The Josh Innes Show - Nightmare House

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

Well, we have lived in Detroit for two weeks. Our landlord is pretty meh and the house is old. We've had some issues I'd like to discuss. Also, we have birds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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up on chat GPT and like sending pictures asking how to do things like our fun fact, a lot of fun facts today, when we moved into our new place here in Detroit, which I haven't gotten into great detail on yet with you guys, but in this house, it's very old, and whoever owned this house, actually that's where I'll go. We'll talk about Hull Cogan in a second, okay? Let me talk about the house that we are currently in. Old house, right? Nice place, it's fine, like it's livable.

There's no dishwasher, there's no garbage disposal. So initially when we rented the place, I saw there was no dishwasher, so I was like, okay, I think that'll be fine. No dishwasher, I could live with that. You know, we'll just do the dishes very quickly, try to avoid making giant messes of pots and pans and everything else. That shouldn't be too difficult. I can live with that fine.

There's also no garbage disposal, so that really gives you very little room for air as it relates to things in the sink. We've only been here now for I guess about 16 days, so we haven't done a ton of cooking. In fact, the first thing I made was yesterday. I went and got some propane and I made some chicken on the grill. But I think this is something that at the beginning you don't think is that big of a deal because you're ordering a lot of food, because you're trying to get moved in, you're trying to get acclimated to the area.

You want to try more of the food in the area so you have a point of reference when you talk about it on the radio or whatever. But I think in the coming months, we have a two-year lease on this place. Although, I may try to get myself out of said lease in a year. I'll see if maybe this chick will work with me. I don't know. Uh, because, hold on, let me play some commercials. I gotta get into a lot of details on this whole thing.

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And this maybe should have been a red flag, all right? So I reached out to this person back, and I think it was back in June, and I said, hey, you got a cool looking house, you know, and I asked some details like on Zillow where you can like send some DMs on Zillow and ask some questions about it. And it's like, okay, cool, nice place, whatever. And I asked if it's still available and this person, Chris was the name, said, no, it's actually being rented.

But if anything goes wrong or the person doesn't end up renting it or something changes, I'll reach out to you. Now very rarely in my experience, never in fact in my experience, is there a scenario where a person tells me that their place is going to be rented, then it's not rented. That very rarely happens, I would imagine, overall. And certainly for me, it has never happened. If someone tells me that the place is being rented, it's being rented. So I start looking for other places. I get a message about a week later that says,

good news, Josh. The house is available again. Didn't give me any great details on that. Didn't tell me if the credit check was bad, but whatever. Okay, I assume that was my assumption is that the credit check didn't go very well because this person did like a soft credit check. I imagine the credit check or the rental history or something didn't play out well for this person that made them say, nope, we're not going to give you this place. Okay, fine. Could have been that, could have been some other issues. But my last thought was maybe they saw the place and didn't actually

like it or they tried to move in and just realized it wasn't a good situation for them. Well, as time has gone on and I've gotten into this house, I'm beginning to think that the credit check wasn't the issue because after we got basically after she told us this place was available, she asked us if we wanted to do a video tour. I said absolutely sure. It was I think a Sunday. We'll do a video tour of it. Looks great, like the place, cool, whatever.

We send her all the info on it, fill out an application. In like 20 minutes we are approved and good to go and we're sending deposits, right? So it's not a scam. This is clearly not a scam house or anything like that because we're living in it and it's fine. But in 20 minutes she finds out that we have good credit or Jillian has good credit, has good credit and everything's fine and we're good to go, we're clear and let's take off. Why did it take a week for the previous person if it was a credit thing? That's why I don't think it was a credit thing.

What I think we're dealing with here is that maybe this person actually saw the house or did a little investigating in the house and was like, yep, I'm getting the fuck out of Dodge. Again, it's not a horrible place. It's not the money pit. And Jilly isn't Shelley Long and I'm not Tom Hanks. This is not the worst place ever. It is an old house. The floors make noises. There's very little insulation as

it comes to noise. Therefore, part of the reason I haven't been doing as many pods is not because I'm working. I don't even start working until Monday as we discussed. There is no place for me to go in the house where if Jilly is working, I can also do a podcast that doesn't bleed into her stuff. I went into the basement of this place trying to do a podcast. I thought that would be easy. Basement, no one's going to hear me. I could hear her loud and clear. She could hear me loud and clear. It is just wood. These floors are wood and there ain't much else. Like my fat ass is going to end up falling through these floors at some point. I feel it, right? This is similar to the Philadelphia house situation where I went downstairs at one point

and I saw a bunch of chunks of rocks and shit on the ground. I'm like, my fat ass can't jump around watching sporting events anymore. This is going to go poorly. So there's nowhere for me to do the podcast as long as Jilly is still doing hers. That's why I'm using the radio station to do it. I'm going into a little cubby in here, a little soundproof cubby, which is actually better because the soundproofing is great. It's a radio station, so it sounds better. I'm sure this sounds better, and that's great, and I'm happy about it. But I'm beginning to think that probably someone

either didn't want to deal with this landlord lady. She's not terrible. Jilly overreacts to a lot of stuff when it comes to things. Her first instinct is to go down the path of the worst case scenario. I'm not in that category. I'm kind of a we'll figure it out kind of guy. Whereas Jilly thinks every situation is some sort of scam and that the person is a scammer. I don't know if that's because she grew up in the hoods of Chicago and live next to fucking gangsters and shit and gang member, not gangsters. Gangster would indicate or make you believe that she lived next to Al Capone's relatives or something. She lived next to legitimate Hispanic gang members.

