My Dog Chewed On The New Tenant's Car Bumper

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woodguru

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The knothead chewed teeth marks in her rear bumper, holes all the way through all along the bottom. A newer Prius in pearlesent white...

So rather than tell me this had happened so I could let her know we would take care of it, she comes to me after taking it to a body shop for an estimate and tells me she has or is turning in an insurance claim. Of course this means a $2000 bill versus Under $600. I wouldn't think of making a small claim like on my homeowner's policy, we had a heck of a time finding an insurance company that would insure this fire prone area, so we really wouldn't want to make any small claims.

It took some serious diplomacy to get her to drop the insurance claim, I called the body shop she wanted to use and explained that it was not an insurance job, that I'd be paying for it. We went over what was involved, they even charge a different hourly rate, and they are saying that the other difference it makes is that for insurance they would replace the bumper with a new one and paint it at a cost of about $700, he said they can repair it and paint it for about $300. Half an hour to buff out some surface scratches versus repaint like they were going to do for insurance.

Total cost $500 give or take $50.

I don't know what she got on that bumper, or if a rat run under that he was obsessed with. The dog has never tried to eat a car before though.

She was saying that when the estimator looked at it he had never seen a dog chew up a bumper before, and asked her if she was worried about a dog that could do that, she told him not at all, that they are big sweethearts.

So we are also having to do something about a place for her to park that that can't happen again.
 
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This thing is getting stupider and stupider.

This is a several year old car, looks decent but not pristine by any means. Parked outside not in and it has some dings and scratches here and there.

So because the owner seems to "feel" that it was in close to pristine shape, she is now actually looking at the car for the first time in some time, and she believes that every scratch on the car must have been done by the dog. Pointing out that a scratch doesn't look like something a dog even could do flips her out, and she takes it as calling her a liar and questioning her integrity, that she's not that kind of person.

The kind of person we are dealing with here is the kind that is missing the common sense gene. There is no ability to actually look at something and have the dynamics of how dog scratches work to where she can see and acknowledge which ones really couldn't be done by a dog.

So she has agreed to take it to a guy I use that has done my high end cars that cost outwards of $100k. He has dogs, he knows what dog scratches look like, and he will point out those spots that he doesn't think a dog could do. Dogs typically do not make deeper scratches that are through the paint.

Rather than argue with her or refuse to take care of things the dog didn't do we are going to take care of them. She is paying $850 a month including gas and electricity for an apartment that we can easily get $1250 a month for. Even $100 a month comes out to $1200 a year. If she sticks to taking care of dog damage only I am paying for it, it's on me, no need for an increase.

My wife's car has been jumped up on with front feet at least 200 times when the dogs want to greet her, they are better about it now as she's been making them stay down. So why are there no scratches? Nothing deeply scratched into the paint, it's all surface that would rub out with a light polishing compound.

She's not trying to work this out of greed, she just believes the dog made every scratch on her car.
 
Originally Posted By: Rock KnockerGo out and pee on her bumper every morning before you let the dog out.

Hey, I've got coyote juice and mountain lion piss in bottles, that would make things a bit whiffy. I got some of the coyote juice on me, it drove me nuts until I used an automotive hand cleaner on it.
 
Originally Posted By: woodguru

The kind of person we are dealing with here is the kind that is missing the common sense gene.

So she's a liberal huh?
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Originally Posted By: vahunterOriginally Posted By: woodguru

The kind of person we are dealing with here is the kind that is missing the common sense gene.

