OT (long): Landlord legal rumblings

Welcome to the world of Moving Drama!

In brief: Moved in with friends-a couple with 3 kids-a year ago. I and one of them is on the lease. I did it because they needed the credit boost (they are horrible at managing what little finances they have) and also to lessen their rent (so they could work on paying me back money they owe me-haha).

They can barely keep the house clean. They both have jobs (shift parenting). Kids are messy, and they have several pets (I have two cats, myself). House is looking like a wreck and I spend nearly all my time in the house secluded (with all my hoard of stuff in my room, protected from rugrats). I've given up helping them with their mess.

I am moving out this weekend, as lease is up end of month. Roommates told the landlord they would be out and house clean and painted by this weekend (what a joke). They're MIA right now, I think they took the kids down to Florida where she's moving near her parents with her kids (because their credit was too bad for them to find an apartment). I think they went to drop them off to get the 6-year old registered for school in FL and so they can pack and move their things undistracted.

Landlord (who I've barely spoken to for the term of the lease, except to write him a letter telling him he needed to fix the leaking pipes because they were causing safety hazards and water damage to the house.) called today complaining how bad the house looks, complaining that it's not painted like they said we would do, not ready for him to show to prospective tenants, etc. He rumbles (jocularly, if such a thing be possible) that he's so concerned that he's consulted a lawyer about suing for damages to the house. He says he knows it's likely them, not me, who've got the inside of the house looking like trash, but since I'm also on the lease, yadda yadda, he'd hate to see me get stuck with it.

No security deposit for him to take, since it was applied to final month's rent.

He's made rumblings like this before, according to the roommates, threatening to evict us after the plumber acted as his spy and reported that the house was a "total loss". However, this house wasn't in the best repair when we moved in. His follow up on the plumber-spy a few days later resulted in him saying the place looked fine to him (at that time).

But I'm worried that he's trying to find some tenants to sue so he can catch up on his own neglect of the house.

Maybe he's just trying to motivate his tenants to fix the place up, but I'm still worried. My roommates are not the best at getting the lead out and I'm worried I'll be stuck with a big clean-up job and might get sued.

Commisseration and advice appreciated.

-nervous ingenue

 

I was going to do pictures on the house and try to get the landlord to sign-off on a document I will prepare stating that the house's condition is comprable to move-in, no damage liability, blah blah blah. At that time, I may suggest to his Lordship that I'll stop by every few days after move-out to check for unforwarded mail (and to make sure I catch any new tenants within 72 hours of their lease-signing to tell *them* my sob story).

The floors are wood. I can tell there's been carpet over them previously because there are carpet nails in the floor at the edges of some of the rooms. He's cheap-maintained them by coating them with polyurethane which makes the wood look dark, but the wood now looks light in patches where normal foot traffic ha worn away the polyurethane. It looks awful but probably only needs another cheapie coat of polyurethane.

The only siginificant hole in the wall is the one that he had to have patched after the plumbing fix. Before the plumbing fix, that part of the drywall hat rotted out due to the leaky pipes.

A few of the doorjambs have come loose from the walls, but I think that's more a matter of his neglect and haphazard repair than roomies abuse.

The interior doors were all crappy quality upon move-in, their outer laminates peel away from the core just from everyday opening and closing of doors. But the downstairs bathroom door is splintered around the doorknob because of an episode where 3-year-old child locked herself in the bathroom and couldn't get out.

One window is broken because I locked the door and male roomie broke window to get in because he didn't have their set of keys with the house key. This is partly the landlord's fault, we were never able to get any copies of the keys to his crappy lockset to work in the locks, so we had only 2 keys among 3 adults. I offered my roomie that I'd pay for half of the window fix, but roomie has not done anything but duct-tape the crack.

The crawlspace/basement couldn't possibly be worse than when we moved in, as at that time is was (and still is) storage of the junk belonging to landlord and/or preceeding tenants.

