THE LEASE- SECRETS OF. The lease is done with the help of the roomie that has the family member with best credit. That roomie becomes the 'on paper landlord.' The person who has the relative and the same last name who signs the lease need not be the person who is the most presentable and charming. As in life, the condition of being the most presentable and the condition of being the most well-fixed with family credit and the condition of being the one with the best car never coincide in the same person.
In real life, gifts are always dispersed by God. Spread thinly. So, too, with our rental team, but the conglomerate effect, which the landlord sees coming toward him, is of a single, well fixed person with a nice car, lots of credit history, and beaucoup references and the phone numbers of a prior landlord who adores you. Naturally, your references are all your friends from high school. In my case, I use my movie star astrology clients. A list handed over in a blase manner, with famous names for references works miracles. I can just see this Valley landlord saying 'Mr Castaneda?' and not knowing who the hell it was. What a waste.
WRITING YOUR OWN LEASE- This is important, no matter what landlord throws at you, you have your version signed to show in court. It states five years, not one, because (have the lease state it,) 'as tenant is a gifted landscaper, tenant does not wish to be thrown out in one year after having done a $25,000 garden without a pre-determined value to the garden affixed at $20,000 for each year of labor'. Little throwaway codicils like that.
WHERE TO FIND HOUSES: Subscribe to the local throwaways for a month, the Recycler free ad type papers, and get Sunday dailies. Forget about using Real Estate agents as their properties have super high rents. Forget about subscribing to a Rent Finder Agent and ignore any ad that says 'agent/fee'. Sometimes a loose-wallet pal will have subscribed to one of these homefinders and you can get lists for free but don't worry, there are plenty of homes for rent and ads in the newspapers.
TECHNIQUE: Get a large COMPOSITIONS notebook or copy book. Glue tabs to the right side of pages leaving space for 5 or 6 burroughs of the city, to confine driving each section of city to one day each.
Each listing goes in a two or three line blank space. You need the space to make directions/maps.
Left hand column is the price. It has to be first as when you empty newspapers, you'll search for the price to see if you have this listing already.
Next comes 3+2, bedroom bath. Next comes features: garden, 2 car garage, water paid, den, garage office/ large yard. Last Phone #. THEN A ONE INCH SPACE left blank.
As you answer them, affix a code. One dot next to price means you left messages. Two dots means you talked to a human and you have map. Map is filled into the 1" space below this.
Day you visit the burrough, you draw map for all streets, keep on car dash next to your TRW credit report, all the credit cards you can borrow from your family, in a wallet holder, a sheaf of cash, a letter from your pal at the bank, letter from former landlord, cancelled checks to former landlord and a pre-filled out application to rent with every question they can think of, answered. And one more thing, as you drive around and see nice areas, you'll frequently see nice vacant homes for sale. Bring a pre-fab letter in an envelope to be given to people selling houses that you'd like to live in/rent, saying I could show the house and find you a buyer plus pay you rent. This always brings a much reduced rent.
CO-SIGNERS? Be good to your relatives. Their good will is crucial. You often need co-signers on leases, utilities, and as co-signers when you need kitchen/laundry appliances. (or for variety, sometimes let them buy the washer and give them a dozen post-dated checks.)
To get a utility turned on, you need to make it look as if it's the property owner-relative's second home. A propertied relative can be the number one asset of a BFer. Your interest on a truck or washer may even be lower for having a solid co-signer. And most important is to use relatives' credit histories for signing leases.
I got my super square, propertied, older brother to give me all his credit history for my lease. He said he'd do everything but SIGN my actual application to lease a house. He wouldn't go that far ---as he said I'd end up in some awful litigation with the landlord and the judgement would land on him. Actually, that doesn't happen if he doesn't live there. The judge forgives the co-signer all responsibility. You may quote me on that when you screw your relative to the wall.
Having my brother's permission for his credit report, I took numbers of his Shearson accounts, his Paine Webber, practically his DOW JONES report and I hit the streets. Landlords love such a voluminous credit and job history. Then the day they ask for a lease signing, I wheel in my father who has the same name as my brother on his driver's license. Dad signed the lease, (my dad owns very little) and nobody even asked him for the driver's license.
I am a good tenant. I always landscape houses to the max so no landlord would ever try to sue me. Nonetheless, many landlords have evicted me for reasons that run the gamut: revenge over my demands. Irritation, because when my demands weren't dealt with, I called the health department and cited them. (After trying this once, trust me. You never want to do this. Eviction is no fun and a momentary pique, and the momentary pleasure of zapping a landlord with the health fuzz can never tip a scale in favor of this act. It is well weighted with the leaden pain of the eviction process.
I have suspected landlords of evicting for even lesser reasons. Carol on Sherbourne did it because she'd only rented to me to get redwood fences built. (I promised in my Fantasia Contract to do this). When her brother nixed my cocky kid (the world's BEST fence builder) spotting my kid's truant aura, Carol thought, 'oh well, we don't need YOU guys! In fact this house is harder to sell with you in it," and the moronic judge supported this demon in her whim. Judges are as bad as codebooks, landlords and the law itself. All equally bad as the entire process supports the landlord who frivolously wants OUT on the contract. I've also wondered if my Jabba the Hut landlady in the Valley really didn't evict all her tenants to collect hte fat security deposits she demanded, though some feel she just want to get the garden back from me so she could go on to rent or sell the house at higher price due to the new orchard and all the hollyhock, iris, tulips and canturbury bells.
If, for the case of argument, a landlord evicted, and I wanted to do the high penalty eviction tango, screwing the landlord to the cross of his own avarice, fighting him in eviction court, being untouchable on the judgement part by taking all my cash out of my own bank account and putting it into an account I share with my kid, and then going bankrupt and making the critter wait 6 rent-free months to even get her house back, (which you can do to a landlord in an evction) and if that landlord then sued me for 6 mos. of unpaid rent, which they can do to a tenant in an eviction) the landlord could not legally land a judgement or lein on my brother or place leins on his Paine Webber account for two reasons. 1.) he never signed the lease or was present for the signing. And b.) he never lived there. That's the law.
But here's the catch. The brother would have to show up in court and say 'I didn't sign any lease. I wasn't there.'
Then the eye of the state falls on YOU. False credit reports are illegal. You'd have to say either, ' but he was my co-signer' that's all, or 'but my brother was going to live with me and at last minute he changed his mind so I gave that credit report without ill motive.' Either would work. Scofflaws are the anathema of the entire court/judge / legal process. You can be a scofflaw; just don't get CAUGHT being one!
THE FINE TRICKS OF WORDING HOUSING LEASES. The BFer trick is to write your own lease with the MAIN MAIN THING you want hidden somewhere in the lease. For me, that's the privilege of staying at least 5 years, maybe ten, as I landscape gardens, and make jam only from the fruit of MATURE trees.
Most landlords will NOT give that kind of time to you and there are no leases that give it to you. ALL leases are ONE year and one year only. So your job is to create this fantastically generous lease that gets in the word OPTION TO RENEW is at disposition of tenant. That secures you a multi-year lease without so stating. You get an option to rent at the close of every year of lease time.
