Stardust is amongst them: She’s been a renter in Madison, Wis., for 17 years and hasn’t ever owned belongings. “I’m an expert renter,” she says. “I know more about renting than I know about anything else.” She’s additionally in detail accustomed to the opposite facet of the renter/landlord courting, since she spent greater than a decade as a upkeep employee for belongings control corporations.
When she used to be rising up in rural Wisconsin, her father taught her how to sort things. But it isn’t a fond reminiscence. Mercury remembers his frustration — frequently fury — over errors. She sought after to discover a higher approach to train folks. “I am treating people in a way I wish I received myself when I was entering this field — I was mocked. I was ridiculed. I was made to feel lesser,” she says. “And it wasn’t until years later, when I realized that I wasn’t just proficient, but I was very good at all this.”
She have been the usage of a TikTok account to advertise her burlesque displays when, about 2½ years in the past, she responded to a request from some other person to give an explanation for easy methods to use a ratchet strap. Her video went viral. “Every day I’m like, ‘Wow, people really need this,’ because you don’t get a response like I have if people are not crying for help,” Stardust says.
In August, she launched her first guide: “Safe and Sound: A Renter-Friendly Guide to Home Repair.” By this autumn, it used to be a New York Times best seller. Now she’s on a book tour of greater than 50 towns around the nation, focused on places the place a majority of the inhabitants rents.
Stardust aimed to stay issues easy within the guide: it lays out every possible drawback, at the side of phrases to grasp, the fabrics you’ll want to make a restore and the other strategies for solving the issue. There’s additionally a QR code with every venture that’ll link you to a video of Stardust doing the restore.
And every phase ends with an “emotional reset” that encourages and validates the reader. “People are at their best, or at least my readers, my watchers are at their best, when they feel like it’s okay to make mistakes,” she says. “It’s okay if it didn’t work out the first time and it’s okay if you do it a little bit differently.”
Here are a few of her primary takeaways.
She needs the guide wasn’t essential
Ideally, some of the primary advantages of renting is that you just aren’t accountable for maintenance. You’re intended so to name to your landlord to care for problems like low water drive in a sink or solving an improperly hung cupboard door. Too frequently, although, landlords aren’t dependable. In some instances, tenants would possibly really feel unsafe inviting a stranger into their house.
“There are so many people who are trans who are scared to ask for help from a staff that is not queer,” says Stardust, noting that the similar feeling is prevalent amongst folks of colour, who’re more likely to rent than own. “People sometimes do not understand the danger that some of our marginalized communities live in.”
Ideally, she says, landlords and tenants could have a mutually really helpful courting, the place the previous supplies a protected position to are living and the latter cares for it, although she has skilled some distance too many eventualities the place that hasn’t been the case. “I know what it feels like to be utterly alone, and then to go home and to see cockroaches everywhere and to see a place that has just [fallen apart], and then feel helpless,” she says. Learning easy methods to make maintenance helped her regain a way of keep an eye on.
Many apartment homes have subpar, builder-grade fabrics, which smash extra simply, she provides. “If you buy the lowest quality of materials, you will get a tenant that puts low quality of care into it,” Stardust says. “Because if you’re not taking care of them, why should they take care of you?” She has tips for figuring out the standard of fabrics in a apartment: Bring a magnet to your excursion — it received’t keep on with decrease grade metals used for rails or hooks. Knock on wooden doorways to decide in the event that they sound forged (just right) or hole (now not as just right).
You don’t want numerous equipment
Stardust says a false impression that you wish to have a completely stocked toolbox is a big barrier for newcomers. She contends that you just handiest want 4 primary equipment to accomplish nearly all of the fixes defined in her guide: A multi-bit screwdriver, application knife, adjustable pliers and Allen keys. (There’s no hammer on her record for the reason that guide makes a speciality of maintenance quite than adorning.)
Some jobs, akin to plumbing or drywall paintings, require extra specialised provides. But Stardust discovered as a upkeep technician that she may just do maximum maintenance with handiest the ones 4 pieces.
She additionally suggests DIY workarounds to interchange some not unusual equipment. For instance, to search out studs with out purchasing a stud finder, you’ll be able to use a magnet, jewelry chain and paper towel. Put the magnet towards the wall, with a paper towel beneath to give protection to the outside from scratches. Then, dangle the steel chain from the magnet. Move the magnet across the wall side-to-side till you are feeling it hook up with the steel screw drilled into the stud. You’ll comprehend it’s a stud quite than a pipe if the magnet loses its pull whilst you slide it vertically.
But you do want the language to explain what wishes solving
One large drawback Stardust sees amongst renters is that “people lack the vocabulary” to give an explanation for what maintenance they want to contractors, upkeep technicians and landlords. “If you never pick up a wrench and never turn a pipe, and you never touch a water valve, that’s okay,” she says. “But the book is still giving you the tools you need to communicate what you need. And I think that’s important.”
This may be why Stardust features a slew of assets past restore strategies. At the outset, there’s a bit on comparing whether or not your apartment is protected. She suggests asking to peer further areas akin to garage and parking. Evaluate how smartly the ones spaces are looked after, as a result of they are able to be a barometer for how smartly maintained the construction is, she says.
Stardust additionally identifies pink flags in a rent. Among them: Sizable overdue charges; limits at the selection of visitors you’ll be able to have over; ambiguity about safety deposits and what it takes to get evicted; and waivers liberating the owner from accountability for preexisting problems akin to mould. She contains tenant rules and assets, a lot of which range by means of state.
“When someone else owns the house and owns the place [where] you live and they have the entire deck of cards on their side … it’s hard to feel safe,” Stardust says. “I think the greatest defense is the knowledge that we have.”