So she's a liberal huh?
tt2.gif


Pure Trump through and through, a Trump supporting psychologist that drives a Prius, she's a mess
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They saw the dog put his paws on her brother's beater when he was here over the weekend, oxidized paint and he said the dog did the bubbles of oxidized paint. 25 year old Mercury Sable, reknowned for the clearcoat looking trashed, and he walks around pointing out about 14 scratches, many of which were from him putting heavy boxes on the car deck lid and hood and sliding it a few inches. I rubbed out everything he complained about except where he had paint in heavy gouges from hitting something, and he still said he was going to turn in an insurance claim. I pointed to one that was easy to see was from a box being slid, you could even see the corrugation marks perfectly spaced, he got ticked off and said he wasn't going to argue over whether the dog did it he'd just go back to Minnesota or wherever he came from and turn it in to insurance. I took about 100 high resolution photos of before and after, and he has no scratches left to claim. He had a Trump sticker on the back of the car, it runs in the family. When I was showing him wasn't the dog but telling him I was going to take care of it anyway, he got ridiculous and walked away. I was going to do his whole hood and deck lid with a high tech polymer that costs about $25 a bottle. He got mad and I did just the scratches rubbed out with cut. I was also going to show him how to do the rest to where that bad paint would hold up for another year or two and give him the bottle of polymer, but didn't since he didn't stick around. I should have used silicone based stuff, you'll never get paint to stick again unless the car is properly stripped.

He had hit things with the front bumper and grill three or four times, he had a four foot long dent across the rear door and wheel well with white paint in it, dings in the rear deck lid and bumper, it was a beater, who tries to say they are turning in an insurance claim on a 24 year old beater with dead paint?

I'm about ready to leave that apartment empty and use it as my man cave to show stereo systems in. As I get into this new business I'm starting back up I'll need to have serious reference stereo equipment to evaluate expensive accessories. The only way I can compare ultra high end products is with absolute top notch systems.
 
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Well, see now they are just using you because they know you hate Trump. Try pooping into your shoe every morning before you let the dog, that should keep them off your back.
 
Yeah, this not greedy liberal is charging someone $850 including gas and electric for an apartment that I could easily get $1300 a month plus electric.

And she wants to jerk me around for this? Rent is going up, $50 equals $600 in a year, $100 equals $1200, $150 equals $1800. I can charge anything, she is an idiot.

I'm going to look for someone who wants to do work around the place for a reduction on rent. $1300 rent and we will pay $15 an hour and give them enough hours that they will be paying somewhere around $800 a month, works for me.
 
Originally Posted By: Plant.Oneso what you're saying is your dog is a trump hating liberal too?

go figure...
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My neighbor, the one that we mess with each other, our phone greeting is usually him saying effing liberals, mine to him is effing conservatives, he is having way too much fun with this dog thing. He called me the other day and said my dog had come over to his yard and scratched his truck, he wanted a new paint job.
 
She may say she supports Trump, but the primary question that has never been covered:...Did the Prius have a Clinton/Kane sticker on it at any given time, most Prius are driven by Green Liberals ???...If so, I can understand the dog's attitude...Lucky he didn't drag it to the nearest salvage yard....

Hope you don't have a long term lease with her....Psychologists that I've met over the years can look stable, but most have some serious quirks....The only exception is the one that I was teamed with on the Suicide Prevention team and he seemed pretty straight and one of my competition shooting buddies that makes the Criminally Insane determinations for the State of Missouri...He's really straight....Even though for team purposes his nickname was "Psycho"...
 
Originally Posted By: OldTurtleShe may say she supports Trump, but the primary question that has never been covered:...Did the Prius have a Clinton/Kane sticker on it at any given time, most Prius are driven by Green Liberals ???...If so, I can understand the dog's attitude...Lucky he didn't drag it to the nearest salvage yard....

Hope you don't have a long term lease with her....Psychologists that I've met over the years can look stable, but most have some serious quirks....The only exception is the one that I was teamed with on the Suicide Prevention team and he seemed pretty straight and one of my competition shooting buddies that makes the Criminally Insane determinations for the State of Missouri...He's really straight....Even though for team purposes his nickname was "Psycho"...

I hear you, and she is on the psycho side. She is refusing to deal with me, saying I scare her. My wife said okay I will be an intermediary and you don't have to deal with him. She represented that the first body shop gave her a quote of $2000, they were telling me if I rubbed out the scuffs it would be $600. We pressured her into the quotes and they had quoted $1100 and if I took off the hours of them doing buffing is where the $600 comes from.

