mns  2008-08-27 11:01   

Thank you everyone who wrote, phoned, invited us to dinner, fed us, watered us and in general cheered us up. We are still coming to terms with the abrupt change to our lives. There we were, living happily in Chester, and then, out of the blue everything came to a sudden halt.

I am putting in the article I wrote for the Daily Mail which will explain. Since writing this article dozens of other problems emerged in the house, mostly to do with insects, live wires, and grime. To give a better picture here is my article, written a week into July:

Last Tuesday my partner and I drove from England to Ireland for the launch of Party Animal, Marisa Mackle’s collection of short stories by Irish writers in aid of a variety of animal charities.
For work reasons we were cutting it rather fine as the ferry docked at 17.05 and we had to get to my old house in Goatstown and then back into the city for the launch at 19.00. We were planning on selling the house, and wanted to see that the tenants had left it in good condition. Within a few seconds of opening the front door, though, it was obvious that the house had been completely destroyed.

My four-bedroomed house (complete with Granny flat) had been rented out for almost three years. In their departure the tenants left a trail of destruction in their wake, sickening me to the core. The state of neglect and of damage has meant that not only are we unable to sell the house, we are now moving from England back to this once-lovely home to try to restore it to its former glory – a job that will take months of work, and thousands of euros.
In case you get the impression that this was ‘normal wear and tear’, allow me to paint you a picture.
The cooker was barely recognisable. They somehow managed to burn layers of filth into a once perfect hob to the extent that it is unusable (plumes of smoke emanate if anybody, in a moment of unbridled optimism, should attempt to switch it on). The grease and grime on the cooker is of a level seldom attained by even the least salubrious chip shops. They even took the trouble to break one of the knobs off the cooker (now disappeared), just in case anybody should wish to attempt repair.
The washing machine did not escape the attention of my tenants, who broke the handle off it, rendering it useless.
In my naivety, I had got a new upright freezer installed in the garage, just to provide some extra space. Instead, the tenants preferred the option of disconnecting it and leaving the door shut. On opening it (in hindsight, a mistake), I felt physically sick when confronted by the thousands of insects who had made my freezer their home. No exaggeration – there were thousands of the things, a mass of teeming life.
My tenants’ tastes in music could be gleaned by inspecting which of my cds were to be found out of their cases, wrecked, and now unplayable. We aren’t talking a scratch or two – it looks like they used them as coffee mats, or maybe just attached them to the underside of their shoes for a couple of days.
Every sofa and armchair in the house now boasts a number of cigarette burns, including the leather chairs that I have owned for years.
Slightly oddly, considering there were five young men in a house with a modern alarm system, security seems to have been a major issue of concern. To that end, the tenants decided to make assurance doubly sure by nailing large bolts onto the back of several doors. In a rare moment of thrift, they troubled to remove these bolts prior to their departure (with a claw hammer, if looks are anything to go by), leaving holes and breaking two of the doorframes.
There is a level of dirt beyond anything I have ever encountered before. I don’t just mean the floor to ceiling cobwebs of a type seldom encountered outside of horror B-movies. I mean filth – toilets that have clearly not been cleaned in the three years of my absence, the toilet seats destroyed, the toilet roll holders broken. They even managed to break a bath tap that I would have imagined it was impossible to remove without great fortitude and a sledgehammer.
The tenants, when on their way out, took with them several items of my property, but were generous enough to leave many more items of their own behind – clothing, congealed paint, court summons – that type of thing.
The desecration just goes on and on. And I haven’t even told you which variety of pet they nurtured in what was once my bedroom. Suffice to say that the insects in the freezer would have fed it for some time…

In case you feel that I was a bit naïve in renting the house to five males of the species in the first place, let me assure you that I was not. On the contrary, I employed property agents whose job it was to visit the house every three months and to keep an eye on it for me, let me know of any problems, and so forth. In the event that the tenants started damaging the house, I would thus be informed about it promptly, and able to remove them, deducting the cost of any damage from their deposit, right?
Wrong. Very, very badly wrong.
I received the odd email from the management company over the last few years saying that all was fine and there was no damage beyond what a pair of marigold gloves and some cleaning spray wouldn’t fix. When it came time for the tenants to depart, said company cheerfully returned their deposits with barely a pause for consideration. If you are thinking of renting your house out, feel free to drop me a line and I will gladly let you know which property management company should be avoided like a freezer full of insects.

