Thursday, April 16, 2015

The deposit heist

It seems that moving away from rented property is daylight robbery. This is exactly one reason why it's a darned good idea to own rather than rent.

After having to give a month's notice that I'm vacating the property (read give us an extra month of rent}, I'm now told I have to give the landlord a receipt that the (already stained when I moved in) carpet must be professionally cleaned and that I must give the landlord the receipt in order to get my deposit back. I believe I'm not the only one to smell a rat, there, especially since the place wasn't clean when I moved in! The advice of my lady is just to accept I'm going to lose my deposit and not actually bother to do any cleaning. I hate to say this but I rather suspect she's right.

I'm not going to harp on about how bad the place I'm renting is. It fulfilled a need for accommodation when I desperately needed it. I'd been paying $700 a month for a room in a house with access to a shared kitchen and shared laundry. Use of those facilities was no extra charge. I swopped that for a house where I had to pay $30 a month for electricity and $55 a month for internet on top of my $525 rent. Financially I was $90 a month better off. Over the 41 months rent, I saved $3690 so even losing $525 rent only raises my $525 rent by $12 a month or $537 approx. In the grand scheme of things, quibbling over this $12 a month surcharge dishonestly applied doesn't seem to make much sense though I deplore dishonesty.

Where I'm now living is at the end of a dirt track, close to some low-income socially supported housing and to the local jail. Indeed the first building in the access road is a bail bonds office. Despite this, the neighbors are quite agreeable though how many families are crammed into the house next door, I can only guess. My guess begins at 3. There's no dishwasher or laundry facility in the house. Dishes have to be done manually which is fine as far as I'm concerned as I don't generate that much. There is a laundry shed with a coin operated washer and drier. In the summers, my $10 wooden drying rack from Walmart eliminated the need for a drier. The big problem with the washer/drier provided was that they were not maintained well and clothes often came out stinking. The front door has a crack down the middle big enough to allow the insects that can't find the bigger gaps around the edges of the front and back doors through.

For some unknown reason cockroaches and spiders would all want to come in. I sprayed every month with a pesticide and after a weekend away, often had to shovel up the corpses of dead intruders. Fortunately, few intruders made it beyond the lower floor with most expiring within a yard of the doorway.

The question now is when I'm planning to move. I have the place until April 30th but feel I ought to give it some kind of cleaning before leaving, for my own morals. Probably the best time is not this weekend but next weekend. That gives me 5 days to clean the place.

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