analog_kidd

There's an emotional aspect to renting your "home", as in a place you have raised kids, had Christmas at, etc. It's difficult to see someone else living there. We recently moved to a new home, and briefly thought about converting the old house to a rental. Neither my wife nor I could get past the idea of having to come to a repair and seeing someone else living in our home.   If it is an upscale home, with lots of nice stuff in it, then it's probably not going to be a good rental. Renters will not take as good of care as you did on the house. That pool that you took loving care of will be green and full of leaves. That beautifully landscaped showpiece backyard will be overgrown with weeds. They'll run the A/C at 60 degrees. They'll lose your garage remote. You get the idea.   Our rentals are very basic. They are comfortable, well maintained houses, but have no amenities outside of a dishwasher. I put a lot of blood and sweat into fixing them up, but at the end of the day, they are an investment and a way to make money. If a renter burned one down, I'd cash the insurance check and not shed a tear.

We have 2 rental properties, but they are right here in town, and we bought them to be rentals, so our situation is a bit different.   If I were in your situation and decided to rent it out, I think I would go with a management company. The renters won't even know you exist, they'll deal with the company. Of course the company will take probably 10% of your rent, plus you're still on the hook to pay for repairs.   If you're making $300 a month, I think I would put all of that into a savings account and get ready for a new roof / AC. Although 11 years old is not bad for a roof these days, and an 11 year old probably still has a few years left in it too. Keep in mind you can also deduct the repairs from your taxes.    Getting good renters is always the thing with rentals. We do all our own interviewing of potential renters, and my wife has a finely tuned BS detector behind her left ear, so we weed them out. We are very strict about no smokers or pets. I don't care if they have never once smoked in the house because their wife has emphysema, if they have even a hint of smoke odor on them, we won't consider them. Little Foofoo is the absolute best dog in the world and has never even laid on the carpet?. Glad you have a nice dog, see you later. To do that, I've left a house empty for a month while looking for the right renter, I'm willing to take that hit on income. Living far away from the property you may not have the luxury of personally interviewing each renter.   If you do rent it out, read up on "Depreciation of Basis". It's a tax thing, that you need to know about. Basically it's a break you get on your taxes every year, but then you pay capital gains on those breaks when you sell it. It's not terribly complicated, but the IRS expects you to claim it, and WILL charge you the capital gains when you sell it.   Good luck

Except for the vernacular, it sounds like that could have been written to our own government.   I'm ashamed to say, I can't recall ever reading the entire Declaration of Independence. I know I've read the first couple of paragraphs, but not the whole thing. Thanks for posting this!

Wait! So you're saying there's other forums out there besides TGO??

If you are going to test it, test it a couple of different times. Once during a dry spell, once after a lot of rain, and once on a typical day. We have ground water contamination where I live, and the neighbor had it tested several times. It only tests contaminated after a heavy rain. the neighbor thinks that the ground water flows from our place toward the contamination, but all the water backs up after a lot of rain.

Reminded me of the old Blonde Joke, where the blonde had TGIF written on her shoes. When asked about it, it was to remind her that "Toes Go In First"

I have one similar to the one on the left, and love it. Solar powered and atomic clock syncing. I've owned it for years and never have had to replace a battery or set the time. i replace the band every few years and never think about it otherwise. i wear it everywhere... kayaking, work, play.

we just watched "Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit" this week, and we couldn't recall any of the really bad swearing (GD or F-bombs) or sex scenes, and the movie was pretty good. We could just be desensitized to the swearing, but  I really don't think there was any in there. It just goes to prove that you don;'t have to have all that to make a good movie these days.   Seems like more often than not these days, we watch TV from the DVR with a finger on the fast forward button to skip over the sex scenes. remember the days when, IF they showed a couple in a bedroom, they had two layers of flannel jammies, she was wearing cold cream, and they slept in seperate beds.

Nobody's even mentioned the so called "disrupted customers". If they exist, and they actually did go complain to the manager about a 3 year old girl with facial scars. they need to occupy a special  place in hell. And soon!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash   Here's a story I just heard about for the first time, about a nuke carrying bomber that crashed in North Carolina in 1961. The bomb was one safety measure away from turning that part of the state into a wasteland. All other arming mechanisms had activated.

We moved twice in three months!    We lived in our previous house for 15 years, and had 15 years worth of treasure to move. We decided, after 25 years of dreaming of leaving the city, to go ahead and make that dream a reality. We put our house up for sale and it sold almost immediately. We could not find another house to buy before closing so we moved into a rental house that we own, and that had just gone vacant.   We found a house in the country that was perfect for us, and bought that. We now have 5 acres, and I can see one neighbor. Nothing but woods and hay fields all around. Best of all, my back yard is my new shooting range.

They probably named it after him because it wasn't a road that was needed, It cost three times what it should have to build, and the contract was given to a foreign company, who hired illegal immigrants. 

