Help with difficult landlord

By anonymous

I just recently moved into a rental townhome with two friends of mine.  We are all young professionals, college graduates.  From the very beginning our landlord has been unwilling to yeild on anything.  Anything we have asked for she has refused or made it very difficult for us.  Something as simple as changing some locks at the property, which according to our lease requires written consent, took days to get the actualy consent executed.  I personally wrote up a well worded consent form that conformed to any obligations within the lease and she proceeded to throw that out and reply to my email 2 days later with her own write up, which by the way was in broken english.  I should point out our landlord is Chinese and speaks with a very thick accent and from my only interaction with her husband, who she has stated she must consult with on any decision, he speaks maybe a few words of English.  I am Caucasian and my two roommates are Philipino and Japanese.  Through all of these difficulties we are also dealing with a fairly significant language barrier.  Back on point, after a full week we finally got consent to simply change a few locks, I also have done my best to make it clear to her that the original locks will be reinstalled when we leave, as I was the one that changed them and I kept the original hardware.  We had another issue when we were attempting to get cable hooked up.  Upon move in the cable to the TV was coming out of a wall in a tiny hallway for the downstairs restroom.  No where near a place that would make sense for a television to be.  When the cable technician came out to the property he suggested the easiest way would be to come down from the master bedroom above.  One of my roommates contacted the landlord and explained as clearly as he could what the cable tech had suggested, she verbally agreed and gave the go ahead to do so.  The cable tech went ahead and drilled the less than dime sized hole to run the cable, in the corner of the cieling, and got our cable up and running.  When the landlord recieved the written consent write up from my roommate she changed her mind and said she was coming to the property.  My roommate was caught off guard and rather confused but said Ok.  Our lease mandates that 24 hour notice must be given for the landlord to come by the property or tenant consent.  My roommate may have given consent but he felt like she wasn’t asking she was telling him she was coming.  I was the only one at the property at the time and spoke with her and explained about the cable.  Here is an explanation of what the cable looks like, walls are white, cable is white, cable runs down a corner where no person could ever be, from cieling to the floor, at which point it runs on top of the base board and behind the TV stand and into the cable box.  The landlord was concerned that the cable in the corner was dangerous and ugly.  She then began to say how it should have been done.  She stated that what the technician should have done was take the cable from the hallway it was in downstairs into a nearby corner and up to the cieling and all the way around the entire downstairs in the upper corner where the wall meets the cieling.  This would have required approximately 50-75 feet of cable maybe more.  Not to mention I think the cable tech knows best, it’s his job.  This became an issue for her and she started throwing lease items at us saying we violated this and that.  This is all less than a week into our lease, in fact we had not even lived at the property for 24 hours at this point.  Nearly every conversation with her since that day has included her response of lease items that she feels we aren’t understanding but we clearly understand everything.  Most emails are written in such poor english I cannot understand them and it takes both my roommates and myself to make sense of them.  The latest issue at hand that we are attempting to get her to treat us like human beings on is one of my roommates girlfiend has decided to move from her home out of state and live with us.  On the lease only the three of us are approved to live there.  To me I don’t see a reason to resist a 4th person.  Especially a girl, as young guys have a much more irresponsible stereotype than girls.  She has a job so she adds further financial stability to the three of us already living at the property.  If I were a landlord I would personally love to add more financial stability to my tenants but that’s just me.  If we bring this topic up the landlord just quotes the lease item that approves only the three of us.  She refuses to even discuss it. I understand she can refuse but I feel she is being unreasonable and fighting us for every little thing.  There are further issues but this is long enough already.  I will leave you all with this and hopefully someone out there has some helpful advice for dealing with this stubborn landlord.  

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