Strangely though, within three months of moving in, the upstairs tenants felt the need to change the locks on the door without notifying me. When I realized that the locks had been changed I demanded to a copy of the key and the reason why the locks had been changed. The husband said that he wasn’t comfortable with the amount of people coming in and out of the house. When I asked him what he meant, he decided not to elaborate.

Since all of my rental units were occupied, I had no real reason to make the 2.5 hour trek to visit my tenants. I decided to save up a few minor repairs that had to be made into one trip. Since I would primarily be working n the outside of the home, I did not give my tenants notice that I would be coming to house. When I got there and began replacing an outside post, the downstairs tenant came outside, obviously high.

Here’s the thing, I don’t care about my tenants’ recreational drug use. What they choose to drink or smoke is their business, but I do rent the apartments as smoke free since the internal venting system carries the smoke throughout the entire house. I ignored his giggly visage and repaired the posts outside.

Perhaps two weeks later the upstairs tenants told me that they would be moving. Since they did not have an extended lease and were slow rent payers I was happy to see them go. At abut the same time the downstairs tenants were roughly nearly two months behind on their rent. I had them served with a quit notice and lease termination notice. I figured that there was no way that they would be able to pay the arrears and the upcoming rent.

In the meantime I visited the home to inspect the now-empty upstairs apartment and replace the flooring in the upstairs kitchen. I would also repaint the entire apartment, install a new door, docks, and digital thermostat. I figured that I would stay in the apartment and complete the work over a weekend.

As I opened the door to the apartment, I felt like an extra in a Snoop Dogg (wait, he’s Snoop Lion now) video. A cloud of weed-filled smoke streamed out the door towards me. Even through it was the middle of February, and freezing cold, I had to shut off the heat and open every single window in the apartment. I thought that maybe the previous tenant had been smoking before he left, but quickly realized that the smell was coming through the vent. My downstairs tenants were smoking truckloads of weed.

When I went downstairs to ask WTF was going on, I was greeted by my tenants,and abut four other people hanging out in the living room. My tenants thought that I there to ask about the rent money and instead handed me the past due rent, the current rent AND the next 2 months of rent. It was then that it hit me – my tenants were selling weed. There was absolutely no way that they would have been able to come up with the money in such a short time otherwise.

If my tenants want to sell drugs on a street corner somewhere, there’s not much that I can do. If they were selling drugs at my rental home, then it was a problem since it would affect the other residents. Honestly, though, could I say for sure that they were selling drugs? No. I had never seem them with so much as a baggie so I couldn’t terminate their lease on the basis that they were selling drugs. All I could do was wait for them to make a mistake. It took nearly two months, but they didn’t disappoint me. It all went down in spectacular fashion.

This is just the back story. The juicy part involving the cops and parole officer comes next