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• Career advice for the uninitiated.
• When the going gets tough...
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• The rise of the text sick note, and the email rent avoidance excuse.
• The best laid plans of Mice and Men - and slugs named Nigel
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• The story so far

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Drying out

By Hapless Investor

Terry Pratchett gave the best explanation of in-sewer-ance that I've ever read. Insurance is a bet. A gamble. You're betting that something bad is going to happen to your home, your car or even your life. It still strikes me as strange that someone would want to bet that I wasn't going to do anything stupid. To be honest, I wouldn't take that bet.

However the NFU did. And although I don't want to be using this space for advertising they were absolutely brilliant.

We had lined up two new tenants, both had jobs literally round the corner from the flat. The unique selling point of our flat was they could get an extra 20 minute lie in compared to anywhere else they'd seen. Some things in life are priceless.

The only problem now was that we didn't have a flat to rent them.

Dave the non-dead upstairs tenant was feeling remarkably sheepish and on the whole was quite happy to cope with his ruined wall, door and kitchen until I was able to sort everything out and it also turned out that he knew pretty much everyone in Hackney on Sea.

Out of the cursed Sex Pistols mobile phone came the number for a plasterer, a kitchen fitter and whilst we were there, the numbers for ten other people who could fix the odd things around the flats that were in need of sorting out. I dunno, you give these people an inch and they take a mile.

So that was Dave taken care of, but downstairs was another matter entirely. The insurance company told us that the water had seeped into the walls and that the flat was now unfit for human habitation. To demonstrate his point the loss adjuster pulled a sheet off wall paper off the wall taking part of the ceiling with it.

I'll be honest with you, I'm getting pretty sick of people telling me that my properties are not fit for human habitation. First Manchester, and now this.

They installed a series of R2D2 like extractor fans around the flat designed to suck in water from the atmosphere and deposit it in a friendly bucket. I was told I'd need to come back every other day to empty the buckets as the place was so wet. I asked when I'd be able to get the new tenants (and therefore rent) into the property and he made a sucking noise through his teeth and shook his head.

I'll be honest with you, I'm getting pretty sick of people making sucking noises through their teeth and shaking their heads at me.

I spoke with the new tenants and told them what was happening and they seemed pretty good about the whole thing.

6 weeks later when the insurance company came back for the fourth monitoring visit I asked them again when I would be able to move the tenants into the property. Once again he said that I wouldn't be able to rent it for another few weeks.

I'll be honest with you, I'm getting pretty sick of not earning rent from that flat.

The man from the insurance company came back three more times each time he told me maybe next week and I was starting to feel like I was back in junior school asking my parents if I could have my ears pierced like Vanessa Kraft and all the popular girls did. In the end we came up with a compromise. When the damp levels no longer meant the girls would develop polyps on their lungs or anything like that the insurance company said I could move them in if I absolutely had to.

Absolutely had to?! By now we had gone nearly a year with no rent from this flat -Absolutely had to didn't even begin to cover it.

And so it came to pass, amid the ruins of the decimated kitchen with R2D2 still in the kitchen, plaster and wall paper still hanging off the walls and with extractor fans and heaters running 24/7 The Girls took residence in the Middle Flat.

 And for the first time in nearly a year we had money coming in from the middle flat.

But good things aren't meant to last.

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