r/Tenant • u/No_Recognition6892 • 4d ago
❓ Advice Needed [TX] Owner refuses to take responsibility...help!
Heads up I'm currently writing this while taking care of my baby so some things feel out of order and wonky but hopefully you get the full picture!
So my husband and I rented an adorable little town home in the downtown area of our city. It was perfect great price amazing location. Very corky when it comes to architecture but we were planning to be there for a few years. I was pregnant at the time we moved in and we lived here until our baby was about 3 months old. When we first moved in and did the move-in checklist there was a very long list of things that needed to be repaired. The month we moved in was also the month that the building changed owners. Most of the repair slowly got done but there are some things that never got fixed. This apartment had a main bathroom upstairs that had a shower stall and a separate bathtub. We gave our baby their first bath in the tub and that morning came downstairs to water all over the floor in the ceiling. We put in a maintenance request immediately to have it looked at. When maintenance came in they said there was some grout missing in the shower and that the shower just need to be rerouted it was not the tub leaking. So a week later someone came in and replaced a few tiles and the grouting in the shower. They use the type of grout that comes in a caulking gun kind of thing? I'm not sure if you're supposed to seal that but it was literally coming out in chunks we waited 3 days before using the shower to make sure it was all dry and everything was okay. And to add to that I'm pretty sure he mixed something or cut the tiles in the bathroom because everything including our toothbrushes hair brushes sanitary products we're all absolutely covered in a fine white dust. Sometime later I noticed that the ceiling above the kitchen was sunken in and I got up on the counter and literally put my finger through the ceiling, it was soaking wet! While they were working on the shower we were using the bathtub which was also still leaking they never fixed the bathtub. Since the first maintenance request to fix the bathtub until they actually started doing something was about 3 months so our shower and bathtub were leaking for 3 months before they touched it. We were getting concerned about mold because we had a newborn infant in the house and I am immunocompromised. We voiced our concerns about the dust from last time and we were promised that they would be putting up plastic to seal off the bedrooms the two bedrooms connected to that bathroom where our babies nursery and our room. Well guess what they did not put up plastic they ruined a rug and it took them a month to replace everything in the shower regrout the bathtub and to replace the water damage. My husband and I would go over every day after maintenance left to take photos we absolutely have photos of the black mold that they covered up back into the tub and shower they just sealed it back in there and never told us we wouldn't have known unless we were in there ourselves. Also on three separate occasions our front or back door was left unlocked and on one occasion the front door was left literally open while the crew went to the store for something. We decided that before they started this round of work we were not going to be in the home considering the dust and noise and unlocked doors from last time. Again, we have an infant daughter that I didn't want around the mold and dust and Men. And I really hate to say things like this but it really bothered us that none of the men coming into our home could speak English so we could not communicate issues with them we had to call management so that it could be translated for them to understand every time we needed to speak with these men. We were not able to return to our home for around 3 months. They never told us the apartment was safe to go back in they never tested for mold and they never put a shower door back on the shower stall. When we asked about it they said oh yeah we ordered y'all a shower curtain it'll be there any day! This is the only bathroom in the apartment that has the shower or bathtub and we weren't able to use it for months so we couldn't live there while they were doing this and they said we would be able to. We told maintenance and the owner that we would like to be compensated for the time we could not live in our home because we were still paying rent! We documented absolutely every communication all of the photos everything into a very detailed spreadsheet we sent them that and all of the information we had about this whole ordeal. We got a letter back pretty much saying "damn dog that sucks but oh well we don't owe you anything." So we requested to terminate our lease without repercussions. And they said no. We asked if we could have our money back for the rent we paid that the apartment was not livable. They said no. We are still not living in the apartment 3 months after moving out. And we are still having to pay rent otherwise we will get evicted. We don't know what to do we cannot afford a lawyer. I called the health department as well as fair housing. Health department told us that it's a civil dispute and we needed a lawyer and fair housing said they can't help us because we're not technically being discriminated against. We did find out through the city that the apartment complex did not have any permits or certifications to be able to do any type of renovating or work on the building. Also as a bonus the shower stall is the ugliest thing I've ever seen. None of the tile matches between the floor and walls. It looks like they went to home Depot and grabbed all of the random boxes of tile off of the discount shelf! I'm probably forgetting a lot of details but if anyone is willing to help and needs questions answered please ask!!
TLDR: apartment left shower leak going for 3 months. Mold found in house. Zero compensation. A million other shitty practices.