My husband and I moved into our new apartment today (wonderful, lovely new apartment, in fact it was just completed on Wednesday - it still smells very new-painty).
We told the landlord (of the apartment we were leaving) that we were moving our stuff out on October 1 and would be cleaning the apartment on October 2 (we couldn't move on the 30th of September, because our new apartment wasn't going to be ready yet).
We even paid for the extra two days of rent, and we must have told him three times about the schedule (even on Wednesday, when he griped that we were putting too-large items in the dumpster).
Overall, he's been an ok landlord. He was a great landlord the first year we moved in, but his interest and care in the building has declined over the five years we were there. He had a falling out with his former maintenance guy, about 18 months ago and the place really started to fall apart after that. This winter, almost no snow removal was done.
Sorry, that was a lot of build-up to the story. Anyway we got into the apartment around 1pm to clean. We still had a couple personal items in the apartment (three baskets of dirty laundry, a chair, our vaccuum cleaner, the microwave, several brooms and mops, a counter full of cleaning supplies, and some food in the freezer and fridge - and a bunch of stuff we decided not to take with us. I can understand why the landlord might have thought the apartment was abandoned - that is, if we hadn't told him just two days before that we would be cleaning this afternoon).
When we got there, the vaccuum cleaner was gone, but the canister had been emptied into the trash. A really big part of the cleaning we had to do, was the vaccuuming. We guessed that the landlord had come into the apartment and thought we weren't coming back (again though, we'd gone out of our way to tell him so many times, it does frustrate me that he wasn't paying attention).
So anyway, we called the landlord and left a message on his machine that our vaccuum cleaner was missing and we needed it for the cleaning (and if he took it thinking we'd abandoned it, could he please return it). So he called back and told us that the vaccuum cleaner he removed from our apartment was his - one he had bought a week ago (basically accusing us of stealing his vaccuum cleaner). My husband told him that he'd better look again, because our vaccuum cleaner was very definitely not a new vaccuum cleaner (not to mention ours was red, and his new vaccuum cleaner was bright yellow). He said he was going to be right over to show us that he didn't have our vaccuum cleaner (how he intended to prove he didn't have our vaccuum cleaner was a bit of a mystery to me).
Anyway, we did the rest of our cleaning (I was tempted to leave the apartment as is, and consider the cleaning fair trade for the vaccuum cleaner - but hubby talked me out of it), and we borrowed our neighbor (and hubby's best friend)'s vaccuum cleaner. We were there several hours, and no sign of the landlord, until we opened the apartment door to take out some trash), and there in the hall was our very old, red vaccuum cleaner. The landlord hadn't even bothered to knock to let us know it was there. He had to have tiptoed in, carrying (rather than rolling) the vaccum cleaner, because the walls are paper thin, and even with the cleaning, we would have heard him in the hallway. I told hubby that I thought I had heard someone walk by our door, but I just assumed it was one of the other tenants going to their apartment.
Hubby called the landlord back to thank him (he's a "no-hard-feelings" kind of guy) and the landlord had turned off his cell phone and his voicemail, so hubby couldn't even leave a message. Hubby was REALLY steamed at that, but by the time we finished cleaning, we were laughing about it.
In hindsight, it's kind of funny, but really irritating too. Why couldn't he just admit to making a mistake?
Oh well, chalk it up to good riddance, but still I'm a bit peeved. Our security deposit was extremely low, only a small fraction of our monthly rent (only $200), so we're not expecting to get it back. It's pretty common in our area, no matter how clean you leave an apartment, for landlords to keep most of the security deposit, especially if the deposit was less than a full month's rent.
Oh well, it's just another funny story we get to tell, I guess.
hahaha we have had some problems in the past w/ landlords. this one is definitely entertaining.
we had our thanksgiving turkey held hostage one year - we were soooo mad!!! and once we were charged full replacement costs for blinds that we apparently had failed to dust. whaaaa??? so instead of dusting them they threw them away? i doubt it!
When DH and I moved out of our first apartment, we took a week to do it. Our rent was paid through the end of the month, and we were both working, so we did trips every night to move all of the stuff. We took the bed, clothes, etc first, and were staying at the new place since it was closer to work. When we showed up on the last day of the month, everything we'd still had there was gone. The maintenance guys came in and took our grill, the shelves off of the wall, even our wedding album. They wouldn't admit that they had done it, and after searching all the dumpsters, we never got our wedding pictures back. They also ran up $400 in charges on DH's cell phone that he's accidentally left there overnight.
Wow, we own houses in Buffalo that we rent out and would never be that rude to our tenants. On the other hand, we have had our share or terrible tenants lol
I definitely have heard far worse stories on both side of the landlord tenant fence. The landlord really has been a fairly decent guy (just very passive aggressive).
I really think he panicked, and didn't know how to admit that he thought we had abandoned the apartment and the remaining belongings. My husband was a bit annoyed when he called and it did reflect in his voice, even though he was trying to be polite. We think the landlord is a bit intimidated by my husband (hubby is a sweet heart, but his appearance can seem intimidating to people who don't know him). Nothing else makes sense.
