't ever stop in front of the courthouse to drop any one off. That is a no-no! We find our courtroom, and sit down with our binders of evidence, waiting for the attorney to show up. When he gets there, he reads the brief, looks at our evidence, asks if the tenant is here, which we say 'not yet' and he heads into the court room to check in. When he came out, he asked again if she is there and we don't see her anywhere. He tells us were are first on the docket and in we go. The tenant hasn't come, the judge hears the case and awards us $4500 and a win. We will probably never collect on it, but she does have a judgement against her as well as an eviction. These are bad things to have follow you around.

So, court was interesting, albeit a bit scary going downtown, I hate going downtown. The judgement was fair, unpaid rent, legal fees and court costs. It paid to be prepared.

Now it's back to normal, and we are moving forward with getting the house repaired. We went out after court to look at the property and the tenant had moved, according to the neighbor, last week. It wasn't too messy, but there is a lot of work needed to make it rent ready again.