Next, get your new landlord to sign one copy. You do not have to give him the other as he might throw a rod when he reads it carefully later. Just say that you'll mail him a copy and don't. See, Jabba, you hennaed frog, you witch, I learned puh-lenty from YOU, you captain of larceny.
Be like Jabba. Write a lease that has landmines hidden in it. A seeminly generous lease. If you bring your new landlord a well typed lease, (in ten point or less font) and he'll be glad to scan it and be pleasantly surprised. Point out the many features, rent amount to be filled in by him, security deposit amount to be filled in by him. Penalties have been pre-filled in by you: i.e. ANY DAMAGE and they get to keep security deposit. You promise to pay promptly. You will never seek relocation fees no matter how long you live there. Promise the world. Here are some surefire lures:
TENANT promises to take care of all drain clogs not involving ingrown roots, at personal cost.
Tenant will pay all utilities. Tenant will pay gardener. Tenant will fix thermostat on gas water heater if it breaks (5$) but not buy the entire heater new if it explodes. Tenant will take care of garden, mowing, vine cliping, topping off trees so they don't create rot in the house's eaves, doing garden clean-up in autumn, tree pruning. Get a real long list of chores here.
Announce in this lease that you will be responsible for all ROOM painting, walls, ceilings, with top quality paint from Home Depot. But not exterior paint, although you might want a new color, so if you do, say you will paint the exterior once.
For clues on how to write a lease, get the usual dunce lease at a stationery store, or from a library book. Rewrite it to fit your profile.
For instance, always write in a paragraph to cover your ambitious landscaping plans. "In no way will the landlord penalize the tenant if he turns the yard into a vegetable garden and orchard. Tenant will be allowed to install as many fruit bearing trees, vines and vegetable producing plants as he wishes. He will not be prevented from landscaping or installing boulder or brick borders and walls, low-voltage lighting, water sprays, fountains and waterfalls."
This advertises to the landlord that you're serious about landscaping, which they love as they reap the bounties when they sell the house out from under you, later.
Announce your intentions about laying linoleum, installing valuable lighting fixtures, sanding and poly-urethaning floors and carpeting the back rooms.
If you don't do all these projects later, they can't legally get you for breach of promise. That's not what the lease stated. It only stated that you were to be allowed to do these things.
But most important, get a phrase in there that's key to any future possibile litigation, the fact that landlord may not evict you for any reason in the next ten years if you are current with rent, and landlord may not raise rent, nor sell house out from under you without reimbursing you from sale money for all betterments you installed.
Put that 3/4 of the way down as people only scan the first half of a small print document.
Bring your customized lease with you when you look at houses. The trick with renting houses is to know this fact: underpriced houses are RENTED the first hour the newspaper comes out, so you or friends who subscribe, have to be no top of three newspapers every morning. Noon won't do. Every paper has new ads daily. You've got to spot their first appearance. Sunday papers come out Saturday afternoon. You've got to be on the curb waiting.
Then, you must show up at the house, story in place, your gorgeous lease in hand, credit application filled out and a few thousand in your checking account and checkbook in hand or forget it. The tidal wave of applicants will be right behind you.
KNOW YOUR OWN CREDIT PROFILE: Call TRW 800 682-7654 or write them: PO Box 8030 Layton UT 84041. Ask to have your free, once a year credit profile mailed you. If there's something you don't like, take it out this way. Call the robot automaton employee, say: "Line number 9 says I didn't pay my Student Loan. That's not true." TRW will write college, asking for the true scoop. A week or two later, they'll have the info that you indeed owe it. BUT as you're in a dispute, you'll get a second profile from TRW for free. If line 9 is still there, insist that they call the college again. These people are total robot automatons and will dutifully do it. The second time, however, the college will note that they've sent the information a week before and IGNORE the request. Within a short time, line 9 will magically erase. So always insist a few times until any distasteful item erases. Disputes get you free print-outs every time.
Another tip. Don't go looking for credit at the local Discount House because each time you're turned down, it shows up on your TRW. Inquiries stay on for 2 yrs. So think back. When were you last begging for credit? You can only be the master of the TRW report if it's more than 2 yrs ago.
WANT TO BUY NOT RENT? BFers don't have downpayments and they get gooseflesh if you mention loans or some bank getting interest. They don't pay taxes and don't need deductions thank you very much. They like to make homebuying a person to person thing. They look for a house which has been on the market for more than a year, something a real estate agent can spot on the computer. They ask the owner if they can buy the place with a 'land contract.' It's a kind of installment plan only the bank is left out of it. And so are all those piles of interest that double the price of every house. The old owner retains title to the house until you've paid every drop. His property taxes stay the same (and that's nice as you're paying them). You see, there's been no transfer. You, the new owner, get a quit claim deed which will become valid when you pay off a given sum, say his asking price. (You don't lowball a man who's going to give you his home, friend.) There's no transfer of title until it's paid off, so the old owner doesn't get a huge lump sum of capital gains on which he must pay income taxes. You pay whatever monthly sum you can afford, maybe in cash that he doesn't even have to declare. You do this on a monthly basis. If he were to die while you were paying the house off, you wouldn't have anything so what you do is, buy a term policy life insurance payable to his heirs. If he dies, it pays a huge amount to his heirs and you get the house because that's stipulated in a contract he signed to you. But here's the so hot bonus for him; his heirs do not have to pay any taxes on life insurance. They would have to pay it on any house they inherited. But not on this trade. So you see, as is true throughout nature, the most beautiful is the most economic and vice versa. A paralegal with brain impairment could make up the deal memo contract on one page. Wheel this baby out on the streets, you'll see it flies.
WRITE THAT LEASE WRONG, you're going to need a pro-bono LAWYER later. FOR an EVICTION. There are pro-bono legal angels all over the city and there are Legal Aid Societies, (they all demand you have a super low income, like 900$ a month total.) But you won't need legal advice if you remember this one word. When given an eviction notice, ANSWER. Not the first 30 day eviction notice but the summons that the CITY sends. Answer the day after it is served you.
Get a good ballpoint pen, take the summons that was 'served' you, go downtown to the City Housing Department, Rent Stabilization division either in the downtown court building where the first, infamous OJ trail went on. (Low cost parking is on the block immediately south.) Or to Van Nuys City hall, or to West L.A.'s Purdue's Municipal Court, Room 102.
There you will ask for the proper FORMS TO do your ANSWER. They consist of a FORM TO WAIVE FEE (so you won't have to pay for the answer) and the ANSWER FORM ITSELF. To file an indigency petition you will need to have a driver's license with your photo on it or some other photo I.D., passport. And to fill out the waiver form, describing how low your income is. So there's no high (87$) answering fee. Regulations state that you must be dirt poor, earning under 1025$ a month, so if rent you're paying on paper is high, admit that there are three or four of you, and you also have a tenant leasing the sofa so you only pay $300. Claim your usual, modest traceable income not the untraceable. They used to ask what you spent on food, laundry. Latest forms I've seen do not.
Bfers spend 30$ a month for food, and so state, as they grow their own produce and eat brown rice. And they spend zero on laundry. After you get the waiver, which takes 30 seconds, you will file an 'Answer.' This is something more lengthy, times four, so you might want to take the FORM HOME and get it back the next day.
