B
Bijad
Guest
My fiancee and I moved into a place in mid September, around Halloween we noticed that thebasement was flooding, we didn't think too much about it as it was in the laundry room which led us initially to believe that it was a leaky washer. How wrong we were, the flooding became more and more frequent and by the second week of Nov. the basement was constantly flooding. Our landlord lives out of state so we tried to call her 4 or 5 times, the last being on the 14th of Nov. at which time we left her a voicemail telling her that the basement was flooding and we were going to have a plumber come out and look at it. When the first plumber came out he went out into the mainline about 100ft. and determined that it was broken, and left without even charging us. By the time the second plumber came out we had three inches of standing sewage sitting in our basement, he had the same diagnosis. At this point it is now the first week of Dec. and we still haven't heard from our landlord. We make a few more unsuccessful calls and then start looking for a new house. On Dec. 17th I recieve a call from my landlord who calls only to ask why we haven't paid for Dec. rent. I explain that we have been trying to reach her and as this problem has gone unanswered for over a month now we would withhold it until it wass dealt with. She denies ever recieving our message. The phone call gets pretty loud and ends on a calmer note with me saying if you are going to fix this problem we'll pay rent. So after Xmas she still hadn't done anything so we started looking again and found a new place to move into and did so. Now she is saying that she is going to sue us for god knows what. We stupidly did not send her anything in writing, but, the city came out and said it was unsafe and unhealthy to be living there and we have pictures of the three inches of standing water filled with feces in the basement that held our children's bedrooms(it is a splitlevel w/ 3 brooms down and one up. Does she have a case? and what can we do now to protect ourselves, we don't have a lot of money for a lawyer.