I Resign from Housing You

To my former tenants:

I cannot even call you tenants now, can I? You started out on an official one-year contract to rent my house through a property management company. By the end of that year, you started to have difficulties paying the rent and accumulated fees and penalties that made it unmanageable for you. My property manager wanted to evict you. She actually started the eviction procedure without my approval and wanted to stick me with a bill of over $1,000 for the eviction.

I urgently made an inspection trip to the house (a 12-hour drive north to south) to figure out what was going on. I didn't want to evict a family with five children. When I came, you gave me lots of reasons why you were behind on the rent, including the accumulated penalties from the management company, of which I knew nothing about. Apparently, my property manager played her own game, serving her interests more than mine.

You kept the house apparently clean and functioning (granted, I only saw the living room and hallway), which was important for me at the time. I fought my property manager to stop the eviction and nearly went to court with her over the "contract breaking fees": We were done with the one-year contract but because I allowed you to stay on a monthly basis, the property manager wanted me to pay the fees and penalties for another lease year, which came up to over $5K. I fought my way out of it, having earned a lot of additional grays to my already graying hair.

While you were catching up on paying the past due fees and penalties to the management company, I received zero rent for three months. You were basically house-sitting for me then. Again, I didn't mind as I thought you were good to my house. My previous experiences with other tenants taught me that it is more important to have someone in the house who cares rather than timely pays the rent while treating the property as a temporary crash pad. I thought it was a win-win: I'm lenient on rent while you treat my property like your own, with love and care it deserves.

I don't know what happened over this year when we switched to a month-to-month arrangement. Maybe I was just blinded by wishful thinking...

I gave you a month's warning on when I'd be coming back this May. It took you two weeks to confirm that you'd be out by the date I specified. That should have been the first warning sign. But I was too excited about moving back in for the summer and bringing my friends to stay with me in my house while they establish themselves in the US after receiving green cards.

As we were driving for our 6 pm key-handover, you texted me that you'd need more time, until at least 10 pm. We went out for dinner and did a sight-seeing drive around my town. When we came to the house at 10:30 pm, you were still loading your stuff onto multiple trucks. A group of three young males was hectically patching up a huge hole in my garage ceiling. When I saw that, I felt a clump of anxiety and fear moving from my stomach to the throat. By the time we were done with the walk through, I wanted to throw up.

On that first night, my friends were so shocked by the state of the house they offered to go to a hotel for at least the first night. I managed to convince them that we should clean out the sleeping spaces and take it one step at a time. I cried most of the night that night, feeling pity for both myself and for my house that needed so much work to be put back in order.

Since during the walk-through you behaved as if everything in the house was normal and I was too shocked to point everything out and didn't discover many things through visual inspection (oh, the discoveries I was about to make in the first several days of staying in the house!), here's a list of what was wrong/broken in the house:

When the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink broke about five months ago, instead of simply removing it and connecting the pipes directly — which we agreed to because neither I nor you had the money for the new disposal and the plumbing service — you continued running water into it. Despite one of you allegedly being a construction contractor, no proper action was taken. The disposal rusted and rotted from the inside. While I was cleaning it out for removal, I nearly passed out from the stench of the stagnant water and rotting food particles.

You somehow managed to damage almost all lower kitchen cabinets' surfaces (your dogs' scratches and teeth marks?) and cause the countertop to sag at the corner joint to the point where it could collapse inward at any moment. As a sealed dead space, that section is inaccessible for repairs. I have yet to come up with the solution for that. I'm inclined to take a loan for the entire kitchen remodeling.

You destroyed the oven by baking something so greasy and smelly that it’s now impossible to open it without triggering a gag reflex. You ruined the dishwasher, too — it had standing water in it for weeks if not months, which I had to remove manually, soaking it up with rags. Because of the persistent moisture, the drywall behind the dishwasher became soaked and swollen, and the laminate floor around it buckled.

And that was only the kitchen.

In the bedrooms, the floors were coated with wax from the scented wax lamps (you had four dogs — perhaps the wax lamps were an attempt to mask the smell). There was also dog waste that hadn’t been fully cleaned up. The professional carpet cleaner I miraculously managed to have you pay for struggled so much I honestly felt bad for him.

The guest room dweller was obviously someone with long red hair that I found on the floor and in the corners of three rooms. Hair dye stained not only the guest room floor but also the walls — everything had to be repainted.

In the guest bathroom, you apparently bathed the dogs — and judging by the condition of the tub, I was likely the last person who cleaned it before you moved in nearly two years ago. I have no idea how you bathed yourselves in it. I had to soak and scrub that tub for three full days, using every professional-grade product I could find. That same red-haired guest left red stains on the white bathroom shelving unit, the cabinets, the walls, and even the toilet. The floor in that bathroom looked like it had never once been mopped.

You ripped electrical outlets out of the walls in three different rooms. I cannot imagine what got stuck there so firmly that made you pull the entire electrical box out of the wall — I’m genuinely amazed no one got electrocuted.

In February, you informed me that the water heater had broken and offered to replace it in exchange for one month’s rent. I agreed in good faith. What I ended up with was a gaping hole in the garage ceiling that was being hastily patched up the night we arrived. You explained that the floor/ceiling had to be opened up to install the new water heater on the second floor. I doubt it. I suspect the old one had leaked and collapsed under its own weight into the garage.

These were the major things that took me three weeks and $2K to clean, repair, patch up, and repaint. Each day my friends and I cleaned and mended the house (thank God for their help), we discovered new damages — small things here and there, but enough to add up. At this point, it’s just like “what else could the house sitters have damaged or broken?”

It took you more than two weeks to move all your stuff from my garage. In those two weeks, you frequently communicated to me that you'd pay the back rent for two months you still owed me, as soon as you could. On the day you finally moved all your stuff out, you changed your phone numbers.

You've been irresponsible, untidy, and careless house-sitters. You've broken my heart and took advantage of my generosity and trust.

Not even hoping to get anything in back rent or broken promises of repairing that fence, I am relieved to resign from the position of housing you. Have a nice life, wherever you are now.