When you rent a home from a landlord, you need to read the contract carefully and meet all of your obligations.

What would you do if your landlord was always neglectful of what he needed to do, but was quick to charge you fees and forced you to do a ton of work before you moved out?

That’s what happened to the family in this story, but after they moved out, the rest of the neighborhood came together to make sure the landlord had as much trouble as possible renting it to someone new.

Our entire neighborhood got petty revenge against our terrible landlord

In 2020 my family moved to a new state for my husband’s job.

They were lucky to find a place like this.

It was in the middle of the pandemic, and renting costs were way down across the country, so we didn’t think twice when we found a cute little house that fit our needs and was well within our budget range, 2 houses down from the school my kids would be attending and across the street from a really nice park.

The house had been empty for a while, we assumed due to the pandemic, and the landlord, who was also the owner, seemed eager to get it rented. We had a friend walk through the house for us on a video call before we signed the contract, and everything seemed like it would work out.

Things took a turn quickly.

As soon as we moved in, things started falling apart.

The blinds fell off the window the first time I tried to adjust them. The plumbing under 2 different sinks started leaking within the first week. The seal on one of the toilets broke during the first month.

The tenants don’t need to help with repairs.

We called the landlord who came over and fixed everything on his own, but always asked that my husband help him (My hubby used to work construction, and the landlord wasn’t too great with home repairs).

Then during the second month we lived there, the garbage disposal broke.

Umm, no. There is no service fee for this.

When I informed the landlords, they responded saying that they could come fix it, but that they would need to charge me a $70 service fee for repairs “as per the contract” and then pointed out that they should have charged me a service fee for each separate repair they had already made, but they were trying to be nice since we just moved in.

I was confused – In every place we have ever rented, basic home wear and tear was NOT the tenants responsibility. That’s the entire reason we rent!

Oh, well they should have read the contract.

I read back over the contract and realized that the line including a service fee for repairs doesn’t specify for repairs due to misuse of tenant – just repairs in general.

I argued with them that it was THEIR home and they were responsible for basic repairs, but they insisted that I “kindly follow the contract”.

Legally speaking, he is right.

I got in touch with other landlords in the area and they all agreed that my landlords were correct. Because most of the developed housing in this area is between 50-100 years old, landlords know that basic wear and tear will cost them an arm and a leg every time something breaks, so they implement a fee to discourage tenants calling about every little thing that might break.

But I wasn’t calling because a door came loose off the hinges or a drawer fell off the track, I’m calling because water is pouring from under the toilet or appliances have shorted out, none of which is my fault.

This would be very disappointing.

Regardless, we were stuck paying a service fee every time the landlord had to come fix something, which ended up being at least twice a month throughout the entire duration or our 2-year lease.

Every time I had to call about an issue, they found a way to make it sound like the problem occurred because of our misuse.

Because I had argued with them about the terms of the contract and insisted that these damages were NOT due to misuse, they decided we must be incompetent, and began micromanaging EVERYTHING.

This would get old quickly.

A few things they did:

• Came over to supervise my husband as he fertilized and mowed the lawn to make sure that he was doing it correctly.
• Drive by at least once a week to see that the grass was mowed, leaves were raked, snow shoveled, flower beds weeded, etc… and would message us if they felt we had neglected it even a little bit – we did NOT live in an HOA neighborhood. They always ended with their messages with “If it’s too much for you to handle, we can do it for you, but we would have to charge you a weekly fee”. Yeah right, over my dead body!
• Find “hazards” to nitpick every time they came into the house – the rug was a tripping hazard – you can’t put those boxes there, they block the walkway and it’s a hazard – you have to secure your trampoline to the ground because it might be a hazard – you have to take out the edging that you put around the flowerbed, someone might trip into it, and it’s a hazard. To say I hated these people is an understatement.
• Call us on holidays to harass us about menial issues, such as the last time we weeded the yard or fertilized. Then they insisted on receipts and proof, and implied that we were lying because they said the entire yard looked unsatisfactory. To be clear, my husband dedicated 4 hours every Saturday to the landscaping of this sucky 1/3 acre lot, and it was the nicest looking lawn and yard on the block

Why is this landlord being such a jerk?

Whenever we would call about repairs that we weren’t comfortable handling ourselves, they would give us instructions like we were children.

They would tell us what repair tools to purchase and how to fix it, even if we weren’t comfortable with it.

There is no way I would touch the electrical issues.

They insisted we try to manage it first before they came and looked at it, even if it was an electrical issue or plumbing issue that would require us to make changes to the house (which was prohibited in our contract).

At first, we played their game, but when the instructions they gave us didn’t work, they would always respond with “well you probably did it wrong, but I can come look at it for you. I’ll have to charge you a service fee though. Or you can just call a professional”.

