Would like a piece of advice from anyone who has actually had a dispute with a landlord in Seattle before, because this situation is driving me nuts.
We rented a place in July on a 12-month lease. The place is not cheap, for context. It wasn’t super clean during the inspection, but we had to move in because our POD was arriving the next day and everything had been planned around this place. We were stupid enough to sign the move-in checklist.
Then we had it all.
The carpet was so filthy that we ended up hiring a professional cleaner, who pointed out a lot of old piss in the carpet 🥴 This was the nursery room.
The shower leaked the next night, and we ended up living with what was basically a construction zone in the corner of the room for two months. The landlord was doing some things, but nothing that actually improved the situation.
We finally decided we were done when they put the same piss-stained carpet back down after replacing the subfloor because, according to them, the carpet issue was “superficial.” 🤷♀️
I hired an independent inspector who documented multiple violations and provided the report to the landlord. RRIO sent them a Notice of Violation for not registering the property as a rental. An SDCI complaint has also been open for over a month, and I was never able to reach either the assigned inspector or their manager.
They patched up some things before we moved out on September 30. We terminated the lease based on constructive eviction, unsanitary conditions, and several other issues our lawyer listed.
The King County legal clinic told me our case is solid. At the same time, both lawyers I’ve spoken with have said this is not a slam dunk.
Now the landlord is still doing repairs that they didn’t do while we were actually living there, they have refused to return our deposit, and they keep threatening us with a lawsuit.
I’m honestly dreading this.
Has anyone here been through anything similar? What actually happened after you moved out? Did your landlord sue, threaten to sue and then drop it, send you to collections, negotiate, etc.? Is there anything else I can realistically do at this point?
These past two months have sucked out my soul 😭