She is getting a $1250 apartment for $850, she is missing the fact that we can make up the cost of this damage by $4800 in 12 months. No rent control in this state means we can charge whatever we want whenever we want, we can give notice that the price of rent is going up.

Fortunately my wife is letting me throw down in a legal point by point list of our rights to get this done in the most affordable way possible that gets it done right. If she won't let me handle it she can make an insurance claim and we will refuse to pay it based on our willingness to do it and her failure to cooperate. I can get the insurance company to accept a check for the amount that this would cost if she let me take care of it. Because she is being an idiot she will more than likely incur raised rates, not my problem.

I'm already pretty sick of this, and she thinks she can say she is afraid of me, jerk us around fixing her car, and still live here at $400 less a month than the place will easily rent for, with me not talking to her? My wife is going to diplomatically tell her that if she is afraid of me she needs to move, why would she stay on a property with a guy that scares her?
 
Originally Posted By: Tbone-AZThat's what happens when you make green cars from soybean silage.

I need some humor, this is going to be a long hard weekend. I want this hammered out by the end of the weekend. She is all freaked out and has to think about every decision before giving us answers. I'm out of diplomacy and patience and so is my wife. She's a basket case, and I'll have to worry about every single thing that happens resulting in stupid lawsuits.

I'd rather have this thing empty than causing me this kind of stress.

Deep breath, let it go.....

I'm pretty agitated, I probably need to shut up and go read a book, except that I can't stop thinking about it well enough to forget and read the book. Sometimes you need a place to blow off some steam
 
unless you have a month to month lease, i don't see how you can raise rates on her, unless you have a clause in the lease stating such. which you wouldnt be able to get anyone who isnt crazy to sign in the first place. that should have been your first clue if that's the case.




if you dont have a long term lease with this problem tennant, you need to give her whatever notice your agreement requires, get her the [beeep] out, and lease the space for what you say it should go for. You're being stupid not to, or awfully [beeep] generous, which is biting you square in the [beeep] right now.


take your lumps on this, pay the $1100 on the quote she gave you - in full - and find a new tenant as soon as you can break her out of your property. you'll make up the $$ you lost in 90 days by getting your extra $$ per month, and have less stress to deal with.


you wouldnt catch me leasing to anyone who wouldnt give me their last two landlords contact info so i could call them and ask them one simple question ..... "would you rent to so-and-so again if they wanted to come be your tenant in the future". if you get the same answer from both, you'll probably be ok.
 
I'd sell the dog and use the money to pay your tenant.Win / win get rid of two headaches at once.
 
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So Jeanne got fed up when she saw the estimate for $1100 that had been represented as $2000, and another one that was for $2100, but that is a really high quality shop. The $2100 I could get done for about $800 once I weed out all the unnecessary hours applied to 5 minute things.

Jeanne told her that either I buff the things out that saves us $500, and that if she doesn't go with the shop that's $1100 that will cost me $600 she needs to turn it into her insurance company and we will pay them the $600 but no more, that we can prove the job would cost that and no more.

She argued that she really liked the other shop and Jeanne told her too bad, her insurance company was not going to take the $2100 over the $1100, especially since the $1100 was the shop they told her to go to.

So this gets better, Jeanne tells her that I am going to go over the car and take detailed pictures of everything that needs to be done regardless of what she decides to do. She parks the car in the sun so I can see everything. So here is what's annoying the crap out of me. The muddy footprints are still there, neither body shop took a damp rag and cleared off the prints to where they could see if anything had been scratched. So I had my camera, I wipe off the first smeared area, and there is nothing, no scratches, not even a patina that would rub right out in less than a minute which I figured was what was going to be there. After cleaning five spots there was absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing. I went over ever inch of the car section by section. The lightly hazed tail light lenses that they were charging 4 hours R&I and repair for were so lightly scratched that I could buff them out with a dab of cut/polish, but it's easier to 1500 wet sand and polish out the haze with a 2" orbital.

