More continuation of the ongoing struggle with our ex-landlord: on March 15th, I requested for a second time that he send me receipts for his security deposit deductions; on March 23rd, he finally responded with "I'll come back to you shortly".
(I've given him a new pseudonym in this episode: our ex-landlord shall be "Biff", while his wife will be "Ophelia".)
. . . and then time marched on, with nothing but silence from Biff. Finally, on April 7th, I wrote him again, requesting the receipts a third time, saying that my patience was wearing thin, that he had more than exceeded all the deadlines established by the law, and that I considered this a serious matter, even if he did not. Later that day, I got this reply:
Was mailed last Monday to the address you provided. Sorry for the delay
but it took some time to finish the work and get all the receipts.
Regards
Biff
. . . so supposedly he sent the receipts a week and a half ago, and they haven't shown up yet. What mailing option did he choose -- twelfth-class mail? Anything I've ever sent from San Jose to Southern California took a few days, at most. Maybe there was a glitch in the system, and the receipts will be waiting for us once we all get back from vacation. Judging from prior experience, however ...
I don't know what to do if the receipts don't show up. Part of me wants to give up; just thinking about Biff at this point almost makes me feel physically ill. The prospect of any return seems less and less the farther we go down the rabbit hole. On the other hand, I don't want to let the bastard just win and walk off with $1450 of our money, ready to turn around and do to the next poor sap what he did to us.
One thing is clear, though. For the benefit of future search-engine users: if you're thinking about renting the house at --- Washington Street in San Jose (or any other property, for that matter) from Biff Slobotnik and Ophelia Hammerseley, don't. It's not worth the trouble. Biff may seem like a harmless eccentric when you first meet him (and someone who's indifferent about his own property to boot; anyone who would drag a piano over an unprotected hardwood floor, leaving giant grooves in its wake, wouldn't seem like the guy who'd haggle endlessly over a pair of nail holes), but he's strongly focused on getting as much from you as possible while giving up absolutely nothing of his own in return. Rent from him, and prepare to be harangued repeatedly about how he's only trying to get you to live up to your obligations as a tenant -- but turn it around and remind him about his obligations as a landlord, and you get nothing but "you don't understand", "it's not as simple as you think it is" -- and when the excuses run out, stonewalling and silence. I don't expect any landlord-tenant relationship to be perfect, or want our landlord to be our friend, but it certainly could have been far better than this.
Update (May 13, 2004): We did get the receipts, as promised; they arrived in Torrance a couple of days after I wrote that entry.
However, this grudging compliance doesn't mean that I don't think that we were totally scammed:
Item #1: All of the receipts are dated between March 9th and March 23rd. Given that Biff originally advertised the house on craigslist.org as being available at the end of February, it seems odd that he didn't do the work during February, a time when the house was presumably vacant for an entire month. Instead, the work begins a week and a half after I ask him for receipts. Hmm.
Item #2: The "professional" receipt -- the one that came first in Biff's packet, and listed all of the work done -- comes from "Home Renovation Services", a business that's not listed in the San Jose phone directory or registered as a business name in Santa Clara County. Given that the receipt refers to the bathroom as the "WC", a distinctly unamerican oddity of usage, I'd suspect that Biff, who comes from Europe, had a hand in writing the receipt himself.
Item #3: Biff's original breakdown of expenses ran as follows:
Painting/handyman work: $250
Dry cleaning curtains: $204
Final cleaning by cleaning lady: $120
Gardener: $80
Carpet replacement: $1750 (of which "our share" was $1000)
. . . for a total of $1654.
The final breakdown, that came with the receipts, went like this:
Cleaning lady: $120
Gardener: $80
Dry cleaning curtains: $110
Glass replacement: $130
Materials: $157
Labor: $910
. . . for a total of $1507, which means that we got a "refund" of $147 along with the receipts.
So what happened to the total carpet replacement in the first estimate? You know, the carpet that we so irreparably damaged that all the carpet in the house had to be replaced? Well, it turns out that merely steam-cleaning it again, along with replacing a frayed patch in the hallway, was sufficient after all. Hmm.
