She Reported Peeling Paint to Her Landlord—Until an Official Inspector Stepped into the Apartment
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Imagine renting a house from a landlord who lives far away. When there’s an issue, she wouldn’t personally be able to come over and help. Instead, she’d have to rely on someone she hires showing up to do the repairs.
In this story, one tenant calls her landlord to tell her about a minor but annoying issue, peeling paint. The landlord doesn’t want to deal with it and gives the tenant the go-ahead to file a claim with the city.
Keep reading to find out what happens when the city inspector shows up.
My landlord told me to go ahead and report her to the city, it did not go as planned
A few months ago I noticed the paint on the ceiling in our bathroom was starting to peel in our new apartment.
In general, asking my landlord to address things hasn’t gone as smooth as I’d like and this was no different.
The paint got progressively worse until it was falling in bits and pieces on the floor.
It’s like the ventilation fan doesn’t really do anything and the moisture is making the new paint come off in huge chunks.
It seems to be taking forever to get this fixed.
I have had a lot of bad landlords thanks to the slumlord issue in my city so I have a pretty good handle on what my landlord is supposed to do when something like this needs to get done.
I’m not dealing with a slumlord though, just an out state owner of the home we rent who doesn’t necessarily like us bothering her. I get it.
So I went ahead and took the timeline she legally has to fix the issue (21 days), multiplied it by 3 to be super patient and rounded up to 3 months.
In those 3 months, the contractors she said would come failed to show up a whopping 6 times and she started blaming me for not being able to plan with them even after I showed her they aren’t answering my calls or responding to texts to confirm when they can actually come out and do the repair. I work from home, the issue was not my availability to let someone into the unit.
OP was starting to give up on the landlord ever getting the problem fixed.
Finally, at 3 months and some change, I asked her if the repairs were ever going to get done and dropped the hint that I knew the legality of these things by mentioning our city’s code enforcement offices.
I’ve used them before, they’ve helped tremendously and put fines on the landlord when they don’t fix things after they inspect the unit and tell them to get it together.
I showed her the document from the city website that lays out the timelines for different repairs and that she was well outside of the 21 days she’s given for defective paint.
Her response surprised me.
Let’s see what the landlord had to say.
She said “That is not relevant to me. File your claim with the city.”
I responded “Oh ok.”
It took about 5 minutes to fill out the form on the website and about an hour before I got a call scheduling an inspector to come out and take a look.
I genuinely have no clue why a landlord would welcome one of these inspections.
Here’s what happened when the inspector came out.
If you’re guessing the inspector took a look around and found way more than just peeling paint that she needed to fix… you would be so so right.
They found a fire alarm that wasn’t working, took note of the garbage around the property, and found windows that were boarded up in the basement that needed to be real windows to satisfy the city’s ‘at least 2 real windows in basements’ rule or whatever.
While we were down in the basement I figured I’d ask the inspector about our breaker.
Here’s what happened with the breaker.
A few weeks ago, my upstairs neighbor had the power go out in one of her rooms. She asked us to turn our breaker off and on to see if that would work and it did!
The inspector told me that something like this needed to be a phone call to the utility company.
Well, I can make a phone call!
The electric company scheduled someone within 2 days to come out and take a look and whaddya know? The wires are way more mixed than we thought.
Let’s see what the electric company discovered.
My upstairs neighbor has been paying for the basement and the kitchen AND bathroom in my unit.
I have been paying for the entire top floor of her apartment.
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I didn’t know it but it turns out that ,when this happens, the landlord has 21 days to have a licensed electrician come out and unfuck the wiring before the entire electrical bill for both apartments legally goes into her name.
All I needed was the peeling paint fixed but now I’m going to enjoy living in a unit that is entirely 100% up to code and maybe save some money in the process. Sounds good to me!
Wow! There were definitely a lot more issues than peeling paint!
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
Here’s some good advice.
Another person was in a similar situation.
Another person comment’s on the landlord’s instructions.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a homeowner who doesn’t care whether or not their neighbors hate their yard flamingos, because they aren’t subject to the HOA.
But this person thinks the landlord will retaliate.
It might be for the best to start looking for another place to live in case the landlord retaliates somehow. Although, the landlord can only blame herself. If she had just had someone fix the paint issue, this never would’ve escalated so much. However, it really is for the best to get the house up to code.
She had no idea the house had so many problems!
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