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What counts as 'wear and tear'?
daisiegg
Posts: 5,395 Forumite
We are moving out of our rented house soon. The deposit was almost £2000 so we're quite keen to get it back!
We have kept the house in pretty good condition (no pets or kids, no parties, etc) and the inventory when we moved in was extremely thorough - listing every little scratch to the skirting boards, etc - so that's really good. However, there are one or two things that worry me.
One is one of the light fittings in the dining room, a wall light, is falling off and sort of hanging off the wall a little bit. It's nothing we've done - we've never touched it! - but it doesn't look like something we can fix ourselves. Would something like this count as wear and tear, or can they deduct it from our deposit?
Another thing is the handle on inside of the bedroom door has come off. This happened very soon after we moved in, and we kept hold of the handle for ages but when I looked for it yesterday it seems to have gone. If we replace it with another handle, do you think that would be ok? It already didn't match the one on the outside of the door, as it had been replaced before anyway.
Our landlord has been incredibly absent during the two years we've lived here (we were without an oven for a couple of months before Christmas while he got himself in gear to sort us out a new one, and when the heating and hot water broke in the middle of winter it took a week for him to get someone in!) and it got to the point where when things broke, we just fixed them ourselves rather than trying to chase him up. As such, there is some pretty amateur plumbing under the sink (after his plumber 'fixed' it twice only for our kitchen to flood again each time) that we did ourselves and has worked fine for a year....would something like that count against us?
I have a little bit of time over the summer before we move and I'm eager to try and rectify anything I can in order to get as much of our deposit back as possible...but I'm not really sure what counts as damage and what counts as natural wear and tear.
Thanks!
We have kept the house in pretty good condition (no pets or kids, no parties, etc) and the inventory when we moved in was extremely thorough - listing every little scratch to the skirting boards, etc - so that's really good. However, there are one or two things that worry me.
One is one of the light fittings in the dining room, a wall light, is falling off and sort of hanging off the wall a little bit. It's nothing we've done - we've never touched it! - but it doesn't look like something we can fix ourselves. Would something like this count as wear and tear, or can they deduct it from our deposit?
Another thing is the handle on inside of the bedroom door has come off. This happened very soon after we moved in, and we kept hold of the handle for ages but when I looked for it yesterday it seems to have gone. If we replace it with another handle, do you think that would be ok? It already didn't match the one on the outside of the door, as it had been replaced before anyway.
Our landlord has been incredibly absent during the two years we've lived here (we were without an oven for a couple of months before Christmas while he got himself in gear to sort us out a new one, and when the heating and hot water broke in the middle of winter it took a week for him to get someone in!) and it got to the point where when things broke, we just fixed them ourselves rather than trying to chase him up. As such, there is some pretty amateur plumbing under the sink (after his plumber 'fixed' it twice only for our kitchen to flood again each time) that we did ourselves and has worked fine for a year....would something like that count against us?
I have a little bit of time over the summer before we move and I'm eager to try and rectify anything I can in order to get as much of our deposit back as possible...but I'm not really sure what counts as damage and what counts as natural wear and tear.
Thanks!
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