It is really, really annoying to be told to vacate your rental four months before you planned to leave town.
Salt on the wound is being handed a list of cleaning requirements the likes of which I have never seen, such as cleaning the outside of the upstairs windows. We live in the fringes of desert. Clean windows are a myth. All on a rental unit they want us to vacate because they plan to remodel it.
The big kicker are the cleaning requirements for the garage. For those of you keeping score, this is the garage they had us vacate the week after Lain was born because they plan on tearing it down.
I consulted a cleaner today. We may be looking at $2,000.
How big is the deposit you’d be forfeiting by saying “Fish you!”?
$2,000. It actually was a whopping $4k deposit, but they already gave $2,000 of it back. If the deposit is deemed insufficient, though, they can come after us for more.
I dunno what the regs are where you are, but in CA you can only go so far on cleaning requirements for retaining your security deposit.
Basically, the landlord is responsible for normal wear and tear and all exterior stuff that isn’t downright malicious on the part of the renter.
I would talk to your coblogger. Certainly replying back to your landlord with a clarification letter (particularly for the garage, which, you know, they actually probably couldn’t legally force you to vacate in the first place).
Coblogger has already been very generous with his time as of late on another matter. And as it happens, I’ve been looking up Arapaho state code and the sections involve cleaning are very ambiguous. Oddly, I appear to have more protection as far as damage goes than dirt. The basics of it are that it has to be left to them in the state in which we found it. Which we certainly can’t demonstrate didn’t involve regular cleaning of the upstairs-outside windows.
Clancy has already asked for clarification on “cleaning the walls” and has received no reply.
At this point, either we are going to hire someone or we are going to let a lot of things on their little checklist go. From a liability standpoint, do they really want me on the roof?
(The other aspect is that they plan to… errr… nail us for having put a not-insignificant number of pictures on the wall. We got verbal permission to do so, but not from these landlords. We think that a lot of what has been going on has been them really, really pissed off about pictures on the walls. They have mentioned it like six times, that “Wow, you have a lot of pictures on the wall” and it was when they saw the pictures on the wall that things suddenly turned very, very sour. It’s a subjective matter as to what is “too many”, I guess.)
A small tub of high-quality spackle and a brand-new flat trowel should set you back seven bucks, tops. I’ll bet the walls are painted flat white anyway, so maybe another ten bucks in flat white paint and a brush to touch up the spackle.
It exit notice specifies that I am forbidden from trying to touch up, paint, or repair the wall.
Is that something you agreed upon anywhere?
Nope, but there might be he’ll to pay if it were at all noticeable. (The color isn’t faded just right, so we’re going to have to repaint the whole house…). Okay, I’m probably being paranoid, but whatever I do could be counted as damages.
Ugh… that’s really frustrating. We primarily rented from big corporate rental companies, with explicit policies and generally reasonable on-site staff. Good luck with whatever comes of it.
Just, whatever you do, don’t end up on “World’s Worst Tenants”…
That’s fishing ridiculous and an unreasonable interpretation of those rules. How are you supposed to return the property in good condition if you’re forbidden from even doing that? I’d spackle and paint anyway. If they’re going to withhold a deposit for that, sue them.
I bet his brother is a contractor. Think about it.
I’ll note that one lesson that I learned belatedly was to take a whole slew of pictures of rentals when I moved in, before any of my stuff was there. And then I burned them all to a disk and dropped it off with my first rental check, along with a letter listing all of the minor problems I noticed with the place, including things like, “I don’t believe the carpet has been cleaned.”
I followed up with an email, after that, stressing that I wasn’t asking for repairs, but did they get it? Because they might want to note with their property guy that their exit of the previous tenant wasn’t handled properly. And they replied yes.
That’s a little late for you under circumstances now, but good practice for the next place you move into.
Well, the OP and this comment have identified the significant issues in play already; I’m not admitted to practice in that state, so the truth is I’ve probably got little to contribute.
