Brigitte Bowers: Taking on the duties of a landlord

This is the second in a series about buying an investment property in Merced.

After signing the papers for our loan to buy a rental property, we left the bank, clutching a hefty bundle of papers in much the same way we had carried our first son home from the hospital 19 years ago, aware that we now owned something wholly unfamiliar to us.

All of those years ago, and this afternoon, we were terrified of what this monumental undertaking actually might mean in terms of our future happiness.

We are teachers, and so we are not accustomed to spending large sums of money on anything. I was afraid now, as I was in 1996 when we buckled our eldest into a car seat for the first time, that I might not be mature enough for the coming responsibilities. And everyone we know has an opinion about whether or not we should embark on this new journey of becoming landlords.

“I’d never own a rental again,” some of our friends have told us, in the same horrified tone of voice they might use for warning us against going into the methamphetamine business. “It was the worst experience of my life.”

Others have suggested that we will derive so much pleasure from landlordship that we will not stop at just one rental.

“I have five rentals,” a trusted adviser recently told me, and I was reminded of parents who enjoy their jobs so much that they produce a half-dozen children.

As we were scribbling our names on 147 pages of documents at the bank, our loan officer informed us that he has one rental, even though he is at least 25 years younger than I am, which makes me feel like an underachiever in exactly the same way I felt when I had my first son at 38.

I do not know if we will one day be the parents of multiple rentals, but if our history is any indication of our future, then we will limit our holdings to two, just as we limited our output of progeny. My husband and I can take only so much accountability.

Though I am not sure about assuming the duties of a landlord, I have developed an emotional attachment to the rental. Somehow, I believe this building, which is supposed to be a calculated investment, is a reflection of who I am, just as I think my children represent my ideology to the world at large.

As a result, I was incapable of purchasing a rental property based solely on its potential to make my family wealthier, and my husband and I may even find that, just as our children have done for the past 19 years, our rental will make us poorer than we were before we decided to have one.

In any case, because we were determined to like the house we bought, we purchased an older home, one built in 1947, because it called out to us. It is in a flood zone, and only has one bathroom, and a good part of its square footage is an uninsulated sun room that is pretty much too cold to be habitable in winter and will undoubtedly be too hot in summer.

It is not the kind of investment a wiser person would make, but it has character – which may or may not mean it will bleed us dry over the coming years.

I like to imagine us shaping the home to our personal tastes, eventually returning the place to its original 1947 glory and adding some newer touches, even though the lovely oak floors and potential for a second bath might exist only in my fantasies.

Until we are thoroughly committed to the home, we will not know all that lies beneath its surface, just as we could not fully know our children until after we had already decided to keep them.

But for now our house is in its incipient stage – at least for us – and I have been faintly dismayed to discover that my husband and I are boasting about our new acquisition in the same way we bragged about our first child when he was still in the womb. We are boring everyone foolish enough to visit us during this time by showing them pictures of the house, revealing features from every angle.

“This is his foot!” we announced almost 20 years ago as our own parents peered at grainy images of a zygote, and then we showed the same foot over and over again to colleagues and friends because, at that time, it was our son’s only recognizable – and thus best – feature.

“This is the fireplace,” we tell our friends now. “This is what it looks like from the entryway, and here it is from the side, and this is the back of the fireplace. Of course, we don’t know yet if it’s a working fireplace,” we always add, just as we mentioned all those years ago that though our son had a foot, we couldn’t be sure it was indeed a usable foot until the baby inspection was completed.

Surely, once the escrow period is over and we find ourselves the owners of an actual piece of investment property, we will realize that we are completely at a loss as to what we should do next. When we brought our eldest son home, we decided that the best course of action, for some reason I still cannot fully explain, was to set up camp in our living room.

We made a pallet on the floor and slept there with our infant for two weeks, unwilling to move to the bedroom, possibly because we dimly remembered that was where we were when we’d gotten ourselves into such a mess in the first place.

I’m pretty sure camping out in our renter’s home will be against at least one or two laws. In any case it might be difficult to persuade renters to agree to such an arrangement. So we will have to learn to let our rental have some measure of independence, just as we have had to do with our first son.

It will be as though we raised our house at warp speed before closing escrow and are now sending it off to college, where it will probably be just fine but where we will, ultimately, have almost no control over what happens to it in our absence.

This story was originally published January 8, 2016 at 10:27 AM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: Taking on the duties of a landlord."