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A Story About My Frozen Pipes That Is Also About Rats
My wife and I bought a new home last year.
Then, last week, my pipes tried to freeze, but they underestimated me, because they don’t know my struggle.
I’ve been fighting pipes since the rats. And this place doesn’t even have rats, so how could they possibly win?
Allow me to explain.
Our home is really a three-unit apartment building. The plan was that we would have the two tenants cover the mortgage and we would be geniuses, but the reality is that the rent for our one tenant is way undermarket and the other tenant moved out not long after we bought it, leaving us with a vacant apartment in the middle of a Chicago winter.
And now I have to shovel snow and salt walkways and get calls late at night about dripping faucets and argue with my tenant because she wants to pay her rent in cash and complain about the noise of the renovations being made to the vacant apartment that would actually make being a landlord worthwhile.
Last week, the temperatures plummeted to 23 degrees below zero. And for those of you that live where it gets cold enough to wonder, no, that’s not with windchill — that was the actual air temperature.
I’m a Chicagoan, so I understand winter. I was born in it. Bred in it. And I know how…
