I came home on a Sunday night after being out of town to find a quarter inch of water standing in half of my apartment. A hot water line above my room had a leak. I called the apartment complex immediately on their emergency line and got the voicemail. I left a message that my apartment was flooding.
When the maintenance worker showed up he went to work without saying anything to me. He could not tell me the procedure for how I was supposed to handle the situation. I asked him if I should get a hotel and he told me that they might reimburse me for the hotel.
I packed up a couple of items including my cat and went to the nearest pet friendly hotel. The next morning I show up at the office as soon as it opens at 9 am. I walk in and nobody in the office can tell me anything because they are all trainees. No one would call the manager or give me the steps I should follow. I speak to the head maintenance man and he tells me a little bit about what they are going to do and asks me to move anything I did not want his team moving. I finally get to work at 11:30 or 12, but I was supposed to be there at 8.
The next morning I show up at the leasing office at 9 am again to speak to the manager because that was his first day back. He tells me that he knows nothing about the incident other than they are working to fix the problem. He told me he would call me and let me know how it was going. Once again I am stranded with no information and have to determine what to do with my cat and whether I should purchase another night at the hotel. I walk into my apartment and nobody is in there so I decided to leave my cat there and take my chances.
I call the office at 4:30 because I still have not heard from the manager. He was on another call and they told me he would call me back. I arrive at my apartment about 5:15 and he has not called. I walk into the office and he is messing with the printer. I ask him what news he had about my apartment. He tells me that they fixed it this morning. When I asked him about my expenses for a hotel and being displaced he said that it was not his responsibility to pay for that. He said that he could take off one day of rent because it leaked Sunday night and they had it fixed by Tuesday morning so there should have only been one day, Monday that I was without an apartment. I told him no I had to get a hotel for Sunday night and Monday and nobody told me the apartment was fixed and ready until Tuesday afternoon at 5:30! Technically I should have booked another night in a hotel because I was unsure if they were finished on Tuesday and I needed somewhere for my cat to stay during the day. I have to pay $15 per month for pet rent and I had to put down a $500 non refundable pet deposit. After all of my information he says there is no way he is paying over $350 for my hotel for two nights and then offers $60 dollars off of my rent for not being able to live in my apartment for 2 days. Then he tells me that he is being generous with that offer and is doing me a favor because he does not even have an obligation to take that off of my rent.
When I return to my apartment Tuesday night there is still a fan blowing my carpet that they did not replace. I realize they did not change any of the baseboards and the wall that had water running through it and a bubble in the paint where it swelled was never resheetrocked or repainted. They are endangering me, the other residents and future residents with their negligent behavior and cheap, improper maintenance practices. Over the next week I had people in and out of my apartment to cover the holes in the ceiling they created to fix the leak. They simply put a patch over it with new sheetrock and painted over it. They did not repaint the entire wall to match the color and they did not cover the wall next to it to protect it from stray paint so there are stray paint strokes on it as well.