THE ANSWER is literally that. You ANSWER whatever the landlord put in his complaint. He says you don't mow lawn, say you did and say that Exhibit A will be photos of that, Exhibit B will be letters from witnesses or neighbors who are not party to the action.
If LANDLORD put two names in the eviction notice and complaint, BOTH MUST ANSWER. Even if one is your co-signer who lives in a mansion, He must answer. If your co-signer wants to waive fees due to indigency, and he's a millionaire, you may end up paying his 87$ just so you don't have to drag him down to the court house to make this answer. Then, you can fill out his papers for him, his answer, and just have him sign it and file it yourself.
In your legal Answer, state which laws landlord broke, how landlord is a cheating rat and why you deserve to be in that house. The judge will read this document and this one only so write it carefully. Clearly state how you did not do the offenses landlord alleges, how landlord is seeking to rent the place for more money. How landlord is retaliating as you called the Health Department. Your answer must be neatly typed, not on legal paper, not required. Xerox it four times and go back to City Hall and file it with the forms you've filled out.
Next, whatever photographic evidence you promised the court in your Answer must be shot and developed. Photograph the dump; INSIDE, use Black and white and flash to catch all the unfunctioning, broken things. Get letters from APPLIANCE REPAIR MEN citing what it will cost to fix it. Have someone come out to the house and look at the damage, get their estimates. BUT better than all of this is one report from the Health Department, BUILDING AND SAFETY Department or the FAIR HOUSING Council. Get them to come out and look at the place, get some form or paper from them. THE GAS company will come if it's gas related. These are free ways of getting evidence. The DWP will also come out and cite and condemn non-working electrical things. To find more people to report landlord to, call the Consummer Affairs Guide to tenants. All these bureaus' reports are worth GOLD. PAPERWORK is GOD in a court.
Collect your graphic evidence. Or, you might get reputable witnesses. The actual presence of friends in court, who say 'Poor Bottomfeeder has no heat, the dishwasher waters the floors, the pipes leak into the yard. " etc. Affidavits will not do. Only their presence as witnesses in court will work.
If landlord is asking you to relocate after years of living there, they have to pay you $2,000. If you have a doctor's letter saying you're invalid, or have a dependent relative, it's $5,000. Maybe even $5k for both disabled tenants, a fiver for each sad invalid.
If you'd like to request this payment, state this in your written 'answer.' The court will give you a copy for the landlord's lawyer and ask that you have someone who is NOT PARTY TO THE ACTION mail this and fill out a form so stating. KEEP THAT FORM. Get a friend to sign it. You can actually do the mailing. You should have some stamps as you must mail landlord's lawyer that copy within 24 hours. I'd do it as soon as you leave the building. It does not have to be mailed registered or special delivery. Court demands that a disinterested friend does the mailing to 'witness' that it was sent, and that friend fills out a simple form which court gives you. Never send anything registered assuming it helps your legal validity. It won't. Give the extra money to Mother Teresa if you want to throw it away. Courts assume that the mail gets through. If landlord claims he never got it, it won't hurt your case because you'll have that form that friend gave you with his signature stating that he mailed it.
Now, the city will write you in a few weeks, give you your day in court within a month so get your exhibits, letters, photos ready to prove all your allegations.
YOUR HOMEWORK- To create a total verbal inquistion of the landlord which you will do in the court room, before the judge. You may not realize this salient legal fact: you are not allowed to talk, not to address the plaintiff landlord or the judge. You can't ask judge to give you time to live there longer, or decide in your favor or give you any concessions. COURT IS like slamming into a brick wall, once a second for an hour.
You may do one thing only --- question witness in the manner judge instructs you to do, either relative to his origianl complaint (always super thin) or his statement as court opens.
This questionin process you must do effectively, backing them into verbal corners. As you do it, observe RULE # ONE: Never ask a question of witness or plaintiff to which you don't know the answer he'll give. RULE #2, show nothing but dispassionate interest, no anger. And RULE #3, double up on the info in a question so you get it ALL IN AT ONCE, i.e. build your entire case with one question because JUDGE will not give you more than one or two questions!
EXAMPLE: when I first met you at the house, did you tell me security deposit was only $1,000 and take this check for that sum, and then later write lease to say another sum entirely?? (Hand bailiff the cancelled check to give to judge.)
The landlord will lie like a rug here, and allege it was this absolutely huge, larger sum of $2500. Persist in questioning. How do you explain fact that that day, when I first met you, I gave you THIS check for security deposit and it was only l000$ security deposit and you accepted it. "Well, YES," landlady prevaricates: "but that was only partial payment. On the lease I clearly state $2500 security deposit and you signed that lease." "But I didn't have eyeglasses that day. Do you remember that? " You signed it.
Then, Your honor I have a witness here in court who will testify that she assured me the contract reflected the verbal agreement of 4 days earlier, when she took my cash. In truth, it did not." ONLY THEN, when it is LINEAR AND SEQUENTIAL --will you be allowed to bring in a witness. Judges don't know what they're called but they hate 'non sequiteurs.
Bring in your witness. And keep it linear. "So, after you swore to this witness and me that your contract reflected your verbal agreement, you added in that weird codicil at the bottom only I didn't initial it, did I?' So maybe you added it later? As you never sent me a copy of the lease and didn't give me one that day?" STUFF a single question with four damning facts. That's the trick.
LANDLADY will say, " SO what? You signed the lease." Then you're allowed to answer that. "Yes, but that codicil wasn't on there. "How would you know if you didn't have glasses?" I don't know it. but there, your honor, she's just admitted that I didnt' have my glasses."
You've got her THERE! So stay sequential and see if you can't be a Perry mason. Go for the awe-inspiring parry and feint as judges are so hateful and bored. ANYTHING banal and USUAL to them, they will squelch.
And as a final fillip, you hold up the endorsed check that indicates security deposit was only $1000 and landlord cashed it 4 days before you signed the lease. Then you can address the court. Your honor, this proves fraudulent intent. She knew I couldn't see the lease. She gave me no copies of the lease after I signed. Here's my check showing what our true, verbal agreement was. Only $1,000 was to be security deposit. The other 3thousand was RENT. A first and last month is what she told me!
You will win even if you get evicted because usually the judge can give you perks. Like not make you beholden for rent, or give you lots of time to get out. Rent-free time. You might get relocation money. If you're lucky, they'll give you value for the garden you installed. But only if you have magic will a judge let you live out that money, meaning if garden is worth 5k, stay 4 mos. That is not really going to happen, gang. The only way you can get more than a few weeks is BANKRUPTCY COURT.
Yes, that's the court of last recourse. If something goes wrong and the Sheriff gives you a 5 day warning that he's coming, relax for three days, then take 160$ to Bankruptcy office down at Spring and Temple (if you do this in L.A.) get the forms and fill out a Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
MANY CHOICES HERE: it's up to you which creditors you want to list. You can do it with no creditors but the landlord and his judgement and rent you think you MIGHT owe. You can throw in a few magazines you never paid for, or a credit card or the utility bills, cable bills that you can't pay due to this eviction and while you're at it, throw in a few pals.
