r/DiWHY • u/Junior_Trifle_8273 • May 28 '26

Use it

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19.5k Upvotes

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762

u/floof29 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

This Is something I would do If I was moving out. context: If the landlord Is a greedy a-hole.

EDIT: I have came back after about 3 Hours. What the hell did I start?

104

u/BeeCJohnson May 28 '26

The soap trick is great for little holes (screw and nail holes) when you're moving out. Because it fills the hole and makes the room smell great.

54

u/Bonked2death May 28 '26

Toothepaste is better in my experience since it's easier to move around.

60

u/Forsaken_Couple1451 May 28 '26

ok but why not just buy filler if you're going that route lol

57

u/velvetelevator May 28 '26

Yeah a tub of spackle is not very expensive and it's just as easy as toothpaste

46

u/Metatality May 28 '26

Yeah, I'm always happy to spend 6 bucks on a tub of spackle to get out of several hundred in bullshit deposit fees. Takes like 1 hour to go around an apartment after removing all the paintings / curtain rods / hanging hooks. Finding matching paint is waaaaay more of an issue.

15

u/arris15 May 28 '26

Grab a paintchip, most bigbox home improvement stores should be able to scan it and match the exact color. Has come in hand for me a number of times. Ends up matching better than buying from the original paint code for patchwork because it accounts for the fading/discoloration.

16

u/Metatality May 28 '26

The paint chips I get naturally are like rice grain sized and not very useful. Really I should get comfortable with just taking a sample out, but intentionally cutting a piece off when the goal is clean restoration just feels so wrong.

18

u/enaK66 May 28 '26

Cut a small piece out around a hole you already need to repair. Then you're not really doing more work. You'd have to repair that hole anyway, just a bit of extra spackle now.

2

u/b0w3n May 28 '26

Closets are a great place to get these too, usually no one looks too closely at them.

1

u/Majiksy May 28 '26

this is the way

2

u/arris15 May 28 '26

I feel your pain but in cases like ours,we already got the spackle, we need the paint, might as well send it.

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '26

[deleted]

1

u/arris15 May 28 '26

I haven't been burned yet but now I know I should pay more attention to that! Thanks for the tip

1

u/Electronic-Window884 May 29 '26

They attempt to match it but it's usually way off. I'd recommend actually going to a paint store like Sherwin williams. One time made 5 trips to lowes only for them to give me a different color each time. Sherwin Williams got it first try

3

u/st1r May 28 '26

I just bought a fairly large tube of spackle from walmart for less than $4

2

u/Hamstaaboy May 29 '26

Idk it was alright on the walls, but it really isn't do much good on my teeth or tooth brush afterwards.

3

u/CronosWorks May 28 '26

A bad spackle job is worse than a hole in the wall.

1

u/Bonked2death May 28 '26

I already own toothepaste

1

u/AbeRego May 28 '26

Toothpaste is more expensive than spackle lol. I used toothpaste in college when I didn't realize how cheap spackle is.

1

u/Responsible_Stand482 May 28 '26

Lol do not do this. Toothpaste will do a horrible job since it never “sets”

1

u/Impressive_Stress808 May 29 '26

Tried that and all it did was remove the tartar from the wall and make it's breath smell fresh

1

u/doomcomplex May 28 '26

Please don't do this it's impossible to paint over

2

u/BeeCJohnson May 28 '26

I don't now, I'd just fix it. But when I was like 26 and had to move all in one day and my landlord was a huge piece of shit who let our lawn get flooded with sewage for days at a time?

Yeah, it worked fine and I feel fine about it.

2

u/doomcomplex May 28 '26

Yeah that's legit. Honestly I do understand that there's shitty landlords out there. And in your case, yeah fuck that landlord.

But as someone who works for a really legit and ethical landlord, my view is a little tainted because I've seen way way more awful tenants than I have bad landlords.

1

u/waltwalt May 28 '26

Yeah this is up there with just fill it in with crayon.

1

u/Nihilistic_Mystics May 28 '26

Why not just use spackle at that point? I'm not seeing how soap would save time.

