Imagine renting an apartment for many years and then buying a house. Would you be willing to give your landlord access to your apartment before you moved out so he could redo the floors and get it ready to rent to a new tenant, or would you refuse to let the landlord access your apartment until you had moved out?

In this story, one married couple is in this situation, and they refuse to let the landlord redo their apartment until they move out; however, if the landlord had been more flexible with them, it might’ve gone differently.

Keep reading for all the details.

We are Going to Honor Your Terms for our Rental Notice

Years ago my husband and I had finally saved up enough for a down payment for a house, and we were preparing to leave our rental.

I think the lease had expired, and we were on a month-to-month basis, but there are still regulations in our state regarding when we had to give notice.

I talked to the property manager before our closing to see if there was any wiggle room on how much notice we had to give, since we didn’t want to give the required notice only to have something fall through at closing, and then we’d be out of a place to live.

We’d lived there for almost a decade and had always paid our rent on time and had otherwise been good tenants, so I thought they’d be flexible with our notice & move-out dates.

They didn’t get the answer they hoped for.

The manager said she would ask the owners, and in a day or so she called to say that she was sorry, but they will not be flexible at all, they won’t pro-rate a partial month’s tenancy, and we’d have to give a month’s notice on the the last day of the month (or that may have been the first day of the month – it’s been a while and I don’t remember.)

We said that would be fine and we understood that he was under no obligation to accept our offer to give our one month’s notice on any other date than the last day of the month.

Fast forward to our closing date in September, where everything went smoothly, and we became homeowners.

We waited until the last day of the month to give the manager our written notice and October’s rent, she accepted it, and we planned to be out on the last day of October.

They took their time moving.

Had the landlord accepted our offer, we would have moved our butts to get out of there immediately after closing, but since he wouldn’t budge, we decided to take our time.

The new place was about 3 miles from our apartment, and we decided that instead of hiring someone to move everything, we’d take a few boxes over every day and then hire movers during the last week to move the big heavy stuff.

That worked out pretty well, as we had time to organize as we moved, and we saved some money by not having the movers pack and transport everything we owned.

The landlord was doing some remodeling.

The owner had 6 units where we were (as well as other properties around town.)

In the early part of October, one of our neighbors told us that the owner was redoing the floors in all of the units. He’d hired a crew to move furniture, remove the carpet and linoleum and replace it with Pergo, or some other laminate flooring.

It was quite a job, since most of us had lived there for years, and each unit was two floors and about 1200 sq. ft.

They weren’t willing to be flexible.

Right after we heard this from the neighbor, the manager came over and asked if they could have access to our unit now so that the flooring could be replaced by the crew. She said the owner wanted to have the unit ready for a new tenant on the first of November.

We said that this would be impossible since we were in the process of moving, and he can have access to our unit on the date he had insisted on since he wouldn’t be flexible with our needs. We’d scheduled a professional cleaner to come in on October 31, and they’ll be done by 5pm, so he can have access then.

Had they accepted our offer, we would have been out of there about two weeks earlier, and we would have been much more cooperative about letting the flooring crew in to re-do the floors.

The manager said the owner wasn’t happy (it sounded like he would lose some money since the unit wouldn’t be ready on the 1st for new tenants, and he’d have to get the flooring crew back) but there really wasn’t much he could do at this point.

I was hoping the landlord would somehow end up paying for their movers and cleaning crew  so they could be out quicker, but giving the landlord a taste of his own inflexible medicine works too.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This is true.

Exactly!

This person makes a good point.

Same!

The landlord didn’t think ahead.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.