Maybe she just doesn't trust anybody. I on the other hand will go, okay, don't overreact to that shit, whatever. Problem is I have to be the one doing the dirty work and all of this because I'm the contact for the landlord. So anytime Jilly's like, I don't think this is going to work, I have to reach out and be like, hey, do you think there's something wrong with blank and blank? And it's kind of a pain in the ass to have to do it. But it's an older house. The doors are old and to a point where, well, actually when we moved in, one of the doors actually fell off the hinge. Now mind you this is also a house where the woman does not let me hang shit with nails. I cannot put holes in the wall. So if I'm going to hang anything up

I have to use like command strips or command hooks or whatever. I cannot put anything up in the house if it requires nails at which point I'm like fuck it if this chick's such a Nazi about nails in the wall or it's an issue, I certainly don't want to put up like these command strips, because when we take these command strip down, it's probably going to tear paint off the wall, and she seems like she's going to charge me

a shit ton of the deposit to repaint some shit. So I'm like, Jilly, tough shit. I ain't putting anything up on the wall. There will be no pictures. There will be no signs. The only thing on the wall in the house is acoustic foam that I put in the studio for Jilly which is self-adhesive which I'm hoping to hell doesn't rip a bunch of paint off the wall when we move. When we moved from St. Louis, it left a bunch of goo on the wall.

I bought some goo gone and put some elbow grease into it. Also, still haven't gotten my deposit back from St. Louis because old buddy is like, well, you left a couple of rooms dirty. I'm like, it's a fucking house it was lived in. Whenever we moved into the place, it was so dirty we had to hire somebody for $400 to give it a scrub clean. There were ant traps in the fucking windows. And I got this guy like, and by the way, I don't want to shit on that landlord. I liked him. He was a good landlord.

For the most part, we've had great landlords everywhere. I mean, they've been great, good dudes. So I've never really had any problem with our landlords. But he's like, I don't know. I mean, my deposit was like 2400 bucks. I don't know how much I'm going to get back. Let me tell you, it was impossible to get all of the junk out of our house. And this is like in Nashville, we had a cool scenario where we could go and

drop off a bunch of junk at like a junkyard for free or whatever, like some garbage. Not the case in St. Louis. One final binge over and give you the gravy pipe from St. Louis. I had to drive miles down the road to go to this place in St. Peters, Missouri and drop off garbage for 75 bucks a load. The problem is I only had limited space in the car, so it's not like I had a truck. Well, Josh, you could have gone to rent a truck over at like Lowe's or Home Depot. By that point, I'm spending so much fucking money, it's pointless, right? So a lot of pain in the ass scenario. It's like, well, you left a couple of things in the garage. I'm like, yeah, I did.

But you know what else I did? I filled up bag after bag after bag of fucking garbage because the garbage wouldn't come pick up all the shit. So I had to go out and just fill up bags of shit and throw it away for 75 bucks a pop. And I had to have the dudes that come out and do the junk removal shit come and do it. I spent five or six hundred dollars just getting shit removed. And before you say, oh Josh, that's lazy. In Nashville, I got a lot of it done for free because I did it myself. There weren't that many options because everything

costs money in St. Louis because St. Louis is hell. So back to this current landlord. Again, I don't think she's a horrible landlord, whatever. It's an old house. Went down into the basement where the washer and dryer is. The other day, we're finally going to wash a load of laundry. It's mostly just underwear anyway. Go down, washer's fine, wash the clothes, transfer them over to the dryer. We leave the house for a couple hours. I come back, clothes in the dryer still wet. So I'm like, shit, I wonder what the problem is here. It's an older dryer, whatever. I look, notice that maybe like the big foil looking vent is not in the thing, so I have to move the damn dryer, shove the thing back in.

Let's try it now. All right, try it again. Still not hot, still not dry in the clothes. Shit, this sucks. So then I'm like, I don't want to bother this landlord lady So I'm gonna just chat GPT this chat GPT says hey It's there's a gas line going to it perhaps the gas lines not on so I turn on the gas line Whatever. I'm afraid the house is gonna blow up. I try to dry again

It doesn't dry I go outside to feel if the air blown out of the vent is hot or cold It's cold the shit ain't working So I text the landlady and I'm like, well, the dryer's not working. And I said, but I tried to put the vent back in, that wasn't the issue. And then I turned on the gas and she's like, whoa, motherfucker, you turned on the gas? What the fuck are you doing? I'm like, I don't know, LOL, it was a joke. Then she sends somebody over to fix it.

