Home Repairs for our Rental Property

Last week while we were vacationing at our beach home in North Carolina our refrigerator started to leak. This isn’t the first time we’ve had problems with this particular appliance, so we headed down to Sears to order a new one. In the case of a rental home, hundreds of miles from our primary home, it’s better to replace broken appliances then continually try to fix them.

My husband wanted a refrigerator with the freezer on the bottom. That little extra cost us a few hundred more than the standard fridge, but since we’re both tall I happily agreed to his special request.

We checked out on Sunday and the first renters checked in. On Tuesday morning I received a call from the rental agency. It seems the air conditioner had stopped working. We called our fix-it guy to take a look, but he’s not licensed to fix air conditioners. So he subcontracted the work out to someone else. The subcontractor fixed the problem for the time being, but we’ve been unable to contact him since.

He told our fix-it guy that the air conditioner appeared to be leaking. We can’t have a beach house without a functioning air conditioner, so we called around to a few other repair shops. Unfortunately, with a heat wave striking the east coast, every contractor in the area is double booked. Thankfully, we don’t have renters in the house this week, so my husband and I are driving back down to North Carolina in the hopes of finding a contractor who can come out to take a look. We’re hoping we’ll have better luck if we can meet with the repair men in person.

Hopefully this will be our last home repair for the rest of the rental season, but just to be safe we plan on performing a thorough inspection of our other appliances as soon as we arrive. I’m crossing my fingers that this will be the last problem we face.