Nosy Intrusive Landlady
You know that we’ve been working on the hallway. It’s all finished except for putting back a couple of doorknobs which my snookey is ‘supposed’ to finish today.
On Friday I took a vacation day to try to get some of this work completed. So we were hammering up the chair rails, and I think we’d hammered about ten nails in when our doorbell rang.
Coming up the stairs was the landlady. My snookey got to the door first and the landlady was angry. I think because she thinks she can steamroll my snookey, she demanded to know what we were doing. I found this a little annoying – maybe if she’d asked what all the noise was about (and hammering ten nails isn’t ‘all’ the noise), I might have told her. And it looked like my snookey was about to ‘answer to her’. Instead I told her that it was none of her business what we were doing in our own apartment.
She didn’t like that answer and started talking about all the noise and banging. I told her that we had hammered about 10 nails, and that it was before 11:00 at night (it was around 2:00 in the afternoon), and we weren’t breaking any noise ordinances if we made some noise in the middle of the day.
She didn’t like that answer either and she started going on and on about what we were doing. I said that we were paying over $1000 a month in rent and that it was ‘our’ apartment, she had no business coming over and demanding to know what we were doing in our own home.
She told me that if I wanted to play it that way, she would get her lawyer to draw up the papers and we would be out in 60 days. I told her I had a lawyer too and she could go ahead and get her lawyer involved.
She tried pulling out all the stops. She said that I am running a commercial business in my home and she would take that to court. I told her that there was nothing illegal about a home-based business. And since she had also been a client, I told her that I’d bring that up in court as well. She said I had removed the closet door (in the studio) and made a mess of it. I said that I had paid for custom closet doors for that room and when we left they would stay.
She talked about how we’d done things to the apartment that we weren’t allowed to do (I don’t know what cuz all we’d ever done so far was painted), and I said my snookey had made repairs and upgrades to the apartment, so she shouldn’t be complaining about anything we’d done. She mentioned that she’d just had someone come in to repair a crack in the wall, and I said, yes, once in 13 years you had someone else come in to fix something – every other year my snookey’s been repairing, she should have been having someone come in for 13 years, not one.
As she started walking away in her rage, she turned and said, “why are we arguing? I don’t like to argue. I thought we were on a friendly basis… remember when you wanted a new rug and I paid for half the new rug?” And I said, “yes, and I paid for half that rug which enhances your apartment when we leave and makes us happy while we’re here”.
She ended up telling us that she’d like us to stop the noise and I told her that we only had two more nails to hammer and then we’d be done.
My overall thoughts are this: Go ahead and try to get us evicted for hammering something one day. I’m sure that’ll hold up in court. If I lived in a high rise somewhere, the landlord would not be showing up at my door thinking he had the right to find out what I’m doing in the apartment I pay for. When I think back, there were times she mentioned something about our computer room light being on and how I must be working late at night – her nosy way of telling us that she knows our lights are on all night. But we pay for the effing hydro, so if we want to leave everything in the house on, we will. It’s our dime.
I just couldn’t get over the gall of her showing up here and thinking that we had to answer to her.
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jafer
Fuhq
Leticia
Matt
Sunny
Female, taken, fire, Sagittarius, Monkey, Toronto, two kids, one grandson, IT.
55
is the new 30. I want the world to close their mouths when they’re eating or chewing gum. If they don’t, I want to elbow them in the face.
Good grief! Sorry to hear about your landlady. Sounds like she’d never had any bad tenants and has to find/invent stuff with good ones to complain about. She may find a day coming when she’ll miss you living there, quiet as sleeping mice, while dealing with the toxic mess meth labs leave behind.