My son had a family of skunks living in his crawl space. He got a live trap and caught one. There is a TWRA officer stationed at his work, so he asked him if TWRA would come get it, and they said "no". My son asked if he could relocate it himself, and the officer said it was illegal to transport a live animal. My son asked what his options were, and the office said "Shoot it". Son said, I live in Oak Ridge and can't discharge a weapon. Officer said fill up a garbage can with water and drop the whole trap in it and drown the skunk.   :dropjaw:

I recently discovered a coon making nightly trips into my barn to steal chicken feed. There are several web sites describing simple DIY ways to make a trap.   The most common one is to take a trash can and fill it with enough water to make it have to stand on it's hind legs to breathe. Put the can next to a table, one that is taller than the can. Place a board on the table, overhanging the edge where the can is, and place the bait at the end of the board. When the coon tries to get the bait, he upsets the balance of the board and falls in. The water makes it so that he can't jump out.   The other one I saw a lot of was taking a piece of 1" PVC pipe, and place four nails through it, each on an angle. Cap the end the nails point toward, and tie the whole thing to a tree. Place the bait in the capped end. The coon will stick his paw in to get the bait, and get it stuck on the nails.   I've been looking at Tractor Supply, who has a pair of traps, one coon sized, and one squirrel sized, for around $35. I think that will be money well spent for me.

Two years ago, I found a place right along a road, that was loaded with blackberry bushes. Unfortunately, I got to them at the end of the season, and most of them were dried up. I kept my eye on them last year to make sure I got there in time. One weekend, I went and checked on them and determined that they would be perfectly ripe by the following Wednesday, which I happened to have the day off. There was an outstanding crop, and I could already taste the wine that I was going to make with them.   Wednesday comes, and I get all my gear together and head on over. As I rounded the corner, I was horrified to see that someone had bush-hogged the entire area! They couldn't wait one more week. They completely destroyed all the bushes and berries.

We all read that sign wrong. Go back and look at it again. He wasn't calling us D-Bags, he was signing his name.   :cool:

Well, I'm not crazy about it eating my eggs, and I hope it doesn't think it can come back any time it wants for free eggs, but a friend of mine has convinced me to leave the snakes alone. There was a time when I would have put a shovel through it's neck, but not anymore. Although the wife was doing her best to get me to reconsider  :cool:

We spotted this guy in the pen where we keep our guinea hens. The stupid birds lay their eggs where ever they are when the mood strikes them, and it's usually out in the pen yard. This snake had just eaten one of their eggs - whole. I feel bad for him, if you've never cracked open a guinea egg, they have the hardest shell I've ever seen. You almost need a pair of channel locks to break them open. I decided I'd relocate the snake to the woods next to the barn, I coaxed him into a 5 gallon bucket, and when I stood the bucket up, darned if he didn't stand up like a cobra and jump right out of the bucket. He looked like a cobra, too, with that egg stuck in his throat. I eventually just shepparded him to the woods with a stick.

  http://www.diytvantennas.com/   Here is a link to a page with several DIY indoor antennas that can be made mostly with stuff you may have around the house.

My favorite Comcast bad service story goes like this: We got Comcast for the first time a number of years ago, and they could not get the modem to work. After being on the line with a young lady for quite some time, she was out of ideas, and told me I needed to turn off the modem, and leave it off for 24 hours to "let the electrons drain out". I told her I was an IT guy, and knew what she said was complete nonsense, but she stuck to her guns. I figured she was just tire of talking to me, so I let her go and called right back. Got someone on the line this time that got me all fixed up.

I always joke around that I'm going to get a dog and name it "Stay", then I can totally confuse it by saying "Come here, Stay". I have a warped sense of humor.   As a kid, my neighbors had a goat that they named OhNo, because every time they looked out the window at it they would say "Oh, no!" because it was into something.   I had a friend that named their dog Deeogee, pronounced as the letters D...O...G

There is definitely an art to packing the bowl and keeping it lit. The "false light" Mike A mentioned above is a critical step. The tamping tool is a must. I usually pack the bowl a little at a time. Put a pinch in and pack it down with my pinky, and repeat. Once I get the bowl full, I light it once, adn the tobacco puffs up a bit, and it will go out. use the tamper adn pack it all back down again. It should stay lit longer now. You do have to kind of puff it several times a minute to keep it going. After a while, there will be some ash build-up. use the tamper tool to scrape off the top layer of ash, and keep smoking.   It always amazes me how stubborn they are to keep lit sometimes. I'll be puffing along, get a really good draw of smoke, and the very next draw its completely out.   For a really cheap, but good pipe, look at a Missouri Meershaum corncob pipe. I bought one as kind of a joke, but turned out that I really enjoy smoking it. Once you get it broken in, it smokes really well. Although, the pipe is a bit larger than I prefer. I tend to hold the pipe more with my teeth than in my hand, keeping my hands free.    My favorite pipe is my actual Meershaum pipe. You want to talk about stylish, and a conversation piece, these guys are it. You can get them in a million styles. You will instantly recognize them as the white stone pipes carved into faces. Get one that is carved from an actual stone, and not one that is resined together from stone powder. As you smoke it, some of the tobacco resin will seep through and give the outside of the stone a really nice patina. 

I did something really stupid with my wife's S&W .38. So stupid, I don't even want to mention it here for risk of being reminded again how stupid it was. Regardless, I had to have the gun taken in to be worked on, and the Smith sent it back to S&W to be inspected. S&W replaced the barrel at no charge, just to make sure the gun was safe.That's great customer service.

  That's an awesome post! When I did this on my computer, it also revealed a link that says "Find in another store." When I click that, it brings up a window with all the other WM's in the area and has the stock status for each.

One of the guys I always miss is Mouse Gunner, who passed away I think in 2011. I never met him, but I always enjoyed his posts, and his website was a great resource. I think someone took it over, but it doesn't look like it has seen much updating since his passing.