The problem is we sat around all day waiting for the guy to fix it. He never showed up. So I called a place, which is literally 50 yards from our house. And I go, this guy was supposed to come and he never showed. He goes, well, he said he drove by the house and called, but no one answered. Well, you know why no one answered? Because the chick gave her, the dude his or her number instead of ours. So we sat there all day and wasted our time.

Long story short, he gets the shit fixed. That's fine. I haven't tried the dryer yet. I'm going to assume it's fixed. But you start looking around the house. I was in the basement. I saw a shelf. I mean, this is like Freddie was raping kids. And this is like Freddie's dungeon, like rape den. Okay? And like he's down there like using like iron and shit to sharpen his blades and shit. Like that's what we're dealing with here. And there's a shelf that's got like an old box of Brillo pads and this box of Brillo pads is probably from 1979. The reason I think it's from the 1970s is because the shelf is lined with old newspapers. Those old newspapers are yellow and crispy and gross.

So I look at them and I'm looking for a date. I'm like Marty McFly looking for the date on the newspaper. I look at the newspaper date. It is October of 1973. That means those newspapers lining the shelf have been on those shelves for over 50 years. There's a bathroom in the basement, but I wouldn't use the fucker. And there's all sorts of...there is a crock pot. It's like a lime a crock pot.

It's like a lime green crock pot in the basement. And I'm fairly certain that this crock pot is at least 30 years old. It's like a time warp you walk down the stairs. And it's like you walk through a portal into a bygone era to a different dimension to an alternate universe. It's like some quantum leap Twilight Zone shit. The door is barely open. By the way, so back to the door being off the hinge, the door fell off the hinge. So because I can't do anything with nails in the wall, I had to reach out to the lady and

sound like a dipshit. I'm like, how do I fix the door? And she's like, well, why don't you just screw the screws back into the hinge? I'm like, I didn't know I was allowed to. So then I went over to the ACE hardware and I asked the dude about some longer screws because the wood was stripped. I go in there like a real fucking man. I come back with those screws and I screw that shit with a drill into the door and the door is fixed and at least we manage that. Jilly's very concerned that we're gonna have some very hot slash dry winter days in this house. That's kind of where we are

right now. That's kind of the scenario we find ourselves in right now is, is it's not a horrible place. Ross has room to run in the backyard. Oh, by the way, the neighbors are mutes. Basically, they're like mutant type people that don't speak. I think they're brothers from what I understand, and they live together. They may have a grandma or a mother or a wife that lives with them. Jilly is convinced that they're like Kip and Napoleon and the woman is grandma because she'll disappear for seemingly days at a time. So she's probably off at the dunes, you know,

while they're sitting there making nachos in the microwave, like, you know, and Kip's over there talking with babes online all day. Now, from what I understand, the lady, the landlady tells me they may be slow, or one of them may be slow, but they don't speak. So like you'll wave, say, Hey, man, how are you? And the guy just looks at you. And I live in an area that's like half hipster, half super redneck. Everyone that's from here that I've told that I live here, I live in Hazel Park, Michigan, which is

right outside of Detroit, and it's very close to the station, relatively speaking. Everyone I tell that I live there, they go, oh, you live in Hazel, Tucky. I'm like, see, you think it's super rednecky, and there's certain parts of it that are, but then there's also people that have like, not just gay pride flags, trans flags flying in the yards, and they've got the in this house we believe signs. Our neighbor has a giant stack of go kart tires on a deck in the backyard. So like that's the balance we have here. The house behind this has a giant American flag on a pole. So it's a strange area. It's not bad. I don't feel unsafe. I feel fine. The other issue

we're running into is when I moved in, I saw that there was a bird's nest that was up in the corner of our tiny little porch, a little overhang going into the house. This is not a big porch. I mean, it's basically the door. And there's a bird's nest. And Jilly was telling me that a bird kept flying around when they were trying to move people or to move the shit into the house. So I put my phone up and I take a picture of the bird's nest and I see three blue eggs in there, Robin's eggs in this nest. So I start Googling what the fuck to do with Robin's eggs because I'm tired of every time I go home having an Alfred Hitchcock situation. Well, legally you can't touch them. So you just got to let them hatch and see

what happens. So that was two weeks ago. Now they've hatched. So I have three birds that I've just watched grow up. Their mom shows up sometimes and leaves. I made the mistake of walking out of the house at like 10 o'clock at night after the bird was settled. It was some nightmare on Elm Street too. Bird going crazy. Think I'm going to get like pecked in the eyes and shit. I'm concerned about what happens when these birds can fly. Are they going to fly and keep coming back? It's a pain in the ass." So I asked the landlord about it. I'm like, have you ever seen these? And she's like, oh yeah, every year the birds come and make a nest. I'm like, why the fuck would you want birds to come to your porch and stand on your door and shit, literally shit on the screen

door? Why would you want them to do this? So that's the situation right now. That's what we're dealing with right now. So I'm going to try to get out of this lease within a year. Not like I'm loaded with cash, but there's by the way, Detroit, great suburbs, like awesome little downtowns. Like I like this town a lot, man. Like it's cool. And this little place I live in is fine.

It's an easy drive to work right off the highway. It's good. But yeah, that's where we are right now. How you doing? More to come.