Landlord refuses to maintain apartment, tenant gets free laundry thanks to technical loophole: 'He lost quite a bit of money'

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Brad Dickson • Managing Editor
Jan 25, 2024 7:00 AM EST

Submitting requests to your landlord for basic maintenance and repairs is pretty similar to trying to get reimbursement from an airline for that hotel you had to book when they stranded you in a strange city because of maintenance issues. And that similarity is that it's impossible; try and plead as you might, it's never going to happen. They're both going to ignore your request for as long as possible while redirecting and gaslighting you, just hoping that you give up and stop asking them.

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  • Still, there's something to be gained in all of this: if your landlord refuses to repair the things they're obligated to repair, who's going to care when you get free laundry? Fair is fair, after all. And, that's what these tenants got when their landlord refused to do simple repairs in their apartment. After being repeatedly ignored and threatened for their maintenance requests, when they discovered a loophole they decided not to say a word.

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    LIN
    via Florian Olivo
  • 02
    Posted by u/Endlessly_Trying 5 hours ago Landlord was an assh*le every time an issue occured in my apartment, so I bend the rules a bit This happened about a year ago and I no longer live in this apartment. Back in CA, my wife and I rented a nice apartment. It had some new features and the monthly rent was a bit expensive, but we felt that it was the better option we had at the time and CA is just generally expensive.
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 03
    My landlord was a retired old man, who makes his income through this apartment complex. He was nice when we first met and when we signed papers. On the first day, he told us that if we had any issues, we needed to call him first and he would handle it because he'd rather have himself or his workers do it. In the first few weeks, we noticed the blinds were missing and we asked for the missing pieces. He happily obliged and gave it us. Then, after a few days, we noticed the blinds were falling off
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 04
    Next, we noticed one of the electrical outlets wasn't working. We informed him about this. He got grumpy and didn't believe us. We insisted and he sent his worker, but his worker also said the outlet worked. However, when I plugged in a lamp, it still didn't work. They never tested the outlet by plugging anything in it, but I let that go because he just rudely kept telling us it did. So, I don't use that outlet.
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 05
    The last straw was our upstairs neighbor. She complained about our noise level, but it was over the most ridiculous things like hearing the door open or hearing the cabinets and closets open. We don't slam anything or run/walk heavily. Our landlord took her side. In the end, the neighbor tried to make our living miserable by blasting music the whole day and leaving her dog alone to also bark nonstop. Our landlord still took her side and basically ignored us. We were ready to leave once our lease
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 06
    Cue the laundry room. There's a nearby laundry room in the apartment complex. Washer and dryer were $3.50 and $3.00 per load. In the first few months, I was playing around with the washer and dryer because I was figuring out how to use it. The settings changed to Spanish and somehow, I was able to bypass the payment method. So basically, I could get laundry done for free. I didn't do it because I didn't want to do that to our landlord.
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 07
    But after 6 months in, where we experienced our landlord's true attitude and treatment (there were many others that I haven't mentioned), I bypassed the laundry payment for the rest of the 7 months we lived there before leaving. On average, I did 3 loads of clothing laundry per week. That doesn't include our bed sheets, washable shoes, plushies (I have a room's worth). That also doesn't include my friends' laundry too (I had some friends stay over a few days), so I did more than just 3 loads a w
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 08
    Anyway, I did all of that for 7 months. I hope he lost quite a bit of money and paid more in electricity. When I left, I contemplated if I should relay this hack to the other tenants, but I wasn't close enough to the other tenants to make sure this didn't come back to bite me. It was a good run nevertheless.
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 09
    O Professional-Rub5386 3 hr. ago This made me giggle a little... nice job. Reply Share 196 ●●● Endlessly_Trying OP 3 hr. ago Haha thanks! My wife said I had a smug look every time I did the laundry. 128 Reply Share
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 10
    00 AromaticDraft 3 hr. ago Nice! That's $546. 46 Reply Share CoderJoel 3 hr. ago You really cleaned up ↑ 26 Reply Share
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 11
    IndependenceNo2060 3 hr. ago agencies should prioritize tenant welfare too, not just landlords' profits. Reply Share 16 ●●● M1RROR 47 min. ago But that's not profitable. They won't do it unless they're forced to. 1 Reply Share ●●●
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 12
    LindonLilBlueBalls 2 hr. ago The outlet could very well have been a switched outlet. 7 Reply Share 7 ●●● 404UserNktFound 1 hr. ago Switched outlets seem like a good idea, but they never seem to work out that way. My mother in law kept wondering why her cordless phone kept going dead, and we finally realized she had the base plugged into a switched outlet in a room she doesn't tend to use often (but it was the phone closest to the kitchen so she'd tend to answer that one). Reply Share
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 13
    SpaceMonkeyEngineer 36 min. ago At one point, I was renting a master bedroom with en suite bathroom in a house in a student housing neighborhood while attending post secondary education. It was far from where I was living so I rented it site unseen. There were lots of pictures but in retrospect, the lighting was poor, the pictures low quality, etc. My mistake. The bathroom door hinge was so broken, I had to remove the door and just not have a door to the bathroom, the window didn't work properly
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 14
    A few weeks after I moved in, the landlord put up a wall on the main floor to add another "room" to the house to rent out that was 100% illegal. Adding another renter to the house also illegally (by-law/safety regulations). Anytime anything that a landlord was responsible for came up, he'd dodge it. At one point, I kept hearing what sounded like running water from my bathroom area, but couldn't find anything leaking. My bathroom was on top of the kitchen/dining area, and
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 15
    there didn't appear to be running water issues there either. I was only there during the week and went home on weekends. I did all my cooking, laundry, etc. on the weekends at home, and I'd meal plan and freeze food for the week. So I didn't need the laundry in the basement and never went down there. After over a month of hearing the running water, I decided to go down to
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 16
    the basement thinking, what could be down there running water non-stop for weeks? Well, there was a small leak in a pipe that was spraying a very thin but high pressure stream of water against a wall in the basement maybe 8-10 feet away, with a HUGE pool of water luckily draining into a floor drain and not flooding the rest of the house but leaving 10-12 foot diameter puddle on the floor. Considering the landlord. I paid it no mind.
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 17
    In my area, the water meter is only read once every three months. The landlord was not notified of the leak until he got the water bill after it had been leaking for months. Spraying and soaking the dry wall with a HUGE puddle on the floor for months. Considering my house mates did use the laundry, they must have known for months too. And also didn't inform the landlord. He sent us angry email demanding to know why we didn't inform him. No one replied.
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 18
    Since the water meter was read only once every three months and with the monthly bill being based on the last previous three months, he had a huge back pay correction bill on top of having to pay a large overage for the next following three months too. Yes he likely ultimately had it credited back to his future water bills over time but it still sucked for him at the time to have the extra monthly running cost. 45 Reply Share
    via u/Endlessly_Trying
  • 19
    Bumblebee569902 hr. ago Owner operated apts are the worse. They don't understand business and do everything cheap which hurts them in the end. that guy. Good for you on how to bypass the fee 6 Reply Share
    via u/Endlessly_Trying

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