Having freed up $1000 by not replacing the carpet, it looks like Biff went to town in figuring out what additional work he could have done on his house at our expense. During our final walkthrough, Biff and I went over every scratch and ding in the house in excruciating detail -- what was new, what was old and reported on the move-in inspection sheet, what was old and not reported on the move-in inspection sheet. We made a list of things that we were responsible for paying for, and a list of things that he was responsible for paying for. Looking at the list of work that was done, it's clear that he decided to throw all of those lists out the window and just charge us for everything. I think the dodgiest thing on the entire receipt is the single unelaborated line charging us $910 for "Labor". How many people labored? How long did they labor for, and what was their hourly rate? But let's look at the rest:
Kitchen
So in our year and a half of living on Washington Street, we supposedly caused approximately $1,000 worth of damage (counting supplies and "labor") to the paint alone. Biff would have us believe that he did touch-up paint in every room and cleaned all of the walls immediately before we moved in, so any damage to the paint and walls was obviously our fault. This is completely ludicrous: for one, Biff and his family lived in the house up until a few days before we moved in -- if he can't manage to do repairs on an empty house in less than two months, when did he find the time to do all the work he claimed to do on the house just days before we moved in? The house certainly didn't smell of new paint, and any patched spots were obviously very carefully distressed to match the surrounding walls' existing level of dinginess. Second, on the day we moved out, you could still point to scuff marks and dirty spots on the walls that matched furniture they had in the house -- a long greasy/dirty smudge along a wall where they had their bed, but we had a bookshelf; in another bedroom, scuff marks at foot level where they had a desk, but we had a bed placed against a wall. Biff himself acknowledged much of this pre-existing low-level damage during our excruciating move-out inspection, as he searched for root-level causes for why we were guilty of everything -- "Why are those marks on the wall? You had nothing there? Hmm . . . ah, that's right, we had (piece-of-furniture) there, didn't we!"
In response to this, Biff would ask (and did ask, repeatedly, during the move-out inspection): "If you didn't cause this damage, why didn't you write it down on the move-in inspection sheet? If you didn't write it down, then there must have been no damage there!" At the time of the move-in inspection, I thought I was being thorough -- indeed, I was being more thorough in noting damage than I'd ever been before. In retrospect, I was being nowhere as picky as I should have been, and taking photographs (or video) in every room would have been more appropriate. But the greatest reason for the discrepancy between the move-in and the move-out inspections was that Biff himself had transformed into a completely different animal. The Move-Out Biff was possessed, driven to look for flaws, spending hours poring over the walls and opening and closing every drawer to verify its smooth operation. In contrast, the Move-In Biff was relaxed, detached -- if there were any problems inside his house, I had to find them, since he was hanging back and not helping at all. He certainly wasn't pulling open any kitchen drawers to demonstrate that they worked. And if he was ready to pronounce a room with scuffs, scrapes, and nail holes as "okay", can I really be faulted for thinking that to him, this amount of low-level, pre-existing damage was, well . . . "okay"?
Looking back, one might almost think that the move-in version of Biff was setting us up for something . . .
So why not take Biff to small-claims court? Believe me, I've looked into it. Unfortunately, to be sure of being successful, I would have had to be much more thorough on the move in inspection, given the vague and extensive list of damages that Biff is claiming. There are definitely grounds for argument here -- that the "labor" charge is excessive, that wear and tear matters are the landlord's responsibility, that paint is an item with a definite service life, and that tenants are liable for (at most) the fraction of that service life that they actually spent living in the house. However, it seems that most cases of this type degenerate into "he said"/"she said" arguments where, in the absence of absolutely conclusive written proof, the benefit of the doubt is usually given to the landlord.
At the very best, maybe I could argue/convince/connive/wheedle Biff out of some additional amount of cash, but the thought of going through several more months of back-and-forth negotiation with him -- and given the amount of work it took to get him to provide material he should have willingly provided without us even asking, it's not worth it. Again, I'll trade off the likelihood of getting back a fraction of the money Biff bilked us out of and the certainty of raising my blood pressure against the peace of having this idiot out of my life forever.
So enjoy your money, Biff -- I hope that you choke on it. I hope that the free paint job you got from us gives you great pleasure. It's hard to see how people like you can sleep at night -- but of course, it's always the most crooked who seem able to sleep the soundest.
And if you're looking to rent a three-bedroom, one-bath house on the edge of San Jose's Japantown, conveniently located next door to a daycare full of perennially screaming children and owned by a double-talking, ethically-challenged landlord, I've got just the place for you ...