What would the point of this be?

Another option they gave was that they could come observe us attempting to fix it, and give instructions as we go, but if they had to condescend to physically touch the issue or repairs at all, that they would have to charge us a service fee. I really hated these people.

After arguing the first time this happened about how unfair it was to charge me a fee after I just spent a lot my own time and money attempting to fix it per their instructions without any success, I told them to forget it, I would just call a professional.

They should be happy about it.

They took offense to that, and told us that they had to approve any professional we called to fix the problem.

If we wanted a pro to look at it, WE had to do the research and send the landlord a proposal about who to use, and they would make the final determination – and we would still pay a service fee because the repair had to be made regardless if a pro fixed it or if they fixed it themselves.

Can this even be legal?

On 3 different occasions we had a professional come out to give a quote – each time for a different issue. Every time, the professionals refused to even bother with a quote for the specific issue they were called on because it was always a smaller part of a larger problem that would require extensive remodeling and repairs to do it correctly and ensure the problem was fully resolved.

These were for structural issues of the home, such as the foundation being poured incorrectly (which was very evident in the way the plumbing exited the basement) or the wiring being done wrong causing a fire hazard.

They don’t want to touch these issues without getting to the root of the problem.

Due to insurance issues, any professional would be unable to only address the immediate problem without making extensive repairs.

EVERY TIME, the landlord would say he wanted a second opinion and then bring in a “handyman friend” who looked at it and said that they pro’s were trying to scam him, that it was an easy fix, and that they could MacGyver a solution without spending thousands of dollars.

No surprise that their fixes weren’t working.

Each time their fix would only last a few months, and then the problem would occur again and they would come back and figure out another half-baked solution – for which we had to pay a service fee every time.

By the end of our 2-year contract I was totally done with these people, but unfortunately, renting prices had gone WAY up, and nothing else close by was in our budget range.

Wow, I can’t believe they wan to stay.

We asked a few months before our lease was up if they would be willing to renew the lease with us (considering we felt like they hated us, and we totally hated them), and they told us they would let us know before 60 days of the end of the lease.

At 11:30pm on the last day they could still legally inform us, they sent us the lease renewal agreement, which included a 25% rent increase, and new clause stating that all damages the landlord deemed to be the tenants fault were to be solely covered by the tenant.

Do not agree to this.

They already acted like everything was our fault, there was no way I was going to give them legal permission to make me pay for everything!

Plus, they wanted to charge me 25% more to stay in the same broken-down house? Screw that, we were moving.

I suppose they can try to charge whatever they want.

At first my husband tried to negotiate the price down, because he was shocked they would ask that much increase just to stay in the house.

They countered that if they were to turn around and rent it to someone new, that they would be able to charge 35% more, and that the 25% increase was really giving us a break considering the going rate.

At least they will be out of there.

So, we decided that since we were going to be paying more anyway, we might as well move to a nicer house with nicer landlords.

All 3 of my kids were going to finally be in school full time, so I could pick up extra work to pay the difference.

Hopefully this one will work out better.

We found a place that was a little more expensive than the cost of staying in our old house, but with twice as much space and a really nice neighborhood. My kids could stay in the same school, so it wouldn’t be too much upheaval for our family.

I waited until 11:30pm on the last day that I legally had to inform the landlords of our decision to renew, and I sent them an email stating that their house was really not a good fit for our family anymore, and that we would not be renewing our contract. This was 30 days before our lease ended.

No way, they don’t have to fix this type of stuff.

They retaliated by sending us a list of all the repairs that we had to make sure were completed before we moved out, which included a lot of small things, but also big things like:

• Spackling all holes in the walls and repainting
• Removing any modifications we had made, such as shelving units, guard rails, and the partitioned office we set up in the unfinished basement, complete with lighting and flooring and walls.
• Replacing the bedroom door that one of our kids broke – which was not a standard size, and would need to cut and sanded to fit the doorway
• Leaving the yard in the exact condition we found it in
• Fix the flooring in the bathroom that had mold build up underneath it

All of those would be irritating to me.

This last one was particularly irritating, because they flooring by the tub had not been properly sealed, so ANY amount of water on the floor was going to run under the floor and cause mold.

In fact, the base sealing that ran around the entire bathroom outline was about 3 inches short of the length in needed to be in order to run flush with boarder of the floor, and whoever installed it decided to leave that 3-inch gap at the middle of the tub rather than some place unnoticeable, like in the closet.

Let him take you to court.

The landlords insisted that the mold was our fault and that the unfinished seal had nothing to do with it.