The weird thing is that two body shops allowed for hours of repair for scratches they assumed were under the mud, and my tenant got quotes for hundreds of dollars for things that will not be done.

So, I told her that there was so little in the way of scratches that she would not be able to find anything but some paint marks which I would remove when I buff out the spots that need it. She took it to her boyfriend to see if he could see anything bad and he couldn't, so she said I can do the work and go from there.

The scratch that they say they will try to color sand but if it goes too deep, that they are allowing for $350 for 2 stage paint and clear coat is so minor that I am going to color sand it, and if I go through the clear coat I'll pay them to give it a shot of clear coat, but it won't go through the clear. That's going to save another few hundred to where we are dealing with repairing and painting the bumper and some plastic parts. I'm going to do all the things I can and take it to a new body shop I've recently used for a clean perspective on what they have left without all the non existent distractions.

My wife is ticked that these shops will charge a woman hundreds more than they would charge me, I told her it's not just women they do the same thing to clueless guys too, you have to know the industry to get them to take out the fluff they make the money on. Heck, the expensive shop had .3 hours R&I for the license plate, if the estimator tried to add that to an estimate for me I'd laugh at him and ask, really, get real. They also had 1.0 hour for each tail light lens R&I plus the repair at another hour each. Now we all know that they are going to do it in place, there will be no remove and install, so that right there is a bogus $140.

If she had turned this to an insurance company like we had told her to go ahead and do, I'd have made these arguments that I was willing to take responsibility, but at my prices not hers, and that I would pay them $700 and they could sue me if they didn't like it. They would have accepted that rather than go legal for a few hundred dollars.

She had texted Jeanne last night saying that I could do the work, her boyfriend has a truck she can borrow so we don't have to rent her a car, and we would go from there. The last hurdle is that she really is attached to the expensive guy, but we'll deal with that when we get there. It isn't happening on my dime. My wife agreed that if it was easier to do that than argue that we just get my buddy at that shop to come down as far as he will, he has already said he can go $1200 but if the color sand and paint isn't needed he's down to about $800. We pay that, her rent goes up $75 for the power we are not charging, we get that $300 back in four months, $600 ahead in a year.

This thing did not have to be this big a deal.
 
Originally Posted By: Plant.Oneunless you have a month to month lease, i don't see how you can raise rates on her, unless you have a clause in the lease stating such. which you wouldnt be able to get anyone who isnt crazy to sign in the first place. that should have been your first clue if that's the case.




if you dont have a long term lease with this problem tennant, you need to give her whatever notice your agreement requires, get her the [beeep] out, and lease the space for what you say it should go for. You're being stupid not to, or awfully [beeep] generous, which is biting you square in the [beeep] right now.


take your lumps on this, pay the $1100 on the quote she gave you - in full - and find a new tenant as soon as you can break her out of your property. you'll make up the $$ you lost in 90 days by getting your extra $$ per month, and have less stress to deal with.


you wouldnt catch me leasing to anyone who wouldnt give me their last two landlords contact info so i could call them and ask them one simple question ..... "would you rent to so-and-so again if they wanted to come be your tenant in the future". if you get the same answer from both, you'll probably be ok.

No lease, and when a person gets an exceptionally high quality apartment for $850 that they know we could easily get $1250 for, they are just glad to be getting it. I told her that we were not sure what to do about power as far as being fair, so we weren't really addressing it yet, she knows we will at some point. This leaves us the latitude to raise the rent anytime we want to an amount that reflects anywhere from the fair $75 To $130 people in apartments are used to paying. We would go low at $75.

She sold a $4000 square foot house that she got after a divorce, and has lived with her boyfriend who has a ranch for a few years. He had a lot of family on the property and she wanted her own place for the peace and quiet. She's a little old gal that can't make decisions, she makes simple things into bigger deals than they need to be.

I'm going to tell her "new rules" you don't do anything about anything that is going to affect us without talking to us first.
 
good thing Jeanne saw that her hubby is not capable of handling this mess. she threw her big girl pants on and is taking control of the situation. way to go Jeanne!
 
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