If you don't want to go bankrupt, which one of the tenants on the summons do you want to declare legally bankrupt? It doesn't have to be you. ANY tenant on the original summons who lives in house will do.
As far as actually completing your bankruptcy, wait until this is about to go to court and dismiss the bankruptcy. When landlord hears about it, and reactivates her eviction and you get that sheriff's warning, declare bankruptcy again. Do this for a year until landlord goes legally insane. That will give you puhlenty of time to look for great digs and to earn the money to pay for it and you can dance on landlord's grave to boot so it's a real win-win situation.
ONLY WAY YOU CAN LOSE on a bankruptcy. The papers they give you are all about payback. They're very interested in how much money you make a year, and how you're going to pay back what you owe. Now, get this. THE IRS reads all the bankruptcy papers in the land. If you say you earn 30k and they never saw the W-2's, the IRS will come looking for you. So tell the court you only earn 3k a year and yet you intend to pay back this debt. All these debts. Cuz you don't want the IRS looking for you.
As for how lousy a bankruptcy looks on your future life? Bottom feeders are not going to go through with the entire bankrupcy. They file but they never show up for the final hearing. They are just buying time. Those three months are rent free. And what if you did go thru with it? Next time you buy a house, do it in a relative's name, with their credit. JUST LIVE in it until you die and then it reverts to them. Again, you gotta have relatives you love, trust, or vice versa. Who love and trust YOU.
THE FUTURE SCOOP ON TOTALLY FREE HOUSING: In California, there's a trend toward what is called "housing takeovers." Hank Aguilar, a UCLA biz grad and ex-con read about an old California squatter's law called "adverse possession" which allows anyone to move into an abandoned home. You can find this article on the Internet as LA Times lets you into their files. Aguilar found lists of foreclosures, put new locks on the buildings and rented them to tenants without informing the banks that he had done so. As 90,000 homes went into foreclosure in California last year there were abundant homes to pick from. It's a well known fact that eviction courts are gentle with the poor and loathe to move them onto the street, so many tenants found they could stay in their posh new homes for years. Unfortunately, Aguilar got greedy and filed fraudulent quit claims and was prosecuted but another company, Windsor Pacific, continues to operate legally, finding vacant houses in foreclosure and renting them 'as is.' The California law states that the new tenant must improve the vacant property, pay taxes on it and live in it for five years. Then, they get to keep the house. If someone comes to court with a superior title, before the end of five years, the possesor is out of luck. Even if that's the case, worst case scenario is, an empty house is lived in for a while until the bank sells it. Seems to me that everybody wins.
DECORATING ON A DIME: You've got the house. However you got it, now that you've got this gem, use every trick I'm going to give you for achieving FREE DECOR. Decor is very important for high morale. The main trick of the Nouveau Goodwill Impovero-Deco design is to swim life's river the way it's pointed. Let everything funky be restored to its original funk. Don't remodel one bit. Use the "This Old House" Bob Villa method of leaving the antique just as it was.
GRUNGEY WALLS? USE that buckled wallpaper and grungey walls as 'texture' under mixed paint ends. (I brake for paint cans on the curb). Always put the textured, sandy, gritty outdoor paint on first, slaphazardly, doesn't have to be everywhere. Just in places. As it's slow to dry, wallpaper comes loose, and you tear random pieces out of it.
When wall is dry, you're going to put a good thick layer of the DARKEST COLOR first. I like a copen blue, myself. This is the only coat with complete coverage. The rest will be 'kissed on.' The dark coat takes a gallon, the rest quarts. So, second coat is pale blue, 'kissed' on with light, brushy layers of different pale lavendar and another kiss from pale pink. We light-brush and dry-brush the lighter layers onto the rich texture to show the copen blue off as background. Your third coat is medium color, fourth coat is lighter still, fourth is very pale, fifth is white, dry brushed on like white 'snow,' catching just the highest points of the texture.
The wall ends up looking like Pompeii in the light of a Mediterranean sunset. Spectacular. And all the torn or wrinkled wallpaper areas are the best part of all. No, the best part is this: the fact that you realize that you can live anywhere. Life can not throw you any more curves. No matter how delapidated the building, it's better than the best brand-spanking new house a rich guy has. You cannot be challenged by grungey architcture. The weirder it is, the better it will look when you finish with it!
ICKY CARPETS? The mattress where you lay your face and the carpet are two places where grunge isn't appreciated. TRY HOME SHAMPOOING: Only do this on a dry day. Any humidity in the air and you'll buckle your floors, put mold in your lungs. First, use PUMP spray carpet cleaner on all bad spots. This stuff is a miracle. Next, rent a steam cleaner. Avoid those expensive carpet cleaners and costly laundry detergents. Get a bottle of discount detergent, strenthened with a little ammonia. Costs one fiftieth of the other chemicals. Move every bit of furniture out of the room. Start at back end of room, farthest from bathrooms where you leave the dirty water. Go over every area twice, dumping the muck down the toilet at regular intervals. Turn on a space heater and toast the room overnight.
If that carpet is not gorgeous and wonderful, tear it out, install it out in the garage where you'll put your computer room or carpentry workshop. Install it on top of plastic tarps, so no grease gets on bottom side. Sure, sawdust gets in it, but when you saw, put tarps over area. Anyway, sawdust vacuums up easily. The comfort of carpets in a garage makes you paint, spray, saw, write in luxury and is worth it in the end. In the living room, start over. Free carpeting is a cinch to find.
HOW TO SCORE FREE CARPETING AND CARPET WASHING SECRETS. ACQUIRING: Visit a carpet store just after closing time. The bins in back are filled with rolls of carpet they've pulled out of homes. Be prepared with a truck. Load up. Another good place is curb, trash night. Many home owners tear out 12 x 8 carpets. WASHING: Get carpet to your rented home, lay it on a slanted driveway. If there is oil anywhere, put down a plastic tarp. Use spray carpet cleaner for the stains. The commercial one in the super market that starts with the letter S is better than the one with R. I'd like to shout out the name but I resolve not to favor any one product in print. Now, spots all gone? Wet the carpet down well with a dozen buckets of soapy ammonia water. Wrap a foot long 1 x 4 plank in plastic, use it as a squee-jee scraping the soapy water out of the fibers, moving downhill. Do this several times, then rinse. All the water and dirt will slide downhill and down driveway to curb. If air is dry, in a day or two the carpet will be be top dry enough to pick up, flip like a pancake, orr hang on a line or fence to finish air drying. Voila. NEW carpets.
PRO CLEANERS ARE CHEAPER, LESS WORK: Call the carpet cleaner that has the ad, 3 rooms for $7.50. These guys are real punks but they'll come with their little scammer machine and tell you it needs costly de-spotting. He'll want more money, more like $37.50. Keep pointing too the floor and speaking bogus Swedish or Russian, depending on your coloring. Say 'one room only' in broken English. Flash the $7.50 in cash. No matter what he says feign being perplexed, then when he starts screaming at you, be very angry. Demand that work be done for $7.50 like the ad says only demand it in broken English. No matter what he screams at you, be like a wall he can't get through. Grab the phone and mime calling cops. Speak much better English as you say, 'Mr Policeman? ' Swear foully in Burmeese until the f....r cleans the carpet.