There's mold damage on the bathroom walls and the paint is peeling there, but it looks to me like he's been cheap-fixing it for years. I remember scrubbing mold-stains off the bathroom walls when I moved in, but as move-out has neared, I've given up on this $hithole.

The refrigerator that came with the place is on the back porch. The freezer was filled with rotting food when we moved in, and even after roommies cleaned it, it reeked. Plus it was pretty damn old. My roommates' put in a fridge of their own. The landlord knew about this within 2 days of our move-in, so he'd damn well better not have a problem with the fridge having been left outside for a year.

We were assaulted by fleas our first day there and had to bug bomb twice before we moved our stuff in.

The wiring in some of the fixtures is suspect. My dad's an electrician, so I know what professional wiring looks like, and some of the bulb fixtures in the basement look like a do-it-yourself stuff. Those fixtures and a few others on presumably the same circuit burn out new light bulbs within a few weeks.

There were also some HVAC neglect issues - filter old and vent pipes that had completely separated and were spilling heated/cooled air into the crawlspace instead of the house.

Landlord's also complained about the condition of the yard, but it looks *better* than when me moved in. When *I* cleaned the yard and trimmed the bushes, I found junk from the previous tenants, including broken glass, vials of suspicious-looking seeds, rotting shoes, also boards with nails in them that the landlord mainly stored in a pile at the back of the yard. Roommies have been paying neighborhood kid to mow the lawn, I don't think the previous tenants did *that* at all.

The landlord offered us $25 off one month's rent to clean the gutters and roof right after we moved in. I cleaned it myself since my roommates are afraid of heights. The gutters were so clogged and had not been cleaned in so long that the dead leaves in them had become a rich humus soil and plants were growing in them as if they were flowerboxes! It took me at least 6 hours of work to finish the whole job.

We had to nag the landlord for four months to fix a plumbing problem in the kitchen - only a trickle of hot water would come out of the kitchen taps, so we also couldn't use the dishwasher. One of the plumbers doing estimates said our water heater was under recall for interior finish peeling, but that NEVER got replaced. The original galvanized pipes were in this approx. 50-year-old house, and the corrosion was impeding water flow.

After that was finally fixed (the plumbers also fixed the laundry taps, which were *both* connected to the hot water), the next problem was the *drainage* pipes in the kitchen, so running the dishwasher or draining the sink spilled water all under the sink cabinet and out under the wall, damaging the drywall and the floor. Phone nagging (for three months) by woman-roommate (the one adult not on the lease), got nowhere, I had to write landlord a letter stating that these things needed to be fixed and we wouldn't accept responsibility for damages due to his neglect. That was also the incident of the plumber-spy.

So my worry is *beyond* my roommate's mess. That can be cleaned up, and with the window repair, paint, and polyurethane on the floor, the house will be about the same as when we moved in, except for the water damage due to his neglect of the plumbing, and with a cleaner yard than before.

I don't think we are required to paint, either, but roomies told landlord they would, and I'll gladly help if it will placate him.

I'm worried that this guy might know that he's been neglecting the house and can't keep renting it without some serious repairs that have little to do with anything we've done to the house.

If he sues, I'm thinking of motioning for discovery of all repair receipts for work he's done on the house as far back as possible, to try to show that he's neglected it for years and is trying to sue a sucker to finance repairs that he should have been doing as regular maintenance. Another purpose of such discover would to aim at suggesting that he will pocket money without doing repairs (unless he brings repair *receipts* instead of *estimates*, which I doubt he will do.)

*pant*pant* So subsides the rant.

-ingenue

 

Oh, yeah, believe me, I shudder with waves of orgasmic delight when I contemplate my new apartment (moving in the morning-TODAY!) Ahhhh, the equisite pleasure of new carpet!

I've been dying to get out of this house. It's a hellhole and I've only stuck it out because I didn't want to break a lease.

-ingenue.