Rant

I am frustrated and I need to vent. The following may or may not make any sense, and it is definitely going to be very one sided. So, keeping that in mind...

Our most recent landlords are extremely anal characters (anal character- noun - Psychoanalysis . a group of personality traits including meticulousness, compulsiveness, and rigidity, believed to be associated with excessive preoccupation with the anal phase as a child, with effects lingering into adulthood.). I knew this right from the very beginning, and was reminded of it all throughout tenancy. So I should have been prepared for what checking out was going to be like. 

I do believe that it is only fair to leave a place at least as clean as you found it (and in most cases, lots better), and so I have no problems cleaning up after ourselves when we leave. Within reason. But let it be known that I am in no way, shape, or form trying to get out of our responsibility to clean. And I knew that our most recent landlords have a high expectation of clean. I mentally tried to put myself up to the challenge.

As we all know, moving out of one place and into another can be quite stressful. Trying to clean up the mess you left behind at the same time as organizing the new mess you've just made, tends to make life a little tense for awhile. I felt like I did my best to counter the stress by planning lots of time to get everything in the old house perfectly clean and spotless. After we moved out, I would go back to the old place in the mornings and deep clean one room at a time while the kids watched a movie on the laptop downstairs. Side note: I did janitorial work all through high school and college, so deep cleaning is something I feel really proficient at; and while I am not the most spotless of day-to-day house-keepers, I can deep clean any given area like nobody's business. When I deep clean, I start at the top of the room and work my way to the bottom. Dust the corners, dust/clean the light fixture, change bulbs as needed, wipe smoke detector, check batteries, bleach the shelves/cupboards, vacuum out window seals, clean the blinds, Windex the windows, 409 the doors and nobs and switches and outlet covers, wash the walls top to floor with hot soapy water, do the baseboards, edge the room with the vacuum, and then finally vacuum the floor. Obviously bathrooms and kitchens have more to do in the middle areas, but those things get equally as much attention. After I was done in each room, I would shut and lock the door behind me so that there was no chance for my kids to go in the room after it was clean and mess it up again. 

After a week of this, Aaron and I decided to see if we could do one long haul on Saturday to finish up and be out, so we could put all our focus on the new house. Our wonderful Relief Society sisters volunteered to come help too, I asked them to go back over the walls and baseboards a second time with hot soapy water. During that time, Aaron and I finished up in the kitchen, even pulling out the oven and fridge and cleaning the sides, underneath and behind them. Guess what? We found some things that weren't ours back there. A hot pad and an oven mitt behind the stove, and some magnetic letters and a couple toys under the fridge. Could it be from someone who lived there before us? (Which was our landlords, btw.) We concluded that since we'd found those things, that it probably hadn't been cleaned out back there when we moved in. 

When we were done with the inside, we tackled the outside. I was a little miffed that we had to do the outside in the first place...I mean pick up all our junk, yes. But they wanted us to weed the garden and remove any old plants, etc. and...this is what gets me..."turn the soil". Seriously? Do you want to know what the garden looked like when we moved it? There were still pieces of old corn stalk, for one, but that didn't really bother me. What bothered me was that they had dumped out a couple of big flower pots into the garden and in the bottoms of the flower pots were dozens of large rocks. So when we moved in and wanted to start a garden, we had to pick out the big rocks, and then sift out the medium sized rocks, and then turn our own soil. But even if the soil and been pristine when we moved in, I don't think spring-cleaning the yard falls under the responsibility of the renters. Up-keeping the yard while you live there - yes, if it's in your contract. I guess, to put in mildly, I thought the check out sheet was over the top. WAY over the top. 

But we really wanted as much of our deposit back as possible, so we honestly gave it a valiant effort. When all was said and done a grand total of 30 hours had been spent in cleaning the old place inside and out.  After a very long Saturday, we turned in our keys and garage door opener. Our landlords couldn't come out right then to walk through with us, but said they'd let us know if they found anything that effected our deposit. We knew a of a couple things that were broken, the weather stripping on the bottom of the storm door, and one set of blinds, that we expected to come out of the deposit, but other than that we were fairly confident that the place couldn't get any cleaner.

Lesson learned: never be confident when renting. They will ALWAYS find something to charge you for. A few days later, we received and email with a long list of stupid things that they said didn't get cleaned. Taking off the floor vents and vacuuming them out was one. She said there were marks all over the walls, especially at kid level. And some other equally dumb things.

And you know, I'm willing to consent to the marks on the walls. There may have still been marks on the walls. HOWEVER, the walls were scrubbed once with bleach by me, and once with hot soapy water by either me, or someone in the RS who was helping us. So after two pretty thorough scrubbings, if it's still on the wall, it's probably not going to come off. But regardless of a scuff mark that won't come off, the wall is still clean. 

It reminds me of the difference between the kinds of people who want to be healthy vs. the kinds of people who merely want to look healthy. People who want to look healthy are the kind that don't care if they are anorexic and that their body is starved for vital nutrients, they just care that they are skinny and don't weigh much. People who want to BE healthy, eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly and aren't as concerned about the numbers on the scale or the size of the clothing, as long as they feel good inside and have energy to do the things they want to do. 

I think our landlords want a house that LOOKS clean. No dents, no scuffs, no scratches, new looking everything. When in reality, over time, things get worn out, baseboards and handrails get dinged up, there will be wear and tear where cupboards slide in and out, tile grout will discolor slightly, as will the bathtub bottom. And any other numberless amounts of things that just get old. And not that the house is old and decrepit and falling apart, because it isn't, it's still in really nice shape...but it's far from brand-spanking-new. However, it is completely sanitary. It has been scrubbed top to bottom inside and out. It IS clean. Not just cleaned but deep cleaned. Clean doesn't mean restoring it to perfectly new. That's not possible. It wasn't perfectly new when we moved in, but even if it had been there would be no way to put it back to new. And I think it's asinine that they are practically demanding that we do so. 

But what chaps my hide even more...if we don't go back and successfully attempt to fix the list she sent us, she will charge us $25 an hour to have someone come in and clean for us. Really? Twenty-five-dollars an hour? When we managed Mira Monte, we charged $12 an hour to clean up after people, and I thought that was a bit high. $25 dollars an hour is flat out highway robbery. Especially to re-clean a place that's already been thoroughly cleaned. So, what if she spends 2 hours re-scrubbing walls, only to discover, that oh-ya, I was right, they were already as clean as they were going get, can she still charge me for those 2 hours? She would.   

And I guess the part that really gets me, the part that has kept my blood boiling for the last 2 days, is that there really isn't anything I can do about it. They've got our money, which we really want back, and they are holding it over our heads, demanding the ridiculous, and if we can't live up to the demands, we're out. That's it. There's no second opinion. No appeal to anyone. Nothing. I suppose, we could go to court, but really? That's not going to happen. Too much money, too much hassle, and no guarantee of  any favorable outcome. A more realistic expectation would be this: Aaron and I will go back and spend several more hours there this weekend. It still won't be good enough. They'll deduct large sums from our deposit. We'll be angry. That will be the end. We lose. No matter what. And I can't get over it. It's just turning and spinning, 'round and 'round in my head, and grating on my nerves. I feel powerless, frustrated, and annoyed. I just want to ring their necks and yell at them until they realize how profoundly unreasonable and ridiculous they are being. But, being the non-confrontational person that I am, I'll write a blog post to vent my frustration instead, and vow that I'll never rent again.