Imagine renting a house with a small backyard filled with weeds. If your lease stated that you needed to mow the lawn, would you do it, or would you let the weeds continue to grow?

In this story, some college students are in this situation, and they come up with a clever way to get out of mowing the lawn. But there’s another funny story about this landlord that they also feel compelled to share.

Let’s read all about it.

Landlord wanted us to mow the lawn

In college, I rented a house with a couple of roommates.

We probably should have looked into the landlord a bit further before renting. But it was a bit of a small college town where the college had outgrown the available housing, so we were desperate for whatever we could get.

Shortly after signing the lease, a family member sent me an article about what a slumlord the landlord was. But there wasn’t much to do about it at that point.

In the end, they were slow and cheap about fixing things, but they pretty much left us alone, unlike some of the other college town landlords. So it wasn’t too bad.

They inherited a problem.

The house had a small back yard. I believe that the yard had once contained a lawn. But one of the consequences of the landlords refusing to put any time or money into the place was that, when we moved in, the whole backyard was just a sea of tall weeds.

This didn’t really bother us, so we just left it. But apparently it bothered one of our neighbors, because they went to our landlord, who sent us a letter telling us that, according to the lease, it was our responsibility to take care of it.

I feel a bit bad for the neighbor here, because they did have to live near this eyesore.

But we didn’t create the problem. And we didn’t feel like it was our job to do something about it.

This is funny!

So we took a look at the lease and found that it said (I’m paraphrasing here; this was a while ago), “It is the tenant’s responsibility to mow the lawn”.

After spending some time thinking about this, we came to the conclusion that what we had couldn’t rightly be called a lawn. And the lease only specified that we were responsible for mowing the lawn.

So we sent back a letter saying, “We would be happy to mow the lawn, if you would provide us with one”.

That actually worked!

We really didn’t want to have to mow a lawn.

We didn’t have a mower, and I’m sure that the landlord would not have provided us with one.

But, by that point, we had become familiar with how cheap and lazy they were, and we bet that they would rather ignore our neighbor than either argue with us about it or replace the weeds with a lawn.

And we appear to have been correct, because we lived there for probably another 3 and a half years and we never heard another word about it.

This bonus story is funny too!

There are a couple of other funny stories about them, so here’s another quick bonus story: They were trying to sell most of their properties out from under their tenants.

At one point they brought someone in to tour our house while we were living in it. And the landlord, while giving the tour, had the audacity to ask US how the house was heated.

When we pointed to the crappy furnace (not the HVAC kind – basically just a box that got hot), they asked “Aren’t there baseboard heaters in the bedrooms?”

Which there was. In just one bedroom. Upstairs. Which never needed it, because it was upstairs and all the heat ended up there anyways.

What an awful landlord! But the college students proved they knew how to get him to back off.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

One person shares problems they had with a rental.

I’m sure this is exactly what happened.

Here’s some praise for being smarter than the landlord expected.

Sometimes it’s easier just to smile and nod.

The weeds will probably be there forever.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.