He said he came in looking for his vaccuum cleaner (why would it be there). He had vaccuumed just the day prior to the move (Wednesday) and when he left with his vaccuum cleaner, taking it to his vehicle, he apparently dropped one of the attachments in the parking lot without noticing. Hubby found it, and called the landlord Thursday night to tell him we had found the vaccuum cleaner attachment and had left it on the mailboxes in the hall, so he could pick it up.
My husband thinks that he very well may have been going to retrieve the vaccuum cleaner, and assumed we had left it in our apartment, and the only vaccuum-like object was our vaccuum cleaner (not yellow like his, and not yellow like the attachment we left behind - which he had also retrieved - you'd think at this point, he'd have realized "uh, these don't match."
Personally, I think he thought we had abandoned the apartment and the remaining stuff. He was a bit cold to us on Wednesday (he's upset we're moving) the day before the move and had warned us that if we left anything in or around the dumbster the garbage men wouldn't take or left anything in the apartment, he'd have to go to the dumps with it and would take it from our security deposit.
We gave him more than two months notice, and told him we were leaving because the apartment was no longer fitting our needs, because of our health issues and disabilities we really needed laundry facilities that weren't in the basement, and needed a more handicapped-accessible apartment with a garage. There were some significant upkeep issues also, but we didn't feel it necessary to go into those because he had started working on those.
I think he was mostly annoyed, because we had done (free) some of his work for him, and he liked having us in the building. If there were maintenance issues, security or safety issues... we'd call him. He asked my husband to go get new keys made for the basement - and we could take the expense out of next months rent (which hubby never did), but when hubby went to return them, the landlord asked us to keep them, because we were usually home, and whenever a new tenant would move in, he'd send them to our apartment for a basement key. He asked hubby to show one of the empty apartments for him, and hubby did so (again, free). He asked hubby to remind tenants not to pile trash by the building (hubby wrote a polite sign on the computer and printed it up and posted it), but all these little favors started getting more familiar and uncomfortable. He wanted hubby to knock on the door and remind delinquent tenants that they owed rent. We think he didn't want to do it himself (who would) and wanted to use hubby's intimidating appearance to his advantage. (Hubby is 6'2," 330 lbs, hair pulled in a pony tail, heavy beard, often wears denim and leather - very "biker-viking"). Hubby does like the hardcore badass image, and even walking with a cane, can seem a bit menacing to people who don't know he's a complete softee. Of course it doesn't help that he favors intimidating canes with heavy pewter handles shaped like skulls, panther and dragon heads, medieval weaponry)...
Hubby drew the line at that - and told the landlord that he (the landlord) shouldn't even be telling us who was late on the rent, and he certainly wasn't going to "remind" anyone to pay their rent. He never asked us to do anything like that again, but he still would tell us way too much of the other tenants business.
I think because we had done alot of nice things for the landlord and the building (We bought a super-cheap dvd player to put in the exercise room for everybody to use. We used a gift card at Walmart we got for one of our birthdays, and it was under $20), he felt a bit betrayed that we were leaving, because he went from friendly to cool, rather suddenly.
After selling his house, my hubby's best friend was apartment hunting about a year ago (and maintenance of the building was still pretty good), so we recommended him to the landlord. We felt kind of bad, when winter came and there were so many snow removal problems. Our friend, gave the landlord a big list of things he wanted fixed, and in arguing with the landlord told him that the "real reason" we were leaving was all of the maintenance problems. A bit of a distortion of the truth, because they weren't the main reasons, but they were part of the reason, we'd already brought each to the landlord's attention, and he promised to work on them, and seemed to be doing so (slowly, but making some progress), so we didn't feel we needed to rub salt in the wounds.
At any rate, I think it all boiled down to the landlord being really sad to see us go, and not dealing with it appropriately. I've had landlords that were much, much worse (after all, he did return the vaccuum cleaner, and he could have just as easily stuck to his story that he didn't have our vaccuum cleaner). He's just not a people-person and probably shouldn't be a landlord (he knows it too, he's been trying to sell the building for four of the five years we've been there).
He never wanted to be a landlord, he's a realtor and builder. He only bought the apartment to use as collateral for the fancy homes he was building, but then with the economy and real estate market decline, now he's got a lot of empty semi-mansions on his hands.
I understand it all. I even understand him possibly panicking and not wanting to admit that he took the vaccuum thinking we'd left it behind, but it was just so silly that his invented lies made absolutely no sense (in some ways, I find it reassuring that he's such a really bad liar. I think it proves he's not a terrible guy - or at least will never be very good at being a terrible guy, because he couldn't even come up with a more plausible lie).
(Ex)-landlord stole our vaccuum cleaner! ROFLMAO
@ the vacuum-stealing landlord. I tell ya, some people. 
