Ugh…

Another day, another horror story about a no-good landlord.

And this guy was a real gem, let me tell you…

But he got what was coming to him in the end!

Check out this guy’s story: we think you’ll like what he did…

Bad Renting Situation.

“The place we were renting is a duplex that is split down the middle here in Upstate NY.

My little 2 bedroom side of the house was next to the garages and driveway. It had a small side of the yard which was 15 ft x 5 ft.

We have a Chocolate Lab named Benny that uses that back yard for his bathroom etc.

The awful neighbor in my duplex who I’ll call Rick had the bigger side of the yard and a staircase that lead up to the back field where there was a nice walking path and horse farm.

And then there’s Rick…

The back of our duplex was kind of built right into the side of the hill leading up to the horse farm/corn farm.

Rick was subletting one of his rooms to a Russian chain smoker that we’ll call Olga and she was the same age as him (60 ish).

Rick is a jerk 90% of the time and demands we never use his staircase to go up to the walking trail.

His Russian friend and he also chain smoke in front of our living room window making our house smell like an 80’s era bowling alley.

Over the course of our renting this place we got in numerous fights with these jerks over where they could smoke so that our side of the house didn’t stink.

The landlord lives in FL and uses the property as his retirement cash cow.

The LL we’ll call Dwayne and he’s about 70 years old.

The house itself was built in 1940 or earlier and we lived on an old farm road with a pumpkin farm across the street.

Just want you to have an image of the location because it’ll come into play.

The first week we’re in the house unpacking and my wife asked me to plug in the vacuum and run it around the downstairs to get up the Styrofoam from the packing materials.

I notice that the plug sparks when you plug it in or unplug anything.

I call Dwayne and tell him and he says “Ok…..call around and get a price from an electrician and let me know what it’ll cost.”

Hmmm…

This was a red flag for me. I’m paying $1300 a month for this duplex and now this guy wants me to do all his leg work since he is out of state.

I figure whatever and find an electrician that’ll charge $200 for the house call plus the outlets he’ll end up replacing.

I call Dwayne and he says “no, that’s too much, I’ll send one of my guys over to do it.” This ****** me off because I just spent 20 minutes calling around getting ballpark quotes but I figure fine as long as the work gets done.

Fast forward one month and his electrician finally shows up one day to do the work. He replaces 12 of the 14 outlets because he didn’t think he’d find so many bad ones.

I figure that’s fine since the ones he didn’t replace are up in the room we never use.

2 months goes by and its early spring and raining a ton. One night we get a HUGE downpour that lasts for about 35 minutes.

My wife says she hears water in the basement.

Oh, boy…

I run down in the basement and we have 2 waterfalls coming through the windows that look into the backyard and 4 inches of water on the floor and rising.

I call Dwayne the next morning and tell him about the windows in the basement and the flooding and he says I need to find a cleaning service to clean up the mess.

I tell him I can’t because I’m going to work.

Dude…

He says “ok, do it after work then.” I say “listen, I don’t own this house, you do, so find someone today that can clean this up and repair the windows or I’m going to do it myself and take it out of the rent (which is NY state law.)”

He gets ****** and hangs up.

Later in the evening he calls and says a cleaning service will be there in two days to clean the basement from all the mud and water.

I tell him that’s fine but he might want to repair the windows since it’s still raining pretty regularly.

He says no that won’t be necessary since he’s still getting quotes about a French drain for the back of the house.

The cleaning crew shows up and they clean the whole basement out. It takes them 6 hrs with power washers and scrubbing machines etc.

They leave at 5pm that day and we’re thinking ok great now we have the basement cleaned up, but the windows aren’t holding anything out since they are so old and have no sealant around the outside edges.

2 days goes by and it downpours again and fills the basement back up with water and mud. I call Dwayne and he sounds defeated.

He tells me that he’ll send the cleaning crew back out the same day the contractors are going to show up with the backhoe for digging the French drain around the backside of the house.

