Out

As you may have noticed on your daily peregrinations to the shrine of this blog, I ain't been updating it much recently.  Reason being, we've moved.  Again.  You know how much I hate moving and also how often I've had to do it, so I won't bore you with the psychological background this time.  But the circumstances of this move are interesting (I think).

Way back in the dawn of time, in October 2010, we shifted into House Minus One (present house being House Zero).  At the time I had just had a nasty fall-out with my clinical supervisor, my exams were a few weeks away, and my beloved Smaller Half was about to give birth the Hatchling, and we had to find a house to live in.  Time was short, so when I found an airy, spacious house in the hills I signed on the dotted line and didn't worry too much about the little niggly voice in the back of my head telling me to be careful, especially since the landlord seemed so houseproud and promised that the collection of little maintenance issues would be taken care of pronto.

Fast forward 6 months and nothing had changed.  The landlord had gone awol somewhere in Bulgaria to star in adult films and as a result the curtains were still moldy, the paint was still peeling off the ceiling in the Hatchling's room, the fan in the bathroom still didn't work, and so on in that vein.  We kept hassling the real estate agent but she was helpless to act without the landlord's say-so.  When the hot water system leaked into the ceiling we could get that fixed.  And when the drains blocked up time and time again we could get that fixed.  But that was about it.

Then the landlord came back and started hassling the real estate agent about the fact that we needed a plumber every week.  Somehow this was our fault.  He'd done so much for us already, apparently.  Then the smell started.

The smell was more of a stench.  It started one day immediately after the plumber had come round to ream out the drains again.  Strangely, it was localized to one room only and got worse when we opened the windows.  We kept complaining about it and the agents kept saying that there must be a dead possum in the roof despite me telling them back that it didn't smell like a dead possum unless perhaps the possum had died of dysentery.

Eventually we cracked.  There was mold growing on the walls of our bedroom and on the curtains and windows all around the house.  The Hatchling's room stunk.  The drains kept blocking. And and and and and and.  So we bailed - we got a new house next suburb over and wrote to the agent saying that we were giving them two weeks notice to break our lease and we weren't going to pay a penny more because the house was a dump.  We also got a letter from our GP saying that mold was a health risk, just to put a nice medicolegal aspect on the whole thing.

The agents were a little taken aback but it turned out that they were so jack of the landlord that they wanted to ditch him too because it was more trouble than it was worth.  So they bullied the landlord into letting us not pay any more rent even though we had six months left on the lease.  The landlord pushed back a bit and insisted that we let a building inspector take a look at the place.  And his conclusion was that there was a leaky sewage pipe under the house.  Which would account for the smell, the damp, the mold, the blocked drains.  So ha ha sucked in Mr Landlord.  Take your smelly house and jam in up your cribriform plate.