LAYING: All carpet stores have freelance carpet layer artisans who call in daily to do jobs, sit on curb or in parking lot. Get chummy with one of these types, have your address on your card, ask him to stop by after work. They are so used to doing carpet that they can kneekick goods into a few rooms in a few minutes, and be glad for 30$ each room. Don't bother using padding unless he can score it for a few bucks.
DECORATING SECRETS: FURNITURE- The best stuff I ever owned was found in the garage of a geriatric. Call every ad in the Recycler, ads for anything---old coffee grinders, old posters, plants. Listen to voices, waiting to hear a geriatric. When I get a geezer, I ask about the item he's advertised, but then I go roundabout and finally ask 'do you have any old furniture in the garage that you'd let me look at if I bring a flashlight and do the moving and bring cash? If yes, I drive right over. They always have glorious stuff. And always ask them if there's any pottery or dishes, vases on top shelf in kitchen.
GRUNGEY OLD TABLES OR VARNISHED GOLD? I found a Monterey California 20's Arts & Crafts table in an old man's garage. It was scratched so he gave it to me for l0$. An antique dealer who came to one of my garage sales told me he could get $500 for it, and I shouldn't think of refinishing those scratches. Just an alcohol wash, which I describe below.
TRADE-TIPS: I put my own ad in papers to sell plants; an antique dealer answered. She was on a gardening jag and was willing to part with truly rare pottery for boulders, flagstone and plants. I drove them to her house. Her rooms were literally double and triple lined in breakfronts filled with treasures. We're still friends.
Start now, collecting old furniture. Keep it in the garage. Start watching all those home improvement shows on cable. The FURNITURE GUYS (on The Learning Channel) recommend that after using paint remover and a scraper, then a sander, use naptha or paint thinner to clean piece well. Use it with a scrub pad. Then brush on a lst coat of richly colored varnish. Let dry, then sand w. 320 paper. Meanwhile use lacquer thinner on knobs, hot vinegar if brass. Use a tack cloth on the sanded wood, then apply another coat of stain with brush then wipe with rag. Sand w. 320 paper, wipe with tack cloth and varnish again. Now, sand lightly, again with the finest paper, wax, let dry then buff.
Perk up the finish of old, varnished furniture with the ANTIQUE RESTORER'S METHOD, rubbing w. Mineral Spirits on cheesecloth to clean, then denatured alcohol to polish, then 'air swipe' (like a plane almost landing) with pad of cheesecloth and real shellac.
PREVIOUSLY ENAMELED FURNITURE should not always be stripped. It can be left kind of rough, cottagey and artsy-craftsy by sanding in spots until wood shows through. I flipped out one day at a swap- meet booth on Melrose Blvd, run by a clever kid. His merchandise was junk he'd picked up at garage sales which he'd 90-fied. WHITE painted furniture was easy to enhance into a country cottage look. He sanded spots bare on it, taking off the white paint in places, showing the natural pine underneath. Nothing more. He sold it that way. Where he'd found old brown, varnished furniture, with country lines to it, he'd enhance that country look by stripping it all the way down to the wood, varnishing then waxing it.
Another variation is to paint a piece with a different shade of flat enamel, then sand off half the color, showing the different paint layers and a little bare wood as well.
For inspiration and techniques, check Jocasta Innes books in fine book stores. A true bottom feeder won't buy those books. They're 25$ each. We sit in the store reading, and take notes.
Last, the savvy kid at the Melrose Swap Meet found funky, redwood patio furniture, made of planks just like old fencing, which years of rain and exposure had stripped, eroding its grain into fissures. He brushed DIFFERENT bright color dyes or clear pigment paints, I'm not sure which, so that some of the planks were viridian green, others henna reddish orange. He used flat, acrylic varnish (so clothes won't stain) to finish. He SOLD it to hip people for living room furn. It was SO DYNAMITE. This kid didn't work 40 hrs a week hoeing somebody else's row. He had his own creative cash biz, probably paid no taxes. His days were spent in ecstasy, every furniture piece a different creative challenge, doing it all in his carpeted garage listening to Vivaldi with a 29$ Sears Sander! Hallelujah for humans!
ARTWORK: Hey, if you don't do some 40 hour a week dull job with 2 hours torture traffic time daily tacked on you have time to OIL-Paint easy NAIVE painting like Rousseau or easy impressionism, French Impressionist fakes that sell for big money. Matisse is easy to copy. Dufy, too. One library book could inspire a hobby that could turn into a super living. All big cities have art galleries where Frankly Counterfeit sells for $400-1000 each. The only caveat; you're not allowed to forge Dufy's signature, it has to be your own.
When you've collected a lot of 30's artware pottery, glass, knick-knack shelves, teacups, group them in a still life with a gingham napkin and bowls of fruit and vases of flowers, set against a curtained window with landscape outside, put the cat to sleep in the foreground and do a kitsch painting you can sell for a few thousand in the decorator's district.
HIT GARAGE SALES, BUY JUNK & fix it. Buy huge, wooden spoons, bowls, old frames, boxes, and papier mache them with scrunched up newspaper strips. These shall be your Christmas gifts. Always buy goose down quilts, they wash up easily, which most people don't know, and fluff up fine in the dryer. Most people throw these away the second they get spotted. Yuppies are such jerks.
OLD UPHOLSTERED FURNITURE: This is the article most frequently thrown on the curb trash night. If you've watched Furniture Guys, you know that ripping the old fabric off a couch and putting on new takes nothing more than a grapefruit knife and a staplegun. Of course, you blow beaucoup bucks if you use expensive yardage. I love decorator area swap meets because you can buy 15 yards of cloth for a buck. I do it all the time. I tie dye the plain fabrics or block print or paint them with dye.
TIE DYING- Plain fabric shows wear fast. Tie-dye, paint or dye anything you're going to use on chairs or sofas. A library book shows you all the tricks. I seek out thrift store, enamel refrigerator drawers or use huge jam processing enamel pans. You don't want to use metal near dye.
As you can't tie dye anything over five yards, CUT OUT your back, front, sides first. If you've ever sewn, you know that to fit a muslin pattern, you drape and pin with the seams on the outside. Leave one inch seams. Unpin, dye, dry and iron, then repin and baste. Tie Dye sheets and make quilt covers.
CRAZY CARPETS- Squares of canvas get stencilled, freehand painted, then varnished.
LIGHTING: LOW 40-60 watt LIGHT bulbs in abundance make house look elegant and cozy, end up being cheaper in utility bills. If the lamp is a Salvation horror, cover shade with a moth-eaten paisley scarf.
HOUSE AND YARD PLANTS - There are three secrets to a garden stocked with flowers: your NEIGHBORS' trash for his empty, plastic MILK or soft drink BOTTLES. Next, NEIGHBOR'S GARDEN for his PLANTS, seeds and especially CUTTINGS. Next, NEIGHBORS' TRASH BARRELS FULL OF his YARD CLIPPINGS.
