Rental Property

Scooter and I, along with his brother and sister-in-law, own two houses that we use as rental property. The tenant who has been in one of them for two years (? a year and a half?) moved out today, and the new tenant moves in in the next few days. Now, I expect that when a tenant moves out, the house will be in the state one would expect if people had lived there for a couple of years and then moved out without doing any "moving out cleaning." So, a mess. The carpet will need cleaning, some rooms will need paint freshening, the oven won't have been cleaned. Um. I don't know what these people did in this house, but I have a feeling it involved livestock, raves, roofers (what IS that sticky black stuff I'm trying to get out of the carpets?), and a deep and abiding hatred for window frames. Uh, and doors. Scooter, his brother, and Dan'l are not going to their respective homes tonight. They're painting. Until tomorrow. Until it's finished. At which point I can resume steam cleaning carpets. (Which, frankly, results in a vaguely cleaner look for this carpet we had installed less than two years ago, but mostly it leaves us with indelible stains that are - um, shiny.) Are shiny stains better than grungy stains?

What stinks, among many other things, is that we are working our tails off (especially the men folk spending the night there) and the walls will be freshly painted and broken things will be repaired, but the carpeting will still be only sort of acceptable. I feel bad about handing this property over to new tenants, because in many ways it looks substandard. I'm trying to calculate the damage...
1 the destruction of $900 in brand new carpeting downstairs
2 the destruction of what I can assume is a similar $ amount of carpeting upstairs
3 three or four masterfully destroyed window frames
4 an equal if not greater number of destroyed window cranks
5 prime and paint every painted surface in the house
6 (after first removing the alarming layer of grease from the kitchen walls, and - strangely - the basement walls)
7 I don't know what 7 is. There is a 7, but I'm really tired and I smell yucky and if I take a
shower and go to bed instead of trying to remember what 7 is maybe Eryn will have a good,
functional mommy in the morning. Whatever it was, it was HUGE, and I think the total damage estimate may land around 9 KAZILLION-BUVILLION-MILLION DOLLARS. Or
at least that much money's worth in sweat, fatigue, disappointment, and annoyance.

Thanks to my mother, BTW, for picking up the princess, feeding, entertaining, and otherwise kid-wrangling her until it was bedtime. We own these bloody houses so Eryn, Oliver and Arthur can go to school and learn enough not to buy houses for use as rental property to pay for our grandkids' college educations. Or something like that.

Oh, look! The reason I put up with this nonsense: