Have you ever dealt with mold in a house or an apartment before?

It’s a NIGHTMARE.

And on top of that, it’s dangerous stuff that can make people very sick.

So you can understand why this person was so worked up about a terrible landlord who wasn’t taking their responsibility seriously.

Check ou how they dealt with this sticky situation.

Landlord tries to keep us in a Mold House. e get his place Condemned by the City.

“I had recently moved into a house with two other girls. It wasn’t the best house, but seemed to look okay for a college apartment.

They were warned…

One of the girls had a friend who had lived there before, and told us that the landlord didn’t like women and kind of a jerk, but usually meant well, and it was decent rent. I’ll be referring to him as DumbLandlord. We were all broke, so we decided to sign a lease.

I should have realized the warning signs when DumbLandlord wanted to sign it in a Big Boy’s, after he had just eaten dinner there, and the leasing agreement looking like he chopped it up from other pictures of lease agreements on Google. We also found this apartment as an ad off of Craig’s List.

Things were fine for a few months. I was living alone until the next school year would start, and wasn’t home all the time since I would go over to my boyfriend’s a lot and sleep over. It was a split house with an apartment in the basement, and ours on the first floor. It wasn’t long until I started to notice things happening.

Things started to go downhill.

We’d get a good amount of rain, since we were in the Midwest, by some big, local lakes, and it was springtime. We’d get a good amount of water, and the concrete steps to the house would consistently fill up with water I had to jump over, and it would disappear overnight. It also started to get a little bit of a musty smell in the house, and I had started coughing and sneezing all the time, but didn’t know why.

Soon, the other girls moved in, and we started having some difficulties with DumbLandlord. He wouldn’t tell us when he’d come over to check on the property (he said he did this to keep up on looks, and mow the lawn, but he did it way too often for any of us to be okay with).

He would argue with us about having a copy of our own lease. He’d yell at us to give him rent payments in cash, especially before going to his cabin up north with his girlfriend. But the biggest of all was that we were having problems with mold, and he did not care.

For a while, we hadn’t talked to the people in the basement apartment, until everyone started having problems with DumbLandlord. We’d hear them arguing and yelling down below about as often as we would upstairs. But they were in a hell-hole. Everything they owned had mold growing on it.

Gross!

They had bugs everywhere: earwigs, beetles, ants, you name it. They were constantly throwing away their clothes, dishes, furniture, even their college papers and homework, since it was all growing mold. They spent money on plastic bins to hold most of their important items, but even those would get moldy.

We also found out that they were supposed to have another roommate down below, but she couldn’t live there from her allergies to mold after signing a lease agreement.

We also found out that DumbLandlord verbally abused her and her mother on the phone, to the point where they were crying, and she couldn’t get out of the lease.

She ended up paying for two places every month so that she didn’t have to live there, because he wouldn’t let her break her lease, and didn’t care.

It was bad all over.

Upstairs wasn’t as bad as the basement, but it wasn’t good, either. All of us were coughing more and more each month. We would wake up coughing in the middle of the night, and we were getting really sick. We tried to air out the house as best we could, but nothing helped.

I ended up getting a severe case of strep throat so bad, that every swallow I took made my eyes water, and made me verbally make noise from the pain. (I tried to ask the doctor I went to if he could prove that this was from mold later, but he unfortunately couldn’t give me a solid statement on it)

Me, being a vocal, neutral-good person, who was also going to school to be an architect, tried to explain to him what was going on in the house.

No air circulation, his concrete steps and foundation walls were not sealed, so all of the water I’d have to jump over was most likely going into the basement walls, causing most all of the mold. We also found a few areas on the roof that needed patching, since we noticed some leaks, among other things.

And the basement apartment had cheap, patio doors for their only means of entrance and exit, which would consistently be up against water when it rained, adding to the problem.

He wasn’t having it…

Oh, SMART DumbLandlord, decided that we were all just girls complaining about silly things that didn’t mean anything, so he brushed us off, and said we were fine, even though I had told him that I was learning about these things in school, and knew what I was talking about.

He wouldn’t let us out of the lease, as hard as we tried. So all of us girls in both apartments decided we would get out, if it was the last thing we did.

Then began researching all of the legal apartment and tenant information for our State and City to get out.

We were paying for Attorney fees, started taking pictures of the mold upstairs and downstairs that we could find, talking with several different city staff, and police, and started compiling this into a nice document.

After deferring my rent payment to get a copy of the lease agreement from DumbLandlord, we could finally take a look at our legal document, and use that further to get out.

We were also working with another landlord at a renting company in town, who I will call GoodLandlord. He was, thankfully, doing his best to get us out of the **** hole, and into his apartment. Through him, we’d get all of the legal ins and outs of the renting business, and he would help us find a loophole.

Bingo!

Then, after months and months of arguments, money, and researching, we found it.

If we sent in a mold test to a research lab, and it was over the limit of what was inhabitable, we could get out. It was safe to say, we had a pretty good idea it was over the limit.

The tests came back a few days later, and we sent that off to the city, including our nice, document of pictures, statements, and leasing agreements.

Not even four hours went by, and we got a call from the city. Our house was so full of mold, that we were to move out of the apartment within 24 hours, and it was to be condemned.

We were ecstatic.

This was REALLY bad.

All of that hard work had finally paid off, although it was horrifying to know that the mold count was so high, the mold researcher who had been in the business for more than 30 years had not once seen a place with higher mold count than this house. (yes this included black mold)

Fast forward to us happily packing up in our house, all of our parents getting us out together, us moving into the apartment that GoodLandlord kept open for us to move into, and poor, old, DumbLandlord sobbing in our driveway as we happily stack boxes into cars.

Complaining that he should have paid more attention and listened to us, this was his girlfriend’s property, and she’s going to dump him. We all took a picture the next day, smiling in front of the condemned signs. It’s still one of my favorite pictures to this day.

Serves him right for not listening to his tenants.”

Here’s what people had to say on Reddit.

This reader talked about the horrors of mold.

Another individual shared how they handled a mold problem.

This Reddit user offered more info on black mold.

Another reader had a terrible story to tell.

This person shared how things work in Quebec, Canada.

Nicely done!

We tip our hats to you!