A Hard Week

This week has been difficult to say the least. Wil and I spent every waking moment cleaning up our house to get ready to move out. Poor Wil and one of his friends actually spent a lot of time outside in the dark and snow staining fencing panels they had to repair. Our landlord, who has been largely annoying on the phone (he would call to tell us about his colonoscopy appointment and other bodily ailments) but mostly absent through out our two-year stay, suddenly decided that we were turning his house into a pigsty (no, we didn't) and started to get very critical of every nick and scratch on this 40-year-old house. First we were more than happy to work with him and let him keep certain amount of the security deposit to fix little stuff here and there, but it quickly became apparent that he had very little intention to return any, if at all, of our deposit. Wil and I are excellent renters. We always take care of our rental houses like they are our own, so it pissed us off to no end when George, the landlord, started making us sound like we had been subleasing his house to a couple of drunk frat boys. And he was blaming us for some of the things he should have been fixing himself, like the door that was always sticking (he told me to just slam it when we first moved in and yesterday said that we should have hired a carpenter to fix it) or the gigantic pile of brush that he left that he claimed Wil promised to remove once the weather was warmer--two summers ago. The accusation just got more and more pitiful and ridiculous (cobwebs in the basement, doggy nose prints on the glass door--all of which would required a service of professional cleaning, a.k.a. George's poor wife, and a couple of hundred Euros--according to George. We had enough and reported our complaints to the Housing people here after George refused, for the third time, to come out to inspect the house, because he firmly believed that there was no possible way that it could be "habitable" and he was just going to waste more time and gas coming to inspect it. All I can say is that thank God for my husband, who kept calm under the most infuriating circumstances. I would have punched the man and called the lost 1250 Euro a good investment. Between the Housing lady and my husband's finesse, he magically changed his mind and wrote us a check for the full deposit amount. The inspection was awkward and full of "you said you were going to do this," but at the end we all said our peace and wish each other well. Let's hope our path will never crossed again.