Category: Personal

Just as I was gathering information from a family friend (who is also a property solicitor) and reading up on tenant’s rights and building up a head of steam in order to take on Mrs B…she rang us. She told us everything seems to have checked out so she was putting our cheque in the post. Sure enough, this morning it landed on our doormat. So, before it really started, it’s all over. I’m still annoyed that she took so long and had us jump through so many hoops to get what was rightfully ours, but it’s such a relief to have it sorted. Much as we were in the right, it was still a scary thought that we would have to get into a nasty fight over it all. In the end I think it came down to the fact that she realised she had no excuse not to pay us…much as she tried to find one. Either that or she does read this blog and you guys shamed her into paying us!

Things I’ve learned from this:

1. Make sure all contracts are in order and that the landlord/lady is registered with the Private Residential Tenancies Board so if any trouble comes up you can go through them.
2. Take photographs and make notes that detail the condition of the house when you move in. Agree on them with your landlord/lady and get them to sign them.
3. Take photographs the day you move out to show you have left the house in the same condition as when you moved in.
4. Keep all receipts of final bills.
5. Be friendly with your landlords but don’t get lax about the official stuff.

Thanks for all the comments and good advice everyone.

Another couple of updates to the Eircom/Landlady Sagas. One comes to an end, but the other might just be kicking off:

Eircom

Landlady

Just scroll down to the red text.

A couple of updates on the Eircom/Evil Landlady Sagas:

Eircom

Evil Landlady

My last post on my Eircom woes actually made me feel better. I guess it’s good to get it out and if it’s somewhere online, even if it’s only read by a handful of people, it feels even better. So, I thought, if it was good for that one, maybe I’ll try it with the other big frustration that’s going on for me right now…my old landlady.

Haha…the risk of this is that she reads this blog. I doubt it, it’s highly unlikely because otherwise she’d know about the cat wee incident and we’d have heard all about it before now. So, I’m going to risk it.

We have had a very good track record with our landlords. With a lot of our landlords we became good friends and we’re still in touch with them. One couple we were tenants of even came to our wedding. So, I think we’re good tenants, yes, the cats can be a pain, but we’ve always taken care of whatever damage they might do and it’s always been minimal.

Enter our latest landlady…from here on in I’ll call her Mrs. B (use your imagination)…we should have heard warning bells when she haggled our rent from our offer of €1,100 a month to €1,125 (yes, that’s €25), but we just thought it a bit strange and agreed. Later on she pulled out the horror of a kitchen and had a new one installed. We were out of the house for five weeks while it was being done and yet we got no rent reduction for that time. Again we said nothing because we were just so happy to see the back of the old kitchen. After it was in, she told us that now we had a nice new kitchen they’d be upping the rent come the end of the contract in June. Ok, we thought, we’re moving anyway, but Matt started to worry about our deposit.

When it comes to Matt and me, he’s definitely the pessimist and I’m the optimist so I hoped he was wrong about this one. It’s not looking good though. In the run up to giving back the keys at the end of June, we cleaned the house from top to bottom. Matt filled any holes we might have added to the walls for pictures and painted the hall and living room. He cleaned the carpets as well and we made sure the whole place looked just as we’d found it…better even. I thought she surely had to give us our deposit since there was nothing she could compain about. ha!

I wasn’t there when Matt met her to hand over the key, I kind of wish I had been. She looked at all our hard work, took the key and when Matt asked about the deposit she told him “Sure…as soon as you wash the blinds and clean the kitchen…” Ooookaaay, eventhough when we moved in I had to pay for cleaners to come in and clean the kitchen (I was 8 months pregnant at the time) and wash the windows. Matt brought up the kitchen palaver and her response was that we had gotten off lightly with that one since she could have put up the rent after that had been done but she hadn’t. Aww, ain’t she so kind. Nevermind that she could have done no such thing before our contract came up for renewal.

