Landlord passes on previous tenants' awful mess to the next group of tenants

A summer in Athens. We thought what could be better? It would mean experiencing the magical paradise that is Athens with beautiful skies, no homework, and a house to call your own. Every Ohio University student's dream.

This was the excitement for juniors Ali and Lauren. They were going to work in Athens over the summer, not taking classes, and live in the enormous house uptown that they and six other girls leased for the coming year.

With that excitement came a twinge of apprehension. The girls who lived in their house last year were slobs. Whenever Ali and Lauren and their friends visited the house, beer cans were everywhere, as was the filth. What would the house look like now that the other girls had left and the landlord had a week to clean and make repairs?

On Sunday, June 21, the first day the tenants could move in, Ali and Lauren picked up their keys at the landlord's office.

"The house was really destroyed last year after those girls left," the landlord told them. "We really did a great job cleaning the place, and we got all new blinds, and we're going to put in new granite counter tops."

Shortly afterwards, the two slowly opened the front door to their house. They shuffled through each room of the house taking in the horrors that surrounded them.

The place hadn't been cleaned at all. There were handfuls of Q-tips littering the basement floor, the back patio exiting from the basement was flooded with trash, and Ali's carpet was wet with toilet water leaking from the upstairs bathroom.

"I swear to God my carpet smelled like urine," Ali said.

And that was just the beginning of their troubles. In another room, paint was chipping off the walls like dandruff, and one bedroom didn't have a door. The shower in the main floor bathroom, which was to be Ali's, had a wad of black hair clogging the drain and a wet mass of paper towels were tucked in the medicine cabinet.

Fire alarms were hanging from their mounts. The wooden floor finishing in the living room and dining room was pulled and uneven (which the roommates found out later was because the landlord did that first, then proceeded to walk all over the wet surface to attempt to make other repairs to the house). The house looked like it hadn't made acquaintance with either rag or mop in years.

"I was afraid to start using the bathroom in the basement for a good two to three weeks," Lauren said.

As if that wasn't enough, the house was infested with mice and ants. Ali and Lauren's paradise had turned into a nightmare.

"I felt like I was camping," Lauren said.

Immediately Ali and Lauren called the landlord, and a cleaning crew was sent over.

"They walked in with rags and a bottle of Pine Sol to clean, if that's what you want to call it," Ali said.

Ali said that even then they didn't really clean anything.
Next, the girls thought to call the Health Department; this house wasn't suitable to live in. Being a Sunday, though, Ali and Lauren had to wait for the office to open the next day.

When the Health Department arrived on Monday, Ali recalled, the inspector said, "And this place was supposed to be clean?"

After making the rounds, the health inspector added a few more items to his list of problems. The fire extinguishers were expired and mold had to be removed from behind the basement washers and dryers. The girls never planned on using those anyway; they doubted they'd actually clean anything.

The landlord now had 30 days to fix everything on the health inspector's list or risk getting fined.

After the girls called the Health Department, the maintenance men were in and out for the next 30 days, Ali said. The cleaning crew never came back, though, she said.

In reality, the girls had to do most of the dirty work themselves and the 50 plus items needing repair not included in the inspector's emergencies, such as the jammed dishwasher door, were never taken care of. The promise of granite counter tops was never fulfilled either.

Let's just say that none of the eight girls will sign a lease with their current landlord for the 2010-2011 academic year.