solicited advice no. 3: specific rental quandaries, universal advice.
considering repairs in a rental.
This is the third edition of a new MAKE / DO advice column called Solicited Advice. I decided to start this column in response to folks’ increasing reliance on robots when seeking advice or attempting to problem solve. Fie! Let’s talk to each other instead!
One thing about a solicited advice column is people need to be soliciting! If you have a question or a conundrum about how to MAKE / DO, send me a note! 💌 Send queries with the subject line SOLICITED ADVICE to erin @ readingmytealeaves dot com. 💌 I’ll try to give my most human advice and other humans reading along can also chime in in the comments!
What kind of subjects am I most qualified to offer advice on?
living well in small spaces 🪺
participating in consumer culture responsibly 🛒
creative, sustainable solutions for decorating, organizing, and maintenance projects 🔨
renting, stewarding, and loving the places and spaces we call home 🏚️
parenthood, esp as it relates to consumerism, creativity, and sustainability 🫙
living according to our values even when it means going against the grain 🪵
fixing stuff, making stuff, and generally being scrappy, thrifty, and free! 🪡
Here’s stuff that would be better to ask someone else about:
brain surgery 🧠
personal finance, stocks, bonds, and trust funds 📈
translating ancient texts 📜
This is something of an experiment for me, so please bear with as I figure out the graphic, to say nothing of the exact format and cadence of this new column!
Questions will be published anonymously with a pseudonym and might be edited for length and clarity.
My full responses and participation in the comments section will be limited to paid MAKE / DO subscribers, but free subscribers will be able to read a preview of my response and are also welcome to submit their questions for consideration!
This week I’ve decided to tackle three distinct queries in a single letter because even though they each peddle in specifics, they all really get at the same universal question of how far to take a repair in a rental apartment.
I’ve written about this before, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much and I’ll do my best to also offer some inexpert advice regarding the specifics.
Let’s start with the universal:
Before investing significant time or money into a home I don’t own, it’s helpful for me to think about how much I might personally benefit from the repair. Notably, this isn’t the same calculus that a landlord makes. A landlord wants to be able to continue renting a place and making money from it. Generously, we might assume this means that they care about big structural maintenance and broad strokes care rather than the everyday sorts of repairs or improvements that get identified and longed for by the people actually living in a space. A landlord might not think a single crumbling medicine cabinet shelf is worthy of their attention, for instance, but a tenant using that medicine cabinet day in and day out is going to notice the daily decay and celebrate when it’s finally fixed.
It’s not our responsibility as tenants to tackle all (or really any) of these fixes ourselves, but I do think we owe it to ourselves and our spaces to at least attempt to maintain the things that affect our quality of life and experience of a place, even when the landlord won’t.
Before tackling a repair ourselves, it is sometimes helpful to consider at least floating the question of repair or replacement to a landlord. You don’t get what you don’t ask for afterall, and I’ll even go so far as to suggest we can occasionally give the landlord the benefit of the doubt and imagine that they might not be aware of the problem in the first place. There are many kinds of landlords though, and I trust that individual tenants know the limits of what theirs may or may not be willing to do. No doubt it is sometimes easier to do the work ourselves rather than endeavor to magically transform a neglectful landlord into a conscientious one.
If you decide to approach the landlord directly, appealing directly to their pocketbook will be most helpful. A landlord views an apartment as an investment instead of a home, and so creature comforts, valid as they are, are unlikely to stir them. (The fact that the maintenance will improve your comfort is something you can revel in privately.) Saying, “I really hate cooking on this countertop,” might not be terribly effective, but leading with “I’m concerned that without resealing, this concrete countertop will continue to degrade and here’s an affordable service that I found to help prevent a more costly replacement down the road,” could just get you a resealed countertop paid for by the person who owns it. Miracles do exist.
Similarly, finding an affordable replacement medicine cabinet that you can live with and that you think your landlord would pay for, could be worth sharing. “The medicine cabinet in our bathroom is badly damaged, and I found this replacement on sale,” might be just the incentive that would spur a neglectful landlord into action. Of course, if you’re willing to front the money for the improvement yourself, the landlord would just be silly to say no. “Our current medicine cabinet is falling apart and I’d like to replace it with this one, which I am also willing to purchase and install” is hardly something that a reasonable person would say no to. Alas alack, many landlords are unreasonable and quite silly.
In the case of some small fixes and some neglectful landlords, the better option is to skirt the interaction all together. When improving something myself, I tend toward finding a balance between honoring the space and honoring myself. Recently, when repainting the window trim in our apartment, for example, I found that I was dealing with an enormous amount of other people’s past sloppiness. There were paint splatters and caulk streaks all over the metal window frames and removing them proved either impossible or nearly so.The windows in our building are purportedly slated to be replaced within the next year and so I decided the best solution was to bring the paint from the window trim up onto the splattered surface of the metal window frame slightly, thereby covering the sloppiness with a single, neat line of paint. The solution isn’t any worse than it was and it looks far better than leaving the splatters untouched. It’s absolutely not the preferred method, which would have been not covering the metal frames with splatters in the first place and replacing the failing double-paned windows ten years ago, but time travel is not yet a skill I possess and I’m certainly not going to pay to replace the windows myself. The solution I found is one that felt respectful of the property and respectful of my time and energy, too.
In general, I stand by using these five questions as a guide for taking on projects in a rental:
How likely is this a project that the landlord would deem necessary?
How likely is it that the job would be handled with care?
How much expertise does this fix require? (How wrong could this go?)
How much will this cost?
How far am I willing to go here?
I’ll also add one more:
How long am I likely to benefit from this repair?
Our recent experience of being forced to move out of an apartment before we were ready was a very stark reminder that when it comes to renting, there’s simply a lot that’s not in a tenant’s control. Changes in tenant protections and rent stabilization laws means that it’s unlikely many of us will have the experience of someone like my cousin Mildred, who lived as a tenant in the same New York City rental for more than five decades. She enjoyed the cabinets she painstakingly covered with Marimekko contact paper for a good fifty years and no landlord was the wiser. Still, it’s important to consider future plans when investing present-day time into a project. Some of this goes back to the concept of focusing first on high-touch surfaces. I’d tackle a gross medicine cabinet, for instance, before cleaning up a gross radiator. Both projects might be worthy of taking on eventually, but only one of them is the first thing I touch in the morning and the last thing I touch at night. I’ll always decide to do that one first.
Now, onto the specific queries: