Promises not kept

By NativeThings

My landlord made certain promises before we signed the lease, including completing the kitchen renovation she was in the midst of. You should have seen us walk in the door with the movers, and all our worldly belongings in a moving van. There was no water to the kitchen, no doors or shelves in the kitchen, the place was filthy, the entire pantry, front closet, and storage shelves were packed with her stuff. The basement was packed with her stuff. The garage was packed with stuff from the previous tenant.

She has done almost nothing to complete the renovation in the 7 months we’ve been here.  Incomplete: installation of the stove, the kitchen sink and faucet, the cabinets and the countertops.  They can be used, but there are issues like how a box with a cabinet that belongs in some other house is being used to hold up the board that’s supposed to be attached to the side of the stove.  And there are almost no shelves in the cabinets, so I don’t have much room for stuff.

There are numerous smaller things that are incomplete, as well. The only things she’s done since we moved in is to put in a couple of cabinet doors & drawers and the hardware for them.  I finally got her to take some things out of the basement, but we still have only about a third of that space available to us. Except for finally taking care of the problem that flooded the basement 3 times, that’s about all she’s done.

We moved here from out of town, and I now know that she has a reputation for not completing things and for ignoring all repairs except habitability issues.  She also blames every paint chip, scratch, already existing damage, and anything else she can, on the tenant at move out, and charges them exhorbitant amounts on top of the $850 deposit.  I have found several negative reviews at various websites, including 4 at Ripoff Report.  I’ve talked to two other tenants and they have similar or even worse problems that haven’t been attended to. 

The lease we signed included 80 pages of landlord rules! The application even asks things like do you know anyone who is an attorney, paralegal, etc. Should have been a big clue, but we were under a very tight deadline to move here, and almost nothing else was available. We should have seen to it that the promises were spelled out in the lease, but that’s now hindsight.

Do I have any recourse? Can I and/or should I continue trying to make her finish all the things she has left incomplete? Should I wait until we move out and see what she tries to charge us for?  One of the Ripoff Report listings said that, at least at that time, they knew of 14 other cases against her.  How could I verify that, and would I gain anything by doing so?

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