CONTAINERS. You have to start plants in some kind of a nursery. Babies in the ground are vulnerable to snails. Seeds or cuttings must go into a pot covered with a sheer, plastic bottle, a container or a clear bag. Trash night on my street, it takes me five minutes with two huge trash bags. I can easily find four dozen root beer bottles, milk bottles, cat litter bottles, ammonia and opaque bleach bottles. THE CLEAR ones will become DOMES. THE OPAQUE ones will become pots for the plant.
Next, I heat a knife on the stove's flame, and cut through the plastic, decapitate these bottles and place put four small stab wound-holes in the bottom of each for drainage. Be very careful that your hand isn't in the path of the knife which can slip off the plastic, sideways with all that pressure you're exerting. Use a sink of HOT DETERGENT to rinse milk bottles of butterfat.
CUTTINGS: There isn't a bush or tree that won't clone itself. Gardening books show you the technique and timing, which isn't much. Put good soil in any pot. Stick twig in soil after immersing bottom in ROOTING HORMONE. (Make your own by soaking a lot of crushed willow twigs in water. Willow has the active ingredient) Bury the cutting's bottom 1/4 inch. Cover with dome made of a clear, plastic bottle so a small greenhouse is formed. Sometimes you air layer woody bushes, by breaking stem a little, bending, wrapping wound in hormone, soil and plastic. Impatiens grow lustily from an inch long piece. As my neighbor's garden will give me 400 pieces, and my street can give me 400 bottles, I could have 800$ worth of plants from thirty minutes of work any night of the week.
SOIL: The GREAT gardener's secret is real humus, none of that 8$ a bag potting mix that's as nutritious and dead as Weber's white bread. Instead, go out under bushes and dig where the sun don't shine, where black soil hides. Fill up a cardboard box with this black gold, then shake it through a one of those black plastic plant flats, which acts as a sieve, onto a plastic manure bag or tarp. Fill your pots and root beer bottles.
I got to WLA College, southern parking lot on the hill. Twenty huge compost piles. Ten buckets in my hatchback and I'm gone. Hamilton High has a track. Their back gate admits you to the many sandpiles used to make it. Sandpiles, buckets, beaverline, chutzpah, not necessarily in that order.
HOUSE PLANTS: Go to thrift store, buy those 40's pottery cache pots for a quarter each. Fill with your freshly made humus. Ask your neighbor if you can UNROOT a few baby ferns from those HUGE CLUMPS in neighbor's yard. Get SPIDER plants as they multiply fast and are effectively splashy in those old pots, and multiply like bunnies from runners that hang from the plant. If pot has no hole, put some aquarium charcoal, peat moss under the plant, on the bottom to prevent soil's souring. Always under-water sealed pots!
DUMPSTER DIVING FOR PLANTS: Most stores, drugstores, nurseries throw their dinged or semi-wilted plants in bins. Scout 'em down. Synagogues throw away fabulous plants. Private homes do likewise. I have every tired palm tree that ever appeared on Yogi Bhajan's trashpile because I live on his street. I unwilt them in a lanai. Takes a year.
FINE ROSES- Really, fragrant roses are a rare thing. On my street, I have visited several hundred rose bushes when I walk the pets. All of them are more flash than cash, commercial junk, paltry aromas. But there's this one bush in my neighborhood which was a truly fragrant rose---a dark red thing, its contours ordinary, but one of these magical blooms perfumes the entire night. A single bloom filled any room with intense, celestial damask fragrance. I never knew what it was, an Abe Lincoln or a Crimson Glory but I knew I had to have it. How? I couldn't justify uprooting a neighbor's rose. I got a tome on roses and found my answer. On an autumn day, I went over there with pruning shears and took off every branch in the right place for an early winter pruning. People do this to roses to get them to flower better the next year. You must prune roses. I took the cuttings home, razored out the buds and budded them all onto all the crummy rose bushes on my property. When they 'took', I cut off all branches but the prize ones.
A bud surgery involves an easy t-incision in the host tree's bark, then you open the bark like little doors. Stick the bud in; a little electrical tape binds the bud into the wound. A month later, when you have sprouts, you cut off the top of the host tree's branch, letting the bud go crazy and 'become' the plant. Voila, thousands of magic blooms for me and my neighbor's tree is better than ever due to the pruning. This non-invasive transfer tech is a metaphor for all that Bottom Feeders do. Martha Stewart doesn't bud, she just uses the pieces as cuttings. So you have two ways to clone the roses you like.
GARDEN ART: The best art in a garden is ROCKS. Boulders. To find the, go anywhere there are mountains. Picnic in riverbeds just east of the San Gabriel Valley; Fill the truck bed up with boulders. Repeat the picnic every week. Cement them into rows to hold up the flower beds. I also hang paintings in the garden, and gaudy signs. When I find broken crockery or tiles, I set them in homemade, cement form stepping stones.
I recently walked through a defunct nursery. They'd left 5 dozen cement borders made in the 40's. They now edge the garden beds of my antique house.
FLOWERS FOR VASES, - My house is filled with huge, Renaissance bouquets. How do I do it? Week-ends, after hours, I drive up in that alley behind the posh florist shop. Guaranteed, tons of spectacular flowers from week-end weddings, or merchandise leftovers, will litter the bins. My son leans in with a flashlight, loads up a bag or box. We scoot home, I clip their stems under water, load into vases for all the rooms. I always add a little lemon juice and sugar to the water so they last until the next trash night.
Florist bins are also full of the props they use at weddings, like fifty yards of white silk organza, vases, and glittery decorations. You might need these when you give your own wedding or give a garage sale. Florist's bins are also full of potted orchid which have outgrown their containers and are no longer saleable as they've fallen out of bloom. I divide the plants, put them in a larger pot full of my magic homemade black soil, set them on my compost pile to stay warm and root, stand back and watch them slowly come back into bloom. Did you know orchids outlive people? Once, a few weeks after Easter, my fav florist's dumpster had 12 potted, perfectly fine hydrangea plants. WOW, I'd always wanted ONE and had never been able to afford one. I went home and planted all twelve by moonlight! Those turn into regulation garden variety hydrangaes, too! Winter, you'll get hollies and poinsettias. Spring, you'll get forced bulbs. Get them out of the pot, into fertile soil and there's a good chance they'll recover and naturalize.
More than any other kind of trash, with flowers you have to know what day the truck comes to pick up the trash so you can be there the night before, when the bin is piled high and the goods are highly fresh and accessible. The day after trash is picked up, the flowers are all 6 feet down in a well. Nobody likes crawling into a deep, dark MOIST bin. Even bottom feeders are refined. Which reminds me of a story. Phyllis, a classic bottom feeder and inveterate trasher, (and totally strung out on meth---she 'hung paper' meaning she wrote her own drug prescriptions..well, it was the early 70's), stuck her head into a large bin and just then her drugs wore off and she fell sound asleep. She was awakened and chased away by the store owner the next morning. Even Phyllis was appalled at how low she'd sunk.
So now we've decorated our house, how do we enjoy it best?
