A day in July!

Today we all spent most of the day at the landlord tenant board.  Not exactly a fun thing to do during summer vacation but you gotta do what you gotta do.

We filed against our landlord because he, over the course of 8 months, didn't want to do what it took to lower the humidity level in the house (it was well over 70% most days, even in the dead of winter, and it should be below 50%) and to stop the mold from growing.  He didn't seem to think it was a problem for us to pay him rent every month to live in a house that stunk to high heaven.  I couldn't stand it any further and so we moved.  We are looking for him to pay our moving costs as well as to replace our moldy couch, I think it's pretty reasonable.

The landlord tenant board works in a very easy, straight forward way.  You enter the building by 9:30 sign in and then you all shuffle into a room to hear the chairman (no judge here) to open the morning with her/his remarks regarding the day, then you hear from the mediator who tries to convince you to come and try to work things out before you get heard by the chairmen, and without any mess, and then you hear from a woman who is there to help tenants who have become behind in rent, or to help landlords with tenants who are behind in rent and or utilities.  It is all quite civilized.   After all this is done you leave the room and go about whatever it is that you have opted to do.  Damie and I opted for mediation.

We wait our turn, trying to keep Zeb busy and quiet.  This is not a quick situation by any means, it seems most people opt for this first.  I really hoped that we could just mediate it and get on with our day.  Finally, after a almost 2 hr wait it's our turn.  We are escorted into a very large room, the floor is white and black checkers and there are floor to ceiling windows on one side.  We all sit around a table and wait for the mediator to take all the paperwork information from us.  Then we all begin to discuss the issues.  The mediator is not exactly interested in looking at all the evidence but rather to come to the conclusion that we both have a bit of ground to stand on and that we should just all call it even steven and go on with our day.  I am not interested in that.  Nope,  not for one second am I going to let someone get away with this, not to them go and turn around and rent it to someone else....I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror if I didn't get the board to force him to clean it up before renting it again.  Ever time Damie or I try to talk our previous landlord interrupts us, or makes car noises with his mouth.  Yep, your read that right, he made car noises....and the mediator said nothing.  So, we stopped mediation at that point and went to get an adjournment so that we could go to the trouble to have witnesses come and testify that, yes the house stunk to high frickin heaven. 

We go to see the chairman, who is sitting behind a fold out table and doesn't seem to have a great deal to do at the moment.  We ask if we can have an adjournment and she says to us that since we filed it is very unusual to receive an adjournment.  She suggests that we first go talk to a legal advisor who is in the building to help tenants, and then come back when we have done that.  She also asks us if we had attempted mediation to which we explained that the landlord was making car noises and we decided at that point that mediation was not going to work.  Well she then went up one side and down the other on the PL....telling him that that type of behaviour will not be tolerated in her chamber and that it was very inappropriate for him to do that in mediation.  Yeah, one small victory for us.  Off to legal assistance we go.

After waiting more than an hour for the legal assistant to become free we finally get to talk to her.  She goes through the evidence we had (which included a mold test including a air test, pictures of our moldy and humidity damaged furniture, and a list of all the times we talked to him regarding the mold)  She told us that the mold report was not a strong piece of evidence, unless the person who conducted the test was there to testify, and then went on to explain that without witnesses we didn't have much of a case.  We knew this after mediation, and that is why we wanted an adjournment.  She then went on to tell us that we were supposed to come ready to go, and that it was very unlikely that the chairman would grant an adjournment.  We decided to take our chances.

Back into see the chairman, who was even less busy than before.  She smiled and started right in asking what we had decided to do.  I told her we wanted to go ahead with the request to adjourn it, and then I held my breath.  She granted it, and now we get to subpoena people who entered our house during those 8 months and smelled what we smelled.  Yeah for us!!

I hate all this, but you know what, no one should have to pay to live somewhere that has a health issue like mold and smelled so bad that my mother could smell it on our luggage when we went to see her in May.  I pay good money for rent, not to stink.