This will be a bit older of an update. When we moved to GA, we were trying to figure out a place to rent for the time being while we searched for houses. We wound up living in this location about a year, and the entire time we were extremely stressed out. This was because of a varying of issues with the home itself, and because the owner/landlord was trying to sell it while we lived there. He did not inform us of the impending sale until about 6 months into our rental agreement. If we had known all of the issues, we would have never moved in - no matter how desperate we were.
Needless to say, when we were informed that our lease would not be renewed ...we grew concerned and started rental hunting again. Which was extremely difficult to do. We were almost homeless because of all that had occurred.
Okay, onto the house itself. It's an extremely small 3 bedroom, 1 full bath home. It has a decent sized kitchen that will barely fit you cooking (on a falling apart stove) and a table. It has no dishwasher, which drove me insane and a falling apart fridge. We kept our good stainless steel fridge in the living room, and plugged it into a wall. Worked just fine, oddly enough, even if it looked odd to have a fridge in your living room. The counters were not attached to the walls correctly, and we were always concerned that they would just "slide off" the top of the bottom cabinets. Likewise, the upper cabinets were not secured correctly in the middle of the shelves. So, the upper shelves in the upper cabinets drooped a lot.
The foundation is total garbage. We couldn't walk around the house without the floor bouncing. We had many dishes fall out of the cabinets and break on the floor, due to the foundation issues. Add on, things like the vents that are supposed to be for the AC go directly to the ground underneath the house. So, we'd have all kinds of critters running into the house from the vents - which we eventually sealed off the one in the bathroom, because of this.
All of the windows are very old and have zero to barrier from the outside elements. Think single-paned glass windows, some of which were already broken before move in, and could never be opened once we moved in.
Every single room in the house leaked, due to a very shoddy roof job. Every time it rained, we had to set pails/buckets/pots to catch the water. In. Every. Room. Even if you are just looking at the house itself, you can see that the roof is rather old and some of the shingles are coming off from the top of it.
There were exposed electrical wires hanging out in the car port, and half of the plugs in the rooms did not work. This was most likely due to terribly-done electrical work. We tried to complain about the car port light that just "hung" from the ceiling of the car port and wasn't properly attached (it never worked either), but nothing was ever fixed in that house while we lived there.
The car port used to flood even during small drizzles of rain. The owner/landlord claimed that this was a "city" issue. This is absolutely not true, as we spoke with the city. The carport is too far onto the property to have the city do anything about it. The property owner would need to do the demo, and fix the drainage issues. Thus, the laundry room (that was outside) would be flooded constantly, and so would the car port. We never parked the car there as it was constantly bogged down in nasty water.
The nasty water attracted the tree roaches, which lovvvveee wet areas. These roaches, are not your normal roaches (though we had those too). This is them for those wondering: https://www.doyourownpestcontrol.com/woods.htm
Basically, these tree roaches were not scared of humans and were actually attracted to light. So, they'd come in from god knows where (roof/ceiling/carport) and at any given time, we'd have 4-5 per day flying at us in the house. Oh, and they are fucking fast. No matter what we did, we couldn't get them to stop coming in and we were constantly finding them everywhere (they'd run to hide under things if we "missed" them). This terrified the shit out of me, and I was constantly screaming like a little girl. My cats were completely worthless against them.
On that note, my oldest cat ran away. He's still roaming the neighborhood to this day, with the other hoard of cats. Yes, there is a hoard of cats that roam the neighborhood. About 10 of them. It's kind of odd, but hey...whatever works. Most of them are nice, though there is one asshole orange and white cat that is a jerk.
As per the tree roaches, do you know what eats tree roaches? Brown recluses. Yup. Heard that right. We had an infestation of those, too. It started in the laundry room and carport. Naturally, this was because this is where the tree roaches originated from. Then, after a month or two they started coming into the house. We would see about 3 a day before I finally lost my shit and told my husband we needed to move the fuck out and I didn't care if we broke the lease or not. (Likewise, again, exterminator tried but failed in getting rid of them. If you do not fix the source of the problem - flooding carport - there is nothing you can do to stop others from coming constantly)
So for the real roaches, we had those too. They were german cockroaches. We had no idea there was even an infestation, though we had heard rumors about the area being really bad in this regard. We found out about them within the first week of moving in, and the landlord claimed that it was "our responsibility" not his. Thus, we tried to get the exterminator out several times. We treated a few times, but they kept coming back due to the neighbors. If your neighborhood is infested, well...you can't really do much about it all.
There is also an infestation of fleas, red ants, and black wasps in the yard. We are still combating the fleas (over a year later). It was so bad, that we were giving the animals nightly "baths" to try to contain them and bombing once every 2 weeks. It was a goddamn mess. The exterminator tried to treat, but this again...was to no avail.
The property itself is actually nice, if it could be updated and made more secluded. However, it backs up to the ghetto/slum area of town. Thus, these unsavory individuals would sneak through the "woods" (really small woods) and come onto the property to play with their kids, use our grill, and many other things. We would find evidence of people using it constantly, as there is a path leading to the other area. We made sure to try to lock everything of ours up, however a lot of our things were stolen.