Then they got angry when I pulled up the flooring to determine the amount of mold damage, because it meant the floor needed to be completely replaced.

This isn’t really possible.

They acted like if I had carefully pealed it back I could clean the mold and put the exact flooring back down.

This wasn’t stick on squares, this was a roll of linoleum flooring that was over 15 years old and had been glued down with professional grade adhesive. Reusing the same flooring was NOT an option, as it was brittle and breaking apart.

These tenants are already doing more than they are required to.

He was also mad that I mentioned to one of the professionals who came to give a quote that there had been mold involved at all (this was after I had removed the adhesive and mold), and said I was ruining their chances of getting a cheap quote.

After 3 different quotes for the bathroom floor, they refused to approve anyone, because every quote included needing to test for asbestos, which the landlord wasn’t confident would end in his favor.

That can save some money, but the landlord will never be happy.

So, I told him I would do the work myself (I’ve put in flooring several times before, and I worked construction with my dad growing up, so I know what I’m doing).

At this point, we only had 2 weeks left before we needed to be out. In the midst of all of this, my husband’s uncle passed away in a very traumatic and shocking event, and he ended up flying across the country to attend the funeral and be with his family.

These people can’t catch a break.

This left me alone with 3 kids to do all the repairs and finish moving into the new house. And in the meantime the landlords also insisted on approving all the materials I purchased to make the repairs in the home.

While all this is happening, our neighbors were mad at the landlords for pushing us out. We had really good relationships with all of them. One neighbor was like a grandma to my kids and was always baking them goodies and inviting them over to play with their dogs.

At least they got along with the neighbors.

The neighbors across the street would always sit on the porch and chat with us on summer evenings. We brought cookies to everyone on our block during holidays and made it a point to get to know everyone’s names and know their families.

It was a REALLY tight community. Even before the landlords/owners turned nasty though, everyone told us how terrible they were, because they had lived in the house themselves and the neighbors all knew them.

Well, renting to family does often make sense.

Before our family moved in, they landlords would only rent to people from their home country, who usually didn’t speak English, and didn’t like to interact with anyone else in the neighborhood.

On several occasions the landlord admitted to neighbors that he did not want to rent to anyone who wasn’t like “his people” because it just didn’t feel right.

The neighborhood is sad to see them go.

We were the first family who had rented that house that felt like an addition to the community rather than someone hiding from the community. When our neighborhood found out they had bullied us into moving, they were very upset.

During the last week (the same time that my husband was gone for the funeral), I realized that I was way in over my head, and wasn’t going to be able to finish all these repairs and cleaning by myself.

Nothing will make the landlord happy.

We reached out to the landlord and let him know that it would take us a few days past our lease to finish up the repairs, but that we were willing to do the work.

He lost his mind. He told us that if he didn’t get the house back in the exact same condition it was in by midnight on the last day of our lease, that he would charge us an extra month of rent plus sue for damages because it would be time lost that he couldn’t rent it out to someone else.

What an absolute jerk.

We reiterated that my husband was at a funeral, and they had just barely approved the work on the repairs and materials a few days earlier. His response was to “kindly follow the contract” or he would take legal action.

So, our neighborhood and church congregation came together and spent those last few days working on the house so that everything was fixed and in accordance with what the landlord demanded.

That is great that the community came together.

One person painted, another person finished the flooring in the bathroom, one family had their kids come over to pull weeds, another guy brought tools to cut and sand the door to fit properly.

EVERYONE agreed that all the repairs were things the landlord should be handling and shouldn’t be our responsibility to personally repair or even coordinate the repairs for.

He was just being a jerk.

These were things that should be covered in a deposit. The landlord acted like he had someone ready to move in the moment we were out and that he was going to lose that contract if the house wasn’t ready. Spoiler alert, he didn’t.

Even after we turned the keys over, the landlord wanted to nitpick and make us come back to fix small things, which we flat out refused and told him he could take it out of our deposit.

No surprise here.

30 days after we moved, we received a bill from the landlord. He nickeled and dimed us out of every last cent of our deposit, despite all the repairs and work the entire community had done.

Stupid claims like $150 to replace a window screen that had a hole in it, when I know he either wasn’t going to fix it at all, or just buy a $2 repair kit from Walmart.

$800 for water damage to a kitchen drawer because there was some bubbling on the bottom, something that I know he was just going to put an insert on to cover it.

He really shouldn’t get away with this.

He even cited damages that had been there since before we moved in, and he had himself charged us a service fee to fix several times, but the issue remained because he never properly fixed ANYTHING.

His bill was in excess of $500 of our actual deposit. Some of it was to cover utility fees that I had already directly paid to the city.

I hope she kept all of her receipts.