Assuming that the agents didn’t somehow manage to go to the wrong house, it seems to me that one of three things must have happened. One, they didn’t bother to visit my house, and just told me periodically that everything was fine whilst pocketing my cash. Two, they visited the house, but somehow failed to notice those subtle indications of neglect, (such as broken windows, cookers, washing machines, taps, and the like). Or three, and perhaps most infuriatingly of all, they actually considered that this extent of damage (obviously criminal damage, incidentally), was to be expected.

Call me old-fashioned, but I had rather imagined that the house would be returned to me in more or less the condition that I left it. Of course I expected there to be some signs of wear, but it did not occur to me that I would lose thousands of euros worth of belongings.
In the last week I have already had gardeners and two skips to deal with the hedges and the grass (care of which were included in the contract), and that is before I even start on the inside.

As I leave my apartment in Chester today, I would be ashamed if I left so much as a bin bag in it, and yet my tenants have left wardrobes full of old clothing and shoes, a garage full of giant pots of paint, cement and other items relating to their employment; the garage sink is embedded with paint…
Any single piece of the damage I have described above would be deducted from my deposit – and yet my agents took it upon themselves to return the whole deposit to my tenants. I have complained to my agents, but was told that this was the norm, that it was impossible to force adherence to the contract, and what did I expect anyway?

I expected a level of respect for my property; I expected decent normal behaviour; I expected adherence to the contract. I did not expect the mixture of negligence, arrogance and stupidity to which I have been subjected.
I cannot even begin to wonder what the property management company thought they were being paid to do if it was not to ensure that the contract was being adhered to.
My agents, both in returning the deposit and in their attitude generally have condoned a level of behaviour that any right-thinking person would see as being reprehensible. Talking to people about this over the last week I have discovered that I am not the only person who has been at the receiving end of such arrogance. I find myself wondering what has happened to a society where such things are just accepted.

My parents belonged to a generation where their property was sacrosanct, anything that got broken was repaired, and anything that got dirty was cleaned. I belong to that in-between generation that learned about replacing things as the old electrical repair shops closed down, and a throw away culture began to raise its ugly head and little attention was given to the problems of landfills overflowing. Fast food and readymade meals have become part of the lives of today’s youth. If you don’t learn how to cook you have little interest in keeping your kitchen equipment clean. Mammy minds you while you live at home, and when let loose on the world you have no idea how to maintain the standards with which you were raised.

I don’t believe my tenants deliberately burned holes in the furniture and yet I can’t explain how every single piece of soft furnishing is destroyed. Surely if they did such a thing in their own homes their parents would be down on them like a ton of bricks. I think back to my own student days and I am quite sure my bedroom was horrendously untidy, but despite that I had a respect for my own goods. The frying pan I bought as a student lasted me for years, as did the few mediocre pieces of kitchenware that I purchased with my hard-earned money from my student jobs.
When I left rented accommodation over the years, I have never owned enough clothing that I could afford to leave it in the wardrobes, nor did I ever have such a lack of dignity that I would consider dumping my things in someone else’s home. I have been told that it will take two more skips to clear my tenants’ belongings from the house – and that is before I even begin to throw away my furniture.

All of this is exorbitantly expensive and has meant that I have to move country. It has been carried out by people from whom I expected more, and it is condoned by those paid to supervise.

It is heartbreaking.

*****

It is weeks since I wrote this, and we are still camping in the house, using a barbecue to cook, eating outside, but gradually getting on top of the mess. Of course there are wonderful things about being back in Dublin ('back' in my case, whole new life for JC), but we have our computers and are beginning to get back to work, and a more normal life will emerge soon.