Overstaying lease after mutual surrender?

[GotMyGoat]

So... my landlords are dogdy as anything; didn't protect full deposit, what they did protect was late - house is unfit for habitation (electrical shocks, serious fire risks, leaking roof) and environmental health ordered them to make immediate repairs within 7 days - that was 2 months ago! They asked us to leave (or they offered us the opportunity to leave) as they were upset with us for calling environmental health on them.

We took them up on there offer, after hearing they had no intention of fixing the life-threatening issues and handed in one months notice which ends this coming Monday.

We found a good landlord who offered us a nice safe house to move into this weekend, disaster has struck and it is now impossible for us or our belongings to move into the nice new house before Thursday - as hard as our new landlord has tried.

This leaves us effectively homeless for 3 days - I have asked the current landlords if we can stay for 3 more days, obviously paying rent, but they have refused (probably out of spite - we are good tenants honestly! Pay rent on time, keep things clean, we just wanted a safe house to live in...)

I've called Shelter and the council and it looks like our only real solution is just to outstay our welcome, we may receive harassment from the landlords and they may try to charge us for our full fixed term but I can't afford hotel costs in London, storage costs and to pay for two removal companies (to move out and then in), rabbit boarding and goldfish boarding (where the hell do you find that?) on top of the deposit for the nice new house.

Has anyone heard of nice law-abiding citizens doing this before? Will I be shunned forever more? Thankfully we are not relying on a good reference from these landlords as we showed our environmental health document to the new landlord, and explained our deposit wasn't properly protected and he was horrified.

Or do you think I should go out on the credit card and pay for storage, 2 removals etc and play by the rules? and deal with at least £2000 of debt because of 3 pesky days?

Oh, god love you. What a nightmare. I'm so glad you're moving out. This is a horrible situation to be in, but there will be a way through it, whereas if the unthinkable happened and one of you did have a serious accident...

Honestly, I think if I were you, I'd send the kids to stay with friends or relatives for those three days and then I'd sit it out. I have zero sympathy for your landlord. Either they want you out for spite (likeliest), or they're trying to move some other poor bugger into the death trap (in which case, the more warning they have, the better!), or they're in a rush to get to work on the repairs (yeah right, because they've been so keen up till now). I am a law-abiding citizen, but I really think these scumbags are below the law... Trying to make a profit at the expense of a family's safety. And if they're ready to do that, they're probably fiddling their taxes and all kinds of stuff, and won't want to stick their heads above the parapet by trying to evict you for the sake of three days.

Sorry, I got all ranty there. I've had a landlord like that (and due to no maintenance, the boiler went up in flames while we were all asleep in bed. Thank god for smoke alarms!)

As for boarding the pets, you must know a small child who'd be lighted to have a pet for a week...

Just thought, before you do leave, could you go round and take photos of a everything dodgy... Just in case they do try to sue you for your full fixed term. Might help you build a defence, or a counter claim.

Just stay. They would need to go to court to get a possession order against you to remove you, which would take much longer than 3 days to get. Once they had the order they would still need bailiffs to remove you and all in all it generally takes no less than 6 weeks to remove tenants (and often considerably more).

Pay them a daily rate when you leave (ie weekly rent divided by 7 x no of days you overstayed) and they will have nothing really to complain about...

Stay.

It sounds like you're going to have major problems getting your deposit back anyway, so I don't think you've got anything to lose by staying.

Thank you for your replies - I did read them over the weekend but have been busy moving things! we've moved ourself into a travelodge and feel the happiest we've been in ages! we've told dd it's a holiday and she seems pretty happy.

we decided it wasn't worth risking us getting a bad reference or ccm in future by staying, and we didn't want anymore grief.

oh - some local people from a local facebook site are looking after our rabbits and fish and the in laws helped us move into storage so i only need to pay for one removal now, it's not all so bad!

re deposit scheme - if not properly protected you can get up to three times back here go through the small claims court is cheap