I am stressed, does anyone have any wise words to help me?
We moved out of our first rented house at the end of June. All fine. Estate agent emailed me 2-3 weeks later, saying we had damaged to property in lots of ridiculous ways - e.g. by installing stair gates, which we didn't, as these were already there, and my DCs are too old to need them.
Similarly, they are claiming we damaged walls by putting up curtain poles - no, these were also already there.
They agreed and backed down on a lot of these points, but are now claiming we damaged the flooring to the tune of £200 (but they are willing to accept £100 for a quick resolve 
).
I messed up because I didn't check and return the inventory when they first sent it to us. This is entirely my fault - the inventory was very top-line so I checked it briefly and didn't follow up -the house was freezing, and things were very hectic with house move, me working full time and two DCs. We had moved in just before Xmas and were then away for 2 weeks, on return I found I was pg and had severe HG, and so the inventory got forgotten. It was my fault nonetheless.
DH thought I had it all under control, and had returned the inventory (even if I had, it didn't cover many of the points they raise). Also as lots of the damage to the house was noted by us to the estate agent on the phone or directly to the landlord on the phone, we didn't note it all down via email, as I didn't realise it would come to this situation.
DH is fuming with them and has told me he will now deal with it, but I am worried that if we go in all guns blazing it will come down to being our fault for not returning the inventory, rather than the agent/landlords fault for doing a crap sign-out from their last tenant, and they will escalate this more, and charge us for all the damage from their last tenant which they hadn't noted in the inventory.
I don't know what I can do :( I was handling all of the paperwork etc for this as a first - DH usually does it all and I wanted to get my pre-DC sensible head back on and do it all this time. But it's all gone wrong. Can someone tell me I'm over-reacting and all will be fine please?