I don’t want to go off on too much of a rant here because I certainly don’t want to alienate things with our landlord should he happen to wander across this here bloggy post, but I’ve kinda been getting a little frustrated with the state of affairs around our house lately…
We moved into the new rental house that we currently call home just about a year ago, and obviously as things normally are when they’re new to you, everything was pretty much awesome. We found a few minor problems and just assumed that they’d get taken care of shortly, so we didn’t really make a big deal about them. The biggest one was a leak where the lanai meets our house that drips water into the living room when it rains really hard – it probably sounds worse than it has been, but it was typically only noticeable during hurricane season when it rains every single day to the point where we didn’t dare unpacking anything underneath the window in question where the water falleth through.
That said, our list started slowly growing … and growing … to the point where today I’ve literally got a full page, double-spaced list of items around our house that need to get repaired. And they’re not likely cheap, simple fixes, either – like recently we discovered a hole in our pool filter, or for the longest time we’ve had one of the jets in our hot tub that’s been broken. And admittedly a lot of them are more creature comforts, as opposed to more serious concerns like the leaks that risk damage to the house itself, or in the case of the pool filter, just jack up our water bill and waste a ton of water.
But at the same time, our rent isn’t exactly cheap and we do kind of have an expectation for what we should actually get out of the house that we’re renting. It’s not really very fair to us to sign a lease with a certain level of expectations, only later to find that X isn’t working or Y doesn’t quite work the way you might expect.
I guess that’s kind of the problem that you have to battle when you rent – the landlord may technically be responsible for maintaining the house, but the likelihood of him just having an open checkbook to fix every issue the moment it comes up may not necessarily be so good. I’ve had to struggle with previous landlords over repairs before and it’s never fun – you would think that in addition to my rent paying their mortgage, they’d set aside some money each month as a reserve to cover the same kinds of repairs and maintenance that you’d do to take care of your own house, but I think instead they tend to get disconnected from the property itself because they’re never actually there themselves and thus as a result they tend to replace more things altogether than actually maintain them along the way to prolong their lifespan.
On one hand, I can certainly understand – the reason why we don’t own a house of our own today is because we’re simply not in the right place financially right now and if we did, all of this kind of crap would be ours to take care of and it’s definitely very expensive, but on the other hand, it’s still not fair to rent us a shiny, red apple, only to later discover that parts of that Delicious Red more closely share resemblance to a lemon… 😥