We’re moving this weekend from our 2 bed flat which we’ve been living in for over 4 and a half years.
For context/background - We’ve raised three dc in this flat (3 boys all currently 4 and under) and have always tried our best to keep the flat in as good condition as we feasibly could. Whenever our landlady came round, she was always so pleased at how lovely our home looked, and she’s forever singing our praises for being great tenants. However, there are some damages and now I’m weary of losing deposit money.
The damages are as follows -
There is a small tear (around 2 inches) in the lino flooring of our kitchen. This happened when we tried moving our fridge freezer to defrost it. The Lino in the kitchen isn’t fitted properly. It’s basically been cut to size and just plonked down. None of the edges are secure, none of it is glued down, meaning if you Hoover the corners of the room (for example) the hoover lifts up the Lino, so I feel like rips and tears were somewhat inevitable in the kitchen given the Lino moves about!
Some of the carpet in our lounge has badly frayed. Again, the carpet isn’t fitted, it’s just cut and thrown down, not fixed or fitted under any of the skirting boards or door tread.
When our first dc learnt to crawl, he was fascinated by the little fibres poking up by the door tread, and unfortunately he pulled on quite a lot of them, despite my best efforts to stop him. I did trim the frayed pieces, but frays are frays and once things start to fray, it's hard to stop them from fraying further.
I did contact the property management company at the time (and also addressed it at each and every property inspection), as where the carpet isn’t actually fitted, you can lift entire areas up, revealing (essentially useless and pointless) carpet grips - which also aren’t glued or tacked down - and I was worried about my DC’s hurting themselves on the sharp grips. Nothing ever got done about it, so of course, several years later (and 2 more DC’s later) the fraying is quite bad around some of the carpets edges.
A tile on a ledge at the back of our bath has broken - the mastic was never properly done, so if you so much as put a fragment of pressure on the tiles, you’d hear them creaking and crunching. I don’t actually know how the tile came to crack, I can only assume it’s from where my DC’s play on the little ledge during bath time with their bath toys, but to be honest, I’m quite surprised more haven’t broken given how loose they all feel.
Some of the skirting boards have succumbed to splits and chips due to water damage. We’ve always had a big mould problem in this flat, and no matter how hard I tried to stop the mould growing, every winter it came back with a vengeance, meaning the vast majority of our walls would be dripping wet and covered in fluffy mould. Obviously because the walls were wet, the water would soak in to the skirting boards! I’ve tried my best to paint over the cracks and splits, but it is quite noticeable that I’ve attempted to sort it out myself.
We’ve used baby gates across several rooms in the flat - the lounge, the top of the stairs and our DC’s bedroom. The pressure from the baby gates has left quite large ‘dents’ (for lack of a better word!) in the door frames and removed the glossy painting of the wood. Again, I’ve tried painting over it, but you can still see the dents.
The grill part of our oven no longer works. It wasn’t damaged, it just literally stopped working one day. I contacted the property management twice a week for nearly 3 weeks before finally getting a reply that they’d pass my details on to a contractor who will fix it. The contractor never called or emailed me, despite the property management saying that he did.
We’re desperately hoping to get all of our deposit money back, but I don’t know whether the things I’ve listed above, will compromise us.
Do you think we risk losing any money?