£92 curtains… taking the piss

[kindereggxo]

Hi all,

My sister has returned home from her student accommodation halls recently. She handed in her keys and received the email this morning confirming her departure and about her deposit…

She was charged £92 for bloody replacement CURTAINS

That is almost her entire deposit gone. Before coming home she spent nearly two full days deep cleaning her room and the kitchen. She’s pissed off and upset to say the least and has to ‘top up’ the deposit since she’s staying in the same accommodation next year.

AIBU to think this takes the piss? She’s a clean and respectful students and i fully believe her when she said she left everything in perfect order. Seems so unfair and grabby from these accommodation companies!! Also £92? What the hell are these curtains made of?

Where the hell are you all buying curtains from same place Boris does? B&m, tesco all under £30 for 90×90
Landlords are idiots for putting curtains that expensive in student accommodation. £50 max would cover new curtains and a curtain pole

The actual cost of the curtains isn't the issue. Curtains can cost anything from £9 to £900+ but it's very likely that those in student accommodation are very much at the cheaper end of the spectrum.

It's more about them saying they've been damaged without specifying what the damage is, or if indeed they really need replacing.

Ripped to shreds or the pole hanging off the wall, fair enough. A couple of fag burns or similar in an inconspicuous place, TBH I'd just leave it. It doesn't stop them functioning as curtains or spoil the look of the room.

She needs to ask for photographs and a breakdown of the cost, but sadly, if it's a deduction from her deposit, they'll just take the money anyway and she'll just have to fight to get it back.

I need new curtains at the moment, current ones are 24 years old.

When I bought the current ones in 1998, I got a quote for curtains for two rooms in my flat. £1400. Clearly I don't know where to shop.

(I do need ceiling to floor, so custom length, therefore custom-made.)

Disgusting £92 for curtains in student accommodation! My floor length front room ones cost £32 and they are lined. Where do they shop?
Thats a rip off.

Unfortunately, this is probably because new tenants go round examining everything with a parent in tow, and will not accept used but still functional items. One year, a parent encouraged all of my tenants to demand new mattresses for all 5 beds in the property. The mattresses weren't bad, but I agreed. But that meant that when, as usual, the tenants marked most of the mattresses in some way after a year of use, and failed to use the provided mattress protectors, I demanded that the marked mattresses be replaced with new ones and money was taken off their deposits. The bed shop I used must be laughing all the way to the bank.

It is true that the TDS will usually offer landlords only a paltry sum for damage though, often only 20% of the cost of replacement. I usually negotiate with the tenants before this stage, as they want good references for future landlords.

Perhaps I just pick good responsible tenants!

The problem with a £40 replacement mattress from Argos is that it will the lowest quality and quite uncomfortable, and tenants will complain about that too and ask for a new one. And if a hall of residence, they will have their own approved suppliers.

Presumably the £92 for curtains includes the labour costs of someone coming in to swap them over? At least £20 an hour?

£92 is a fairly middling price that you would pay in somewhere like Next.

Halls are an all round rip off. Only the kids whose parents were funding them got to stay in halls when I was at uni, we rented a house, six of us, and never went to halls. I went to my friend's halls a few times and they communal areas were rancid. One of the students had to go home as he got scurvy from only eating pot noodles all year. These kids had no idea how to look after themselves physically or financially, they never had jobs. Some were doing vocational professional degrees so obviously took their useless arses into professions but others graduated with art degrees and no work experience and now work in McDonald's ten years later.

I would expect uni hall to have decent flame retardant curtains and be horrified if they just had ordinary cheap ones. It's common for Universities to publish a list of charges for replacement/cleaning. Depending on size/material,it could well cost £92 for professional cleaning of curtains.

is the deposit not protected? or does it work differently with student accommodation? can't she ask for proof of the damage?

But it does. Here's how it will have likely gone - whoever inspected the empty property will have gone and logged any repairs on whatever system they use. Replacement of curtains will sit as a job to be done by the university's maintenance department.

Jobs done by teams like this will have a cost attached. So the job of replacing the curtains will be the cost of the curtains and the cost of the labour. There is likely a fixed labour cost per job on the system.

Then, someone will decide whether the cost can be passed on to the occupier. If it cannot, it sits as a cost to the business and they absorb it as a job included in rent (eg wear and tear). If it can be passed on, then they will add 20% vat and invoice the occupier.

It's simply not an option to just put a pair of curtains in a normal waste bin - it may be for you in your one family home but some of these uni halls have 50 people plus in them - even just replacing 5-10 pairs of curtains would necessitate it going through whatever trade waste system they use.

I’m not saying student halls can’t be grim, that’s my point : that OP claims her sister is very clean and tidy. So how would it take 2 days to clean a clean flat?

She's not the only student living there

’My floor length front room ones cost £32 and they are lined. Where do they shop?’

Where do you shop? £92 sounds reasonable to me.

A landlord might go for the cheapest option and replace it every year. A university halls probably goes for a heavy wearing option that’s intended to last a few years.

It’s interesting seeing different people’s views on how much curtains should cost.

When we bought our current house the previous owners offered to sell us some of the furniture and curtains, and they seem to have spent over £10,000 per window (on the larger ones.)

They we’re hideous, so we didn’t take them, but when we were having some decorating done the painter pointed out that the curtain poles they’d left behind sell for £5,000 each.

They now have some quite nice and very inexpensive Amazon curtains hanging from them.

What are they claiming the damage was? Did they provide photographs?

I have read the word Zuffle on mumsnet twice today.
😮

It’s definitely not something that I’d hope anyone would ever need to be familiar with.

In the real world most curtains cost more than that, and even if they don't there will be a fitting charge. The curtains don't hang themselves!

How so? How is the world of someone spending £1,000 on curtains any less real than that if someone spending £30.

In this, the real world that we all inhabit, different people have different amounts of money and prioritize different things.

That's very cheap for curtains. Mine cost me £1k.

Are they sewn together with gold?

Most people probably don't spend anywhere near £1k for curtains, especially if it's for what is probably a bedsit type room, that is not otherwise furnished to a luxury standard.

To most people a statement like 'That's very cheap for curtains. Mine cost me £1k' is about as 'real world' as a person who drives a Porsche describing a £30k VW Golf as 'very cheap'.

Are you her younger sister..?
Just contest their claims in you're sure there was no damage. No need for the dramatics.