GET UTILITIES TURNED ON. Let there be light (phone, gas, water, cable) and relatives with property who already have contracts with the utility company as co-signers. Always USE RELATIVES' names to get free installation without deposits. But here's the final fillip. After you get the account up and running, SWITCH the ACCOUNT over into the name of someone LIVING WITH YOU who is totally low-income. It could be YOU of course. But choose someone who has not had income to declare or had to pay taxes.
Then, after account name is switched over, go back to Dept of Water and Power and have THIS person apply for a "Residential Low Income Rate Application." You get it at the office where you pay your bills. Make certain this person you've switched your account over to can prove a very low income, either from welfare or a SSI check, or prolonged joblessness or hey, what's wrong with no earnings at all? Gramps maybe, living on a fixed income. Or a crazy son on SSI? A daughter who is jobless? It will half your DWP or GAS bill. Same with phone but you can only have ONE line in the house.
Some Utility companies ask to see your salary check stubs or W-2s. Photocopy them, fill in their application and you'll be pleasantly surprised by having your gas or phone rates go down. Some want you to sign a notarized statement about your low earnings. Some want to see that you're on a fixed income due to SSI. Give em what they want as it will get your rates lowered to a quarter of what you were paying.
Never let the DWP categorize your rented home as a Commercial property (two units or more with one being the landlord, the other the tenant) because DWP rates are double! Even if you're renting the guest house, when you open your account, it is residential. The worst is to rent the house of a landlord who has called it commercial. He's in the guest house, you're in the front house, and he's set it up so your utility bills are double. When you turn on the juice in that house, tell them he moved, and it's a single house and you don't rent your guest house, it's your child in there.
CABLE TV SERVICE OR RENT VIDEOS? Don't try those costly illegal boxes. Cable companies are on to them. Get basic cable for 32$ a month (CNN, Discovery, Comedy Channel and The Learning Channel are all anyone really needs) and with a few yards of cable in the house, spread cable around to all the tubes in the house. Clip video store coupons to rent movies for a dollar. I used to pick up every junk mail ad on Fridays. My neighbors threw them into their trash. I found dozens of coupons, dozens of dollar movies. Another way, rent'n share. One group rents the thing, sees it right after work, the next sees it after dinner, the third group at bedtime. They all pass .33C to the last guy who returns it. Last, in L.A., we all know Academy members. They get thirty of the best movies on video a year, and will rent to you for gardening help, cooking, home made bread, etc. Sign in and out in a permanent SITE, like inside a book or on a big notepad so there are no forgetful space-out accusations of 'didn't you have TWO movies last week?
TELEPHONE- This can be inexpensive if you are 'lower income' and only have one line. They cut you all kinds of deals but I am required to have two phone numbers at times I work on a Psychic Hotline. Two lines are handy for other reasons. A teenaged child that is talkative would cause you business losses. Or, one might like to surf the Internet without friends and clients getting a busy signal. Or, on one line you might like having multiple phones but the INTERNET line is just that one thing. Well, the way to handle A.T. & T's huge charges for installation of multiple new lines is--do your own. If I learned, anyone can.
Have a 50 foot spool of Radio Shack's best telephone wire (the kind that won't pick up Mexican radio stations) and a Radio Shack Phone jack, a hammer, a sharp paring knife for peeling wires, and a screwdriver --all ready to go. When the A T& T telephone guy comes to install your phoneline, tell him you want to know how to run some wire into the house to create a second jack, or maybe more than two, depending on how many garage sale phones you have. He will be working outside the building on a gray, covered box (which he has opened). He will point to the different terminals, show you how to peel back the wrap, exposing the plastic-wrapped copper wires, separate the two wires, wrap them and screw them down to the terminal. He'll also show you where and how you insert the opposite end of the long wire into a jack. While his instructions are fresh in your mind, run back into the house, and do it. Pin down the two wires, close jack. Hammer a hole with nail, screw it into base shoe at toe level. Don't ask phone guy for help. He'll bill you a huge fee. He might inspect your finished work, for free, though, especially if you're a babe and make good coffee and have cookies in the house.
COSMETICS/BEAUTY ITEMS- We Bfers work for the wealthiest families in town, as astrologers, massage therapists, landscapers, fence builders, house painters, or portrait painters. These super-straight people are attracted to us for our zest as well as our low prices. They know we're poor and on their own, one day will offer us used clothing and test the waters to see if we'll go for half bottles of perfume or shampoo and old shoes. When they see that grateful smile and realize we will use costly things that shouldn't be thrown away, and that we joyfully cherish the Gucci quality of these products ---and when we convey that we couldn't afford them on our own and are enthusiastically grateful, they become super generous at regular intervals. My wealthy client, Judith, cleans shelves and wardrobes so profusely that I am forced to find poor people and pass on the overflow! She loves my email describing who got what and how they loved it. I reward her generosity with these letters. Nothing worse than giving stuff to people you HOPE can use it, then never hearing what happened, how they used it.
HAIR CARE TIPS- I use empty toilet paper rollers as hair curlers. Leave a little paper on them so you don't get the GLUE. I leave an inch of beer in a bottle for setting lotion.
SAVING ON UTILITIES: Cook food half way with gas stove. Turn stove off, cook the tail end with the steam that's already inside the sealed pot. In every room, use 40 watt lightbulbs only. Hotter ones can cause fires. Line-dry clothing in sun, then, spin-dry 5 min. to fluff. Dryers chew fabric up, leave your costly duds in the lint filter. Use dryer as little as possible. It's an animal at using juice. In Winter, turn the fridge off when you go to bed, first person to wake turns it on in the morning.
SAVING ON SOAP- I do both laundry and dishes with the same, liquid dishwater detergent and save money by diluting it with water. Keep old bottles around so that new bottles can be diluted immediately. I dilute shampoo, conditioner, too and without telling the kids, either. Everything is a tenth as thick as it was in the market, and a tenth as costly to use.
CLEANERS- I use bargain rate scouring powders, and dilute my ammonia to 1/4 strength by keeping 3 extra, empty bottles around. "One becomes four when it comes in the door". Avoid those sponges with raspy stuff on 'em. It's been saturated with anti-fungicide which is poison to aquarium fish and to US too, as we also are living things.
HEAT/FURNACE TECH- Turn the home's furnace totally off. Have the pilot light snuffed by the Gas Co. You can't afford the toll of its indiscriminate blast in the many rooms of a big house. Use an electric hot oil radiator, which is very inexpensive, much longer lasting than an electric heater which dies every few years. Oil radiators are effective to take chills off rooms withinin minutes of your occupying them, and only cost 60$. If room approaches really warm, put on a sweater and turn the thing off until you can't take the chill again. The nice thing about these oil radiators is that you can keep a teapot warm on them. They'll heat a flannel nightgown, sweats or slippers in 15 seconds. And in the bathroom, use them for hanging chilly towels and bathrobes so when you emerge, you can terry and toast up.
AIR CONDITIONERS SUCK- JUICE that is. Never turn one on. Instead, hose down every tree up to 20 feet high. They will act as a refrigeration grid. Plant vines on every column in the lanai you put outside the house. Spray them. Spray patio floors, sidewalks, grass, plants. All of it chills the air that moves into the house.