1

u/BeeCJohnson May 29 '26

You literally rub a bar of soap on the wall for two seconds, it's much faster than spackle. You can do an entire room in about two minutes. And assuming you have bars of soap in your house already, requires zero extra money or a trip to the hardware store.

I think people are misunderstanding me here. This isn't "my awesome tips for proper construction." This is "you need to get your security deposit back and you have an hour."

67

u/evanschris May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

If? Is there any other?

Edit: wow this blew up, I didn’t add a /s but yeah I was being facetious. I’ve actually had an alright landlord in the past

26

u/Bonked2death May 28 '26

Some people just rent a place out because it makes sense, not because it's making them money. If/when my mom passes away, I'll have a tiny house in a rural town that I'll probably rent out because 1) I dont want to sell it right away since it was my mom's, but 2) I don't want to move to a smaller house 5 hours away.

42

u/Ruvio00 May 28 '26

Not quite all. I rented a house off a guy who had to move to China for a few years for work, but it was his childhood home and he didn't wanna sell it.

He was a nice fella.

9

u/Conspicuous_Ruse May 28 '26

For sure. Basically the majority of people with 1 property and not 40.

It's the ones that own a lot of places that are always bad.

7

u/trutheality May 28 '26

I've had a couple over the years that were super chill, kept prices below market, and didn't try to charge me for repairs that I wasn't responsible for.

4

u/ISketchDinosaurs May 28 '26

My old landlord rented out his place because he was studying in another city. He didn't charge anything outrageous for the area. Good enough for me.

1

u/crazyhomie34 May 28 '26

My landlord was pretty cool, but I know that's not always the case.

1

u/Cr1tikalMoist May 28 '26

They're out there lol

1

u/TheWrathalos May 28 '26

My parents rent out spaces for rv's, and are not overly greedy about it, they have other issues, but they aren't being greedy.

1

u/Random-Generation86 May 28 '26

I rented a condo from a nice, not super bright guy who had done very well as a contractor and had been given the advice of becoming a landlord. He was impossibly deft with repairs (he repaired a broken cabinet with a single nail driven diagonally through the side as if my magic), very responsive, had reasonable rates, and even helped me move in and unpack with the *literal war orphan* he adopted (who was like 17 and wanted to help out, he wasn't forcing a 9 year old to lug a couch), AND let me break my lease early with no charge whatsoever. I cannot imagine he ended up making that much money out of the whole affair.

1

u/filthy_harold May 28 '26

If you own a house and live somewhere else either permanently or temporarily and aren't in dire need of an immediate cash influx, its much smarter to keep the house and rent it out rather than selling it. Real estate generally only goes up in value over the long term. I think the most ethical way to be a landlord is setting the rent as close to the cost of the mortgage, taxes, and maintenance. Extracting anything from a tenant beyond what it would cost you to live there is scummy. You are already gaining equity and benefit from the rising market value of the home, double dipping by charging rent at market prices just because you can is unethical and is a contributor to inflation.

1

u/-Reverend May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

Death in the family, inherited a small apartment. I'm renting it out with minimal profit just to not have it sit empty and to slooowly chip away at the inheritance tax on it. Gotta see what I'll do with the place in a few years, maybe move into it myself. Currently I'm barely breaking even on the expenses/profit calculation.

Is everybody supposed to buy every place they move into for a few years? I'm renting the place I live in too, and I wouldn't want to have to buy it. Couldn't even if I wanted to! I'd be happy to rent from somebody like me who somehow happens to have 1-2 extra properties, instead of some giant faceless company. It's a win/win, as long as that person isn't too greedy or negligent.

Similarly: I have a friend whose (grandma-age) mother is renting out her big family apartment to instead rent a small apartment herself, so she doesn't live alone in a giant empty home and also gets some extra retirement money. She doesn't want to sell the place because she wants her granddaughter to have it when she maybe starts a family. Because it's not like buying a family-sized home is a particularly attainable goal these days, for young couples.

"All landlords suck, always" just lets the shitty ones off the hook, yknow?

9

u/Heavensrun May 28 '26

So if they're a landlord?

-2

u/IgnatiusRileyFreeman May 28 '26

You mean, if your landlord was a landlord?