So we moved into our house a week ago now, and since we moved in, we’ve caused our landlord a fair amount of grief, including calling him in over problems with sanitation and cleanliness in the house, issues with billing and various other issues… however I think we may have topped it all with accidentally calling the police on him within the first week of living here.
Now, I know you must be thinking “How the hell could you ‘accidentally’ call the police on someone?” and let me assure you, there is a genuine reason behind this mistake. And yes, it was a mistake.
As I’ve mentioned, we’ve had a few issues with the house. One of these is the way that most of the things in the house have not been fitted correctly; basically the owner of this house did a very cheap job on it despite being perfectly able to afford to fix things correctly. A brief summary of some of the things he has done a botch job on include;
– The carpets being stapled to the floor several inches away from the edge. Yes, really.
– The shelf in the shower cubicle being fixed into place with a rusty nail and a hole in the tiles for a wall plug. (This one particularly amused me.)
– The edge of the shower basin being covered up not with poly filer, which would have been a very simple, cheap and quick solution to a crack, but instead covered over with duct tape.
– The general state of the house when we moved in. Mould in every single bedroom being one of the more minor issues here.
– The landlord providing us with a miniature dryer, yet no washing machine… this one confuses me beyond belief.
There is more, but I’m sure you get the point. Now I should get to the botch job in question, and the culprit behind this mishap. The bedroom doors are not accurately fitted to the frames. While in two of the bedrooms, this is just a minor irritation more than a pressing problem, in my house mate Steph’s bedroom, it went one better and was so badly fitted to the frame (not to mention that the handles on either side of the door weren’t the same as each other… as tends to be the norm for handles on the same door) that is actually jammed her into her bedroom.
So after a night of the four of us watching a few films with dinner, we headed for our bedrooms. Steph, after entering, pulled the door shut behind her, only to find that when she wanted to open it again, the handle wasn’t activating the mechanism inside the frame to open the door.
Dom, Matt and myself then spent the next hour trying to open the door from the outside, while she pulled from the inside, to no avail. We took off the handle, we pushed it, kicked it… nothing. We were starting to think we had no choice but to kick the door down to get her out.
Now, as you can imagine, a week after moving into a new house, we weren’t too keen on the concept of damaging a door of the rented property perhaps beyond repair, and then being forced to cover the costs of this damage that was the landlord’s responsibility in the first place. So we decided that before resorting to breaking down her door, we should call the non-emergency fire service number for advice on what would be the best course of action.
We got through to the police service, who after lecturing us on “this isn’t really a police matter” eventually listened to us stating that we wanted to speak to the fire service, no the police service (the reply to which was slightly sheepish), passed us through to the fire department, who said that they would contact our landlord, and if he did not respond, they would send someone down to break the door down.
A few minutes after this, we got a call back from the operator, who sounded very embarrassed, and explained that for some unknown reason, the police, who evidently decided that this was a job for them, not for the people from whom we’d requested help, had taken over the case and had called the landlord on our behalf, rather than the fire service, as we had wanted.
So, cue a very nervous and irritated looking landlord arriving at our house at 12.30 am with a box of tools, because his tenants of just over a week, had called the police on him, because a door had gotten stuck.
Thoughts, musings, and ramblings... 