The AC unit is actually broken. It worked maybe 2 days a week, and then would quit on us. Not because we were over working the system or it was out of Freon (we had someone come out to look at it, at our cost). It was just an old system and did not want to work properly anymore. Thus, we bought an above ground pool and played in that for most of the hot time. We boiled inside the house constantly, even at night and even during the "winter" months. Naturally, the landlord did nothing to fix this. (Our electricity bills were $450 a month, no matter how much living in the dark we did. This was because of the AC unit constantly fucking up. Mind you, this is an 800 sq ft home...there is absolutely no reason for bills to be that high. We'd go away for a week, turn everything off, come back and the usage for that week was still high as fuck. Here, we only pay $150 for twice the space)
The laundry room that is located in the car port, has a broken door. The door used to "stick" when we first moved in, and the spiders loved hiding in the molding. However, the major issue we had with it (aside from barely fitting room for a washer/drying in a T shape) was that one night a "ghetto" person was hiding from the police in it. They had locked down the neighborhood starting at our house (awesome), and the guy was "on the run". He wound up breaking the lock to get in, and the door never shut or locked properly after that. Thus, anyone that knew anything...knew we kept things of value in there (some of it), and stole it at their earliest convenience. Anything that was stored in there was either infested with the tree roaches, spiders, or molded over. Majority of it was stolen and only the "bad" stuff remained.
Basically, we lived in a slum rental home with a slumlord. We did legally try to tell prospective buyers what was going on, but there was only so much we could inform them of. Trust me, there were quite a few buyers interested. However, the property is still for sale today.
When it came to about two months before our rental agreement was up, the landlord contacted us and told us that he needed us out of the house immediately. He felt that he couldn't sell the property with us living in it. He originally did not want to give us ANY time to move out. However, the law in GA is that if you are required to give either 60 days move out notice. We used that law to push our side and tried to find a place on a short time frame. He wound up only giving us 30 days, not 60.
We were almost homeless, and had a serious issue finding another place. We even looked into how much it would cost to live in the local hotel, pricey by the way. Luckily, we found out about our current place through my MIL/GMIL before it was even on the market to be rented. After everything was said and done, we wound up only living in the town house for about 8 months out of our 12 month lease (we had a year lease). I knew we wouldn't be renewing our lease to begin with, and had been searching for a new place for about 2 months before the slumlord demanded us to get out. He gave us no reason other than he wanted to sell the place and "fix" some things - you know, the things we tried to complain about that he never fixed while we were living there. We were never late on our rent, and kept the place in a nice condition, as nice as we possibly could. Basically, Chad Roling is a dick.
To understand our position, this is a historic town (supposedly) and small. The school system is deigned the "best in the state". It's really not anything super special, and has it's own issues. (I'll expand on that later) Thus, rental properties have hundreds of people looking at them and are rented out for insane amounts of money. Add on, some places require as much as a $5,000 security deposit (that is the price of a down payment on a house of similar size, by the way).
We wound up moving out the last 2 weeks (30 days notice via text), and broom swept the apartment. We had originally scheduled a cleaning company to come in, but once they showed up...they said all they would do is mop the floors, which was not something required in our lease. Thus, we moved out in the stealth of the night (as people were constantly breaking into the place during our move out).
While moving, that was a shit show all of itself. People were casing the place. We made the mistake of doing our first car trip during the day, and by the time we came back (~45? minutes) there were a lot of hoodlums standing in the street in front of the house actively staring and making loud comments about "stealing" this or that. So, we swapped to doing our move at night. We waited to move the beds until the very last load, but the kids/I were constantly doing trips back and forth between the places to get moved. We did about 15 car loads of things before we were basically done. Even though all of our security measures taken, we could not be in two places at once. My husband had to do the bigger trips solo and I had to go to the kids' school for something. This left the house empty for all of maybe 2 hours. The "ghetto" people still managed to take a few fishing poles, half a package of hot dogs (from the fridge!), some kids' clothes, and a few other things like decorations. Mind you, we had locked the fucking doors. They broke in and stole shit from the living room/kitchen area.
After moving into our new place, we started trying to get our rental deposit back (about $1k). We will never see that rental deposit ever again. According to him, we smoked in the house and ruined the walls. We don't smoke, and the walls weren't even painted when we moved in - which we think he expected us to do? We aren't sure. In the end, because of just the walls, he kept the entire rental deposit. He tried to claim all of the other issues, like car port flooding and electrical issues on us as well...but that is a landlord's duty and we had properly informed him of such, numerous times. We did not petition a court to order the money back, as we figured it would take too much time and effort. (Plus small town, so we didn't want to piss anyone off)
He is still selling the place, to this day, and has dropped the price from the original $110k, to $90k, to now $75k. It has been almost a year since moving out, and we have thrown out majority of our things from the old place. Most of it was either infested with roaches, fleas, spiders, or molded over (due to the water issues). Thus, we started from scratch basically in the new place....which we are still trying to fix.
However, since we are buying a forever home..we are not trying to replace too much. So, we subsist with the bare minimum we need, and will most likely be throwing out even more upon our final move. From there, I have been given the go-ahead to buy whatever the fuck I want to buy.
As a side note: I want to say fuck you to our original slum lord. Just fuck you. I hope you never sell that place.
PS: Living in that house, in town, was horrible. We constantly had people either asking us to sign up for things/buy things, people randomly harassing us when we were outside trying to "chat" (unsavory types), or people staring at us while we played. We also had a lot of people stop by to ask about the house itself, once the "for sale" sign was put out (against our knowledge, we woke up to it being there one day). Oh, and at one point the across the street house lose their recycling bin and tried to convince me for 2 hours that it was a conspiracy against her (where the sex offender lives). Too many times we were interrupted by people, and we are extremely happy we do not live in town anymore because of it. Add on, it being a shady area....well...you get shady folk trying to annoy you constantly.
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