I sent receipts of my payment for the utilities and told him I was not paying him anymore money. If he wanted to withhold my entire deposit, so be it, but he wasn’t getting another dime out us.

If he wanted to sue, go for it. We never heard from them again, but I was still mad. My neighbors were still mad. And we all wanted revenge, even if it’s petty.

I’m glad they are still close with the neighbors.

Because the new house we moved into was only about 5 minutes away, my kids still went to the same school – the one that is 500 feet from the old house. I drive past it EVERY day taking my kids to and from school. And we also still go over just to visit neighbors. Here is what I found out from chatting with them:

Every time the landlords would bring someone in to show the house, the next-door grandma would make sure she or her husband were doing yardwork.

Oh, good for them.

They would make sure to strike up a conversation with the prospective tenants, and always mention how the last family who lived there was so wonderful, and it was really awful that they only reason we had moved away was because of how the landlords treated us.

Someone (I still don’t know who) took to knocking on the doors and windows at all hours or the night, which sent alarm notifications to the landlords. They started to keep his personal car parked in the driveway of this unoccupied house to deter break-ins.

Now this is just too funny.

My neighbor who liked to sit on the porch and chat with us in the evenings decided that anytime the landlord was doing landscaping work was a time my neighbor wanted to be enjoying his peace and quiet. He yelled at the landlord for making too much noise so often, that the landlord ended up buying all new landscaping equipment that was electric and specifically intended to reduce noise.

The house sat empty for 6 months before they got new renters. I watched the price move up and down on Zillow every month.

Good, hopefully the landlord loses money in the end.

At first, they tried to rent it out at $800 more than what we had been paying. Then it steadily dropped each month until they were asking nearly what our original rent was.

Eventually they rented it out, and it was much cheaper than we had tried to negotiate them down to, which gave me great satisfaction. I found a way to introduce myself to the new family within the first a couple of weeks that they lived there.

It is nice to warn the new tenants.

It was easy to spot them during school drop off and pick up times since they walked their kids to school. “Oh, you just moved in? We used to live there! The neighbors are so nice. I hope you don’t have too much trouble with the landlords!”

After a little over a year of the new family living there I noticed a moving truck. I had done the math and knew that they were still in the middle of their lease. I decided to be super petty. I knocked on the door and reintroduced myself, and verified that they were moving.

Hopefully the new tenants can protect themselves.

Then I unloaded everything the landlords did to us during our move out process, and how they screwed us out of thousands of dollars, even after we did all the repairs.

I gave them pictures of our move out process so that if they landlords tried to charge them with certain damages, they could prove that it existed before they moved in.

This is really nice of them.

I gave them contact information for everyone who worked on the house before we had moved out so that they could have a timeline of all the damages that I’m certain the landlord would try to pin on them.

They verified that the landlords had been unbearable, and were the main reason they were moving out. And once again the landlords had sent a laundry list of repairs the family was required to fix before moving.

Good for them.

After our conversation, the husband told me he was going to inform the landlord that he would only do the cleaning and repairs if they landlord returned their entire deposit up front, otherwise he wasn’t going to do anything beyond removing his possessions from the property.

I’m assuming he didn’t get his deposit back, because a few weeks after they moved, I saw the landlord and his wife in front of the house.

This guy seems insufferable.

They had hired someone (not a professional) to clean up the yard, and they had set up an umbrella and chairs to shade them while they micromanaged the work this poor laborer was doing in the hot sun.

The house has sat empty for over a year now. According to our old neighbors, who we are still good friends with, they have only shown the house a couple of times.

His reputation is catching up to him.

It’s both for sale and rent, at much cheaper than going rate, but no one wants it. As I understand, the neighbors still do what they can to harass them.

Someone went back to knocking on doors and windows to set off the alarms, because the landlord has his car parked there 24/7 again.

Hopefully the city will fine him.

One neighbor also reported him to the city for blowing his leaves across the street into the park rather than bagging them himself, and I hope he got a hefty fine and lots of back pain every time he had to rake and bag his own leaves.

Now it’s covered in snow, and because the house is so close to a school, they have to come over and ensure the walkways are salted and shoveled. It sure is a lot of extra work for a house that is empty and not bringing in any income.

Sometimes it is the little things in life.

Every time I drive past to drop my kids off at school, I see that for sale sign and get the sweet satisfaction that they aren’t making any money on that house, and that they aren’t terrorizing anyone else.

What a frustrating situation, but at least they got a little bit of revenge in the end.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

This was a crazy story.

I’d like to know where this was as well.

Always talk to a lawyer.

Some landlords just love making things difficult.

Yup, always know your rights.

Worst landlord of the year award goes to this guy.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.