Watching the mail

We have prospective tenants who have expressed a desire to move into our Thorntown house on Jan. 1.

They presumably signed a rental contract and gave a check for us to a local Realtor and both documents are supposedly in the mail to us as I write this.

Like everything else, I'll believe it when I see it but I am allowing myself to be guardedly optimistic that we can stave off financial disaster.

The deposit and monthly rent are slightly less than the monthly house payment, but this comes at a time when the heating season is beginning and we are loathe to add an Indiana gas bill to our monthly financial burden.

Even so, I'm going to have to call Maria's parents one of these days soon and ask them to turn on the furnaces (one for upstairs and one for downstairs) to keep the water pipes from freezing between now and the end of the year.

The couple has four daughters and inexplicably wanted to remove the shower from the downstairs bathroom to accommodate their side-by-side washer and dryer. Their remodeling plans for our house also include replacing the vanity sink in that bathroom with a pedestal sink, painting the kitchen (which I repainted a few weeks before we moved), removing wallpaper from the dining room and a couple of other rooms and painting the walls. We agreed to everything but the shower removal, recalling how valuable it was when Maria's kids lived with us. We left our stacked washer-dryer unit in the downstairs bathroom and it goes with the house, so they might as well use it.

We also stipulated that they are paying for the changes they plan.

They asked for access to the house two weeks prior to move-in to do the work they plan and we agreed. We'll be up there for Christmas on the weekend of Dec. 21 and will get a chance to see what they're doing.

I have to admit it makes me a little uneasy when tenants are so presumptuous as to want to make major changes in a house that does not belong to them. It's not hard for me to envision a very bad end to this relationship, but we're run out of options.