Carpets - A renters nightmare!!!

[CLS87]

Hi all,
So we are getting ready to move overseas and we are having real problems with our rental agency. We have two dogs and we have agreed to replace some of the carpets as the dogs have caused some damage to them. The rental agency are either calling now on a weekly basis or wanting to come and see the house to ask about the carpets, even though we are going through the process of getting them changed. According to the carpet fitters, the carpets are 80/20 wool... however these carpets are extremely poor quality. I think they have been in the house about 5 years, since the house was built, there is no spring to the material at all! Looking at the quotes if we get the 80/20 wool carpet...we are looking at just under 30 pounds per m2!!!! For the rooms we are doing that comes in at just under 2k!.

Now I have a feeling that our rental agency is going to try and get as much money out of us as possible. I've attached a picture of the carpet in the spare room - this damage was caused by one of those long under the bed storage boxes (with no wheels) that was holding winter hats/gloves etc....just to show how easy this carpet is to damage :(

If we replaced the carpets with cheaper but ok carpet, do you think that would be ok?

Reading this thread with interest. My friend is leaving her rental of 4 years and having moved the beds, two of them have holes underneath from carpet moths. The land lord says she has to replace the carpet in both rooms as pest control is their responsibility. Should she do this?

Absolutely not. Regardless of the cause of the damage and whether it is the tenants fault, you never replace. You will be charged a proportion of the value relative to the carpets life expectancy

what RCheshire said is exactly it in a nutshell.

I will link her to this thread thank you.

We've just been through a deposit dispute, in case it helps anyone. There was one room in our rented house in which the paint was already scruffy when we moved in. We asked for it to be repainted before we moved in, but it wasn't. The scruffiness was mentioned on the inventory on check-in.

While we were packing to move out, I took a picture down off the wall in this room and pulled a couple of inches of paint off. Entirely my fault. I tried painting over the spot, but the paint didn't quite match so you could see it.

The landlord wanted to take the cost of entirely re-painting the room out of our deposit, citing the damage to the paint as the cause. But we disputed this - the room needed repainting anyway and had done when we moved in. It went to the dispute resolution service, and we won outright - no deduction at all for repainting.

So as others have said, don't do the work yourself. That's what your deposit is there for. And you are not obliged to leave the house better than you found it - these words were actually used in our judgement.

cobo - good one. That is exactly how it should work.