Debatably, the landlord breached the lease already by denying you possession of the garage, and by denying you possession for the entire term of the lease. Damages are the difference between the rent on your new place and the old one, and your moving expenses. Normal wear and tear is not deductible from the deposit. Premises should be returned in the same condition they were provided.
We were month-to-month, so there was no lease. They informed us sometime a few months before that they planned to tear down the garage, but didn’t give us much notice on when it was going to happen. Which, it turned out, they never tore down anyway. I left the garage vacant for a couple weeks, but then I started using it again until they told me otherwise.
These landlords sound like douchebags….so while you might be dealing with painful fallout, at least you’re getting away from them?
I wonder if a heart-to-heart with the rental office would help things along. Simply state you have already been told the garage is going and you’ve vacated it by their order. You are therefore not renting that space and have no intention of cleaning it.
I have no advice. But it seems like a very unfair situation.
Landlords suck. There’s just no other way to put it. Forget about ever seeing the rest of your deposit again. You can clean that place to within an inch of it’s life and I guarantee you that they’ll find enough “damage” to eat up that deposit money. Been there; done that.
How far are you moving? Because if it’s far enough, I would just vacuum and mop the floors and clean the toilets and call it good. Like I said, you ain’t seein’ that deposit money again no matter what you do or don’t do. And while in theory they can come after you, it would be a small-claims court thing and they aren’t going to come out to wherever you are to file that and they can’t really subpeona you either. I suppose they could screw with your credit, but unless you’ve pissed them off somehow, all they really want is money.
Have I mentioned how much landlords can suck?
See this comment.
Man, am I glad I don’t rent any more.
My experience with it comes mostly from moving due to postings in the Navy. The worst was when I was transferred from Tidewater, VA to shore duty in Connecticut.
Background: The house we rented had previously been Section 8 housing and the neighbor said that prior to our moving in the place was in such bad shape you could literally see all the way through the holes in the walls to the house on other side.
It didn’t have a refrigerator when we moved in, so being
thriftyfrugalpoor, we bought one from the Sears scratch and dent store. Since we were moving out mid-month we arranged to leave the fridge in place in lieu of a half-month’s rent. They charged us to repaint the thing.This was Virginia, where you mow the lawn twice a week to keep the jungle beaten back. They inspected a week after we left, decided the lawn needed mowing, and then charged us for that.
There was just a whole slew of that kind of shit, $10 here, $20 there, and in the end… oh, looky, we don’t owe you any of your deposit back. And we’re a few hundred miles up I-95 and they knew we wouldn’t/couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
We’ve rented other places where they stated up front that the deposit was non-refundable. I appreciated the honesty.
Rod, that’s very zero-sum thinking.
Tenants can suck too. Just as bad.
I’m well aware of that. See the second paragraph in my reply to Patrick. I realize from some of your earlier posts that you handle a fair amount of work in this area, and if that has been primarily working on behalf of landlords you will have gained a perspective that reflects that. My experience has been as a tenant, so that’s where I’m coming from.
I think the tenant/landlord relationship is just structurally… troublesome. The incentives for each wrt to the other are seriously misaligned. Expectations are often quite unrealistic. For instance, as a tenant, I’ll mow the lawn. But that’s about it; if you want it weeded and seeded and fed, then hire a landscaping company.
But that’s at the high end of things. Unfortunately, being either a tenant or landlord tends toward deteriorating loops of behavior. You get a bad tenant and then you tend to view all future tenants through that lens and act accordingly. Same goes for landlords.
And I won’t proffer a defense of the slumlords who are out there. Nor of what Will seems to be going through.
To paraphrase our esteemed colleague Tim Kowal: people are just no damn good.
May I?
Slumlords fit a market segment that current building codes do not allow for: people who want to live in a place that costs dramatically less than even a very old well maintained building.
I’m not as pessimistic as Rod.
But allow me to be a realist, for once, and ask you to document any portion of the house that isn’t up to code.
Leverage is leverage.
Also, make sure you go through the building with the inspector, so that if he’s looking at something, and saying “it wasn’t cleaned” you can both have pictoral evidence.