Inspection finding

The original. Every other dungeon in the portfolio is a copy of this one, down to the smell, which I have never been able to source and no longer try to.

Cap rate was derived from the parcel number, which is not how that works, by a woman who was not going to be argued with. Ceiling is 6′2″. I am 6′1″. That was not an accident and I have stopped pretending it was. — B.

Inspection finding

East wall is shared with the county records annex. You can hear the clerks filing. On a quiet afternoon you can hear them file something as Mid-Lotion, and then another thing, and then another thing.

I put a chair down there. I sit in the chair. I listen to my own address be wrong at roughly forty documents an hour. Structurally the wall is fine. — B.

Inspection finding

Three sub-grade floors, forty-one hundred square feet, a working service elevator, and its own mailing address. The assessor’s card says SHED — FAIR.

Forty-one appeals filed. Zero heard. It is the same office that will not spell it right, and it is the same desk, and it is the same person, and she is lovely. — B.

Inspection finding

Unit was at grade in 1998. Unit is now four feet below it. Nothing has been excavated. Nobody has dug. The unit is doing this by itself and the tenants describe the process as “settling in.”

At the current rate it becomes the second story of something else by 2071. Reclassified as garden level, provisional. The insurer is aware and has stopped writing back. — B.

Inspection finding

Florida is not supposed to have basements. This one predates the association and the association cannot forgive it. Eleven members. They meet twice a week, on purpose.

They have banned beige, wind chimes, visible hoses, and the concept of a screen door. I have sat in a coven meeting that has run 367 years and I have sat in a Flamingo Reach meeting that ran ninety minutes. I know which one I would go back to. — B.

Inspection finding

A hydrologist confirms that this swamp and the Virginia bog are the same body of water. Not connected. The same. Nine hundred miles apart and it is one bog, and he was very calm about it, and then he left.

If it is one parcel, this Florida asset is in Virginia, or Virginia is in Florida, and either way somebody owes somebody 367 years of transfer tax. I completed the report. I filed the report. I filed it in a drawer. — B.

Inspection finding

Acquired 1911. The address does not resolve. Not to a map, not to the plat, not to a person at the counter. I have driven down four times and arrived somewhere else each time. One of those times was a Wendy’s.

It pays on the first, in full, and the check clears. I have stopped driving down. It knows I stopped. The rent went up on its own to reflect that. — B.

Inspection finding

Forty-one named storms have crossed this parcel since we took it and not one of them has put water in this basement. The street floods. The lot floods. The four steps down to the door flood. The room is dry.

Three carriers have declined to write it and all three cited the absence of a claims history, which they treated as the problem. I have stopped explaining it and started keeping towels down there for the neighbours. — B.

Inspection finding

The legal description on a 2004 closing ended with the words “and the cellar.” Nobody at that table mentioned the cellar. I read the description aloud in full, because I read the description aloud in full, and everybody waited politely until I had finished.

There is a cellar. There is a tenant in the cellar. Her lease is dated 1931, it is a better lease than the one I would have drawn her, and she pays on the first. — B.

Inspection finding

The basement exceeded the maximum permitted sub-grade area for the county by twelve hundred square feet. We applied for a variance. The hearing ran six hours and nine people testified. Three of them were Geralds.

Variance granted, unanimously, at 1:40 in the morning. The basement has since grown another eight hundred square feet. I am not reapplying. — B.

Inspection finding

There is a Midlothian in Texas. It is spelled correctly. Every sign, every tax bill, every utility statement, the water tower, the high school, the sign on the water tower at the high school. Correctly. Purchased 1961.

I brought a photograph of the water tower to the Virginia county office and set it on the counter. She looked at it for a long time. She said, “That’s Texas.” She is 69. She is married. — B.

Inspection finding

There is no house. There has never been a house. There is a set of doors in a field, a set of stairs, one room, and a mailbox at the road with a number on it that the post office honors without comment.

It receives mail. It receives a great deal of mail. Highest-performing asset in the portfolio and the only one I can describe to a stranger in one sentence. — B.

Inspection finding

Note left on the bottom stair, in pencil, on the back of a rent receipt. It reads, in full: “I fixed the light. Don’t fix the light back.”

The light is fixed. I do not know what it was before. I have not fixed it back and I am not going to. Unit shows well. Unit will not be shown. — B.

Inspection finding

The county put this cellar on the severe-weather map in 1971 without asking me and I have never once asked them to take it off. When the sirens go, the road comes down the steps, and there is somewhere for the road to sit down.

Twenty-two chairs, stacked, levelled, wiped down in March. Used eleven times in fifty-five years. It earns nothing at all and it is the best thing on this list. — B.

Inspection finding

It is the only basement in the county, which is why the cap rate is also the county-wide average. In 1974 they asked me to write their sub-grade code, because there was nobody else in the county to ask. It runs one paragraph. It says put in a second way out and mean it.

This one and three others are not on the schedule. The schedule says eleven, the ledger says eleven, and I hold fifteen. I have spent three hundred and sixty-seven petitions on one word already and I am not opening a second front over a number. The record is the record. — B.