So Matt, bless him, got out the basin and the Ajax there and then and cleaned some more. Mrs. B told him she’d be around in the next few days to inspect his work and then she’d see about the deposit. GRRRR! This is where I want to slap her. A deposit is not meant as a ransom to your tenants to get them to do your bidding. Will we be walking her dogs and cleaning her toilet next?

We handed over the keys a week ago and still no sign of the deposit. I don’t even know what we can do if she refuses.

**Update. July 10th: Mrs B is still holding onto our money. Matt spoke to her today to ask point blank “When can we expect our money?.” There is some rubbish along the side of the house that we had told her we would clear this week. A lot of what is there is debris from when the kitchen was installed that they never cleared and some is garden debris from the tall trees that are all around the garden. I don’t believe any of this is our responsibility and really, our part of it is just a crate of bottles to be brought to the bottle bank. Her response to Matt’s call today was “As soon as the rubbish is cleared, the money will be transferred to your account.” I really wanted to get heavy with her, but Matt wants to take the high road (this is a compete role reversal for us!) and fulfill our end of it before starting to play the lawyer card. So, I’m going to go along with him on this one….for now.

**Update. July 14th: Well, the rubbish has been gone now for four days. We rang her on Tuesday to tell her it was gone and she brought up the Waste Charge. For my non-Irish readers, here in Ireland there is a charge for having your non-recyclable trash/rubbish taken away…this includes a pick-up charge and a weight charge. I paid our outstanding bill before we left and put some extra in to cover any pick ups that might not have shown up on our account yet. I even spoke at length to the Council over a week ago to make sure we were all paid up, they assured me it was settled. Mrs. B claimed on the phone that she had rung the Council and we’d not paid our bill. We were able to come straight back at her with the receipt number of our bill for the exact amount. “oh, um, I’ll get back to you when I check this number with the council.”

We’ve heard nothing from her since then and, as of this morning, no money has yet shown up in our account. I think it’s time to call a lawyer…

Phew! Well, it was alright on the night after all. I arrived at the church at about 6:30pm so I had a couple of hours to wait and hope that we would have a good turn out. The fact that the risers for the choir to stand on were being hastily hammered together around the back of the church at 7pm added an extra element of tension but I had pretty much decided by then to just chill and enjoy the singing.

At 7:30pm people began to arrive and we had a steady stream until 8pm. By the time everyone was in and the concert started I could breathe a sigh of relief. We didn’t pack the house, but it felt full enough to be respectable. I never managed to do an exact headcount but I reckon we had about eighty to ninety people. We had closed off the balcony so everyone would fill up the main part of the church and with the wind whipping up outside the atmosphere inside was just right. As for the concert itself…it was amazing. They started off with some classic hymns and southern spirituals that raised the hair on the back of my head. I think a lot of people had come just to support Barretstown…they didn’t really know what this choir was going to sound like but they figured it was for a good cause. I got the impression that people were a little bit stunned because they were so good. Good enough for a venue far grander than a little church in Dalkey. But the choir sang as if they were in the National Concert Hall, it didn’t seem to matter to them where they were or how small our numbers were, the singing and passion was just the same.

After a short interval they sang some more secular songs; folksongs and classics from around the world including a few numbers from Ireland. I don’t usually like Danny Boy, but their rendtion of it, complete with voices reproducing the droning of pipes, was beautiful. One of the favourites of the evening was Flight of the Bumblebee which raised a laugh because of some clever bee-swatting choreography. Their last piece was quite an emotional one; their conductor explained that this was the last concert of their tour and they would be returning to Arkansas the next day. Since many of the members would be graduating and leaving Harding that meant that this song would be the last one they would perform together as this particular group. So, there were a few tearful faces in the choir as they sang The Lord Bless You And Keep You. It was impossible not to be sucked in by it all.

So, I think it was a successful evening. Those who came had a wonderful night and I heard many comments along the lines of “If I’d known they were going to be this good, I would have invited more people…”
As well as that we raised over €1000 for Barretstown which is the most important thing.