RENT HOUSES WITH CHIMNEYS-The cozy mood a fire produces is worth the misery of a downdraft in winter. Fire wood is available for free on every street in the city. Gardeners love you to haul it off saving them going to the City Dump. People with tall Palm trees always have fronds, which burn hot and long. Landscapers have great piles of wood at their yard and will give it away to any who'll haul it away. Use the fireplace often but be fussy. Try to avoid pine which dirties chimney flues more than any other wood. And when there's no fire, block the hole!
MAGAZINES? PAPERS? All magazines offer you a few months for free. Hey, they want my biz so bad??? I take them up on it. My neighbors subscribe to all the major dailies including New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The friendly ones stack the papers outside their back door at my request. Strangers leave them on the sidewalk trash night and I swoop by, nailing a stack of magazines of every stripe while I walk the cats at midnight. I get them all for free on the INTERNET but sometimes the paper version is faster to read.
DO A LOTTA MAIL-OUTS? BFers use and reuse stamps. They pick up envelopes out of the trash on their street, steam or soak stamps off, re-use metered envelopes, making new address tags on their computer. They seal rips or slits with scotch tape, clean up stamps, using white-out on cancellation marks. They just don't put their personal name and address on anything that goes out this way because the fine is hundreds of dollars. They send out SCRIPTS in very large envelopes which are 'used.' As there is no address on it, they call the film corporation a few days later, and ask the reader, did you get "BUYING TIME?" And the reader says yes, there was no address or phone number on it, just the writer's name inside script. Give it to them, then. NOTE: The script will get rejected 9 times out of ten and comes back to the bottom feeder in another large envelope and they save that one, and reuse it, too!
Bottom feeders never use bad stamps to pay utility bills having their name and address inside because if P.O spots a bogus letter, they open it and they will come looking for you. BFers do sign letters to pals, with their first name only…..and use bogus stamps. For none-close relationships, where person requires your full name and address, the BFer will put his return address on the letter but in this case, they use 3 small-denomination stamps --- one, two and three cents --- on an envelope with address clearly on the back. 99% get through. The one that is caught comes back to you saying 'insufficient postage,' which is not a crime. Mail is handled by machines only (and we include the postman when we say that) so that's why these audacious ploys work. Heard all the above from a Post Office Employee, who was a BFer himself.
HOW TO DO LAUNDRY? Good dollars go down the drain at laundromats. BFers get a second use out of bathwater. Try it. After you bathe, drop in some cheap borax, (eco-health nuts swear by it, eschew detergent as being carcinogenic) or they put diluted anti-bacterial dish washing detergent in the tub. Expensive TIDE-soap is a hoax of the public. Its chemical toxins are absorbed by skin and are rumored to cause cancer. The most toxin-free of all cleaning agents is Borax. Rub some into the wet clothes, scrub; let them soak while you drop in more clothing. When it's all boraxed, go back to first item and start scrubbing. Your nail brush will work fine. Rinse first time in that tub water. Drain tub, roll up wash into one corner of tub floor, squeeze semi dry. Stand on it. Tread the grapes. Now, fill tub again, rinse with 1 tsp vinegar, much better than costly softeners which are actually toxic to the body. Swish the borax out. The acidity helps. Squeeze the wash dry, carry in basket to tree branches where cords have been permanently hung, and line dry. But what about the nice fluff? This is so important, it bears repeating: NEVER put wet clothing in a dryer. Dryers EAT cottons up. Look in the lint filter, you'll see why your beloved, soft cotton garments get holes. Dryers chew up and swallow cotton thirstily. Instead, line dry and next morning, when wash is almost totally dry, bring wash inside and spin dry fluff for the last five minutes.
The Bottom Feeder method saves money FOUR ways. You spend less cash on terrible chemicals, you save on doctor bills from not having detergents coming in through your pores; you get more wear out of your costly duds and fourth, you save on the utilities as dryers use a lot of juice.
THAT FRESH LOOK- The ironing board is permanently set up in front of the TV set with an Indian or Guatemalan textile to the floor, so it looks pretty and so everybody looks spiffy all the time and they catch all the TV they want without guilt because they iron as they watch. Verk Arbeit Frei mein kinder.
HOW TO BUY A COMPUTER. Remember the old joke, how many Poles to screw in a lightbulb? Four to turn the table? Well, how many BFers does it take to buy a computer? The answer is THREE. The bottom feeder is the motivator who says to his pals, 'guys, we need a computer.' The second guy has the credit; he gets to use the computer as much as he likes. A third fellow makes the payments, 21$ a month, he gets to use the computer all he wants, too. The bottom feeder got to keep the computer at his house because he thought of it, and because he has super home security, (an enclosed yard, tall fence and then there's that big German Shepherd) and because he motivated them all and found the lowest price machine, a 586 demo unit fresh off the showroom floor, pre-loaded with 150 kinds of software, from Tiger Direct (800 info for Number.) 28,800 baud Modem for downloading and archiving information from the Internet, 16 megabytes, 39 speakers, 100-120 mghrtz, and only about $1000 with expansion chips.
Or, if you have a classified newspaper like the RECYCLER, rich people dump 486's which are Internet ready, for 200$ complete with all peripherals, printer, even software. So go for it.
COMPUTER PAPER: Need paper? Behind Office Supply and computer shops you find all kinds of treasures. A dumpster diver of my acquaintance found a ton of school notebooks in perfect shape, and took them to an orphanage. He found a box of computer paper with a serious dent but the paper inside was perfect. The downside is that he's still writing the great American novel and hasn't seen daylight in years.
COMPUTER SUPPLIES: I send out a dozen ribbons at a time for re-inking, at 2$ each instead of paying 8$ new. Software: BFers are never the registered user. They inherited the software from one, though when they bought the hardware, which makes their use of it legal. FREE INTERNET ACCESS: participate in marketing surveys, read E-mail ads and your E-mail can be free or discounted. That means you can type your way free of long distance phonecalls, converse in written words with all the people you now call LD. Call www.juno.com or www.cyberfreeway.com or www.hotmamil.com or www.netaddress.usa.net.
DISCS: The big Line Servers send computer software on disks asking one to sign up with them. Erase the text (i.e. re-format them), use again. If the disc won't reformat, see that little pair of square holes on the end? With a needle, slide left one shut. Then, it will format. For the one in a thousand that still won't, use X-tree to erase every file on it. Or use DOS. Then format it.
DESK SUPPLIES- The transnational corporations nickel and dime you to death with this stuff. Only it's not nickels. It's BIG, FAT dollars. A glue stick is cute but at two bucks, it's not a great improvement over paste ESPECIALLY when the little suckers have deliberately loose tops which dry them out in a week. I do a lot of gluing so I mix a tablespoon of flour with some water in a teacup, keep it on my desk full time, soupy so it won't dry out, with a Q-tip stuck in it for quick application. Fridge it when not in use. If I forget fridging and the paste gets moldy, I throw it out and start over. So paste is FREE. I find pens in every office or business I visit. Paperclips on floors in banks, sidewalks outside.