Fast forward 2 weeks and everybody shows up.

The work is completed and we’re happy to have a normal basement again even though I’m ****** that we have had a swamp down there for so long.

But wait, there’s more!

2 more months goes by and my wife one night screams while in the kitchen. She swears she saw a mouse in the kitchen run from under the sink to the under the oven.

I ask her what it looked like and she says big, grey, and had pink ears.

I know right away this isn’t a field mouse but a full grown rat. I open the drawer below the oven and all our cupcake pans are full of little rat turds and it’s nasty.

Thankfully we never bake so they weren’t a big loss.

I call Dwayne and he says he has an exterminator friend that lives nearby and he’ll call him and get back to me.

Dwayne calls back the next morning and says “I spoke to my friend and he claims that your dog going to the bathroom in the backyard is probably attracting the rats.”

I tell him “rats don’t eat ****, so that makes no sense. We’ll need to have an exterminator sent out to deal with this.”

Dwayne goes on a tirade about how we’re the worst renters and that we constantly complain about little things.

I tell him “for $1300 a month I expect a rat free, spark free, living space that doesn’t flood or smell like a bowling alley.”

At this point Dwayne says he’ll look into it and hangs up. I’m super mad at this point.

We’ve had nothing but problems with this place from the first week and now we’ve got rats in our kitchen.

I do a little digging online and find out that you can have health department investigate rat infestations and if they see that the landlord isn’t doing anything about it, they’ll put a lien on the house until the work is complete.

So obviously I decided to go that route.

I call the health inspector and he tells me that he’ll come out in a few days and do an inspection and get back to me.

This guy couldn’t take a hint.

Dwayne calls me back and says the rat problem is my fault because I have a dog and that I need to deal with the problem myself.

I told him no problem I just set up an appointment with the health inspector. Dwayne get really upset and cusses me out.

I call my lawyer and tell him to call Dwayne and arrange for us to break the lease since I don’t want to deal with him anymore.

Fast forward two months. The health inspector had found a bunch of rats and holes in the foundation and evidence that the colony had been living in the house for “years and years from the looks of it.”

He contacts Dwayne and tells him about the lien if he doesn’t address it.

Dwayne calls me and says he’s sending an exterminator. Now at this point I had put the place up on Craigslist to find new renters since Dwayne had decided to sublet our lease instead of let us out of it.

I found some college kids that were desperate for a place and they seemed like typical, rich college kids. I tell them that the place doesn’t have A/C and they’ll need window units etc.

But I also tell them that the next door neighbor is pot friendly and loves smoking. I tell them that he is super chill and that they can totally use the staircase in the backyard to use the hiking trails.

These kids had some money behind them.

One of the kids brought his mom that showed up in a new Jag and so I knew that Dwayne wasn’t going to be able to **** all over these people since I knew they’d lawyer up.

I never mentioned the rat infestation or that this place was a nightmare because I knew that these kids’ rich parents would go nuclear with a lawyer if they had to deal with this stuff.

Dwayne accepted the new tenants and let us out of the lease. All it took was a few threats from my lawyer before I got my security deposit back.

Fast forward 3 months. I drive by the old place to see what’s happening. It looks like the college kids and Rick are off to a rough start. There is a plastic divider down the driveway to separate who gets what.

Good riddance!

There are beer cans all over the front yard and Rick’s truck is parked on the side lawn.

He never did that when we lived there, so I’m sure these kids were driving him crazy with parking.

Olga is nowhere to be seen since she probably jumped ship when the parties started.

I don’t know what became of the rats but 2 months later I did another drive by and there was no furniture on our side of the house which tells me everybody had left and Dwayne wasn’t making any money….which made me happy since he was an *******.”

Check out what Reddit users had to say.

This person couldn’t believe it…

Another person offered some advice.

This Reddit user had a lot to say.

This individual was shocked.

And one reader wasn’t too impressed by this.

When you gotta go, you gotta go.

And most people draw the line at rats.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.