Adhesive strips tend to come down all at once, usually in the last week of a lease when every frame and hook is being cleared. That’s also when a tab is most likely to snap halfway through a rushed pull, leaving a flat piece of adhesive on the wall with nothing left to grip. If…
The couch left with the movers an hour ago, and the carpet it covered is a slightly different color from the rest of the room. There’s also a small crater in the hallway drywall where a coat hook used to hang, and the hardware store closes at six. Definition A move-out inspection checklist is a…
A common move-out finding in units with no nail holes at all: a row of pale brown rectangles along a hallway, each one the size of an adhesive strip, where paint and the top layer of drywall paper came off together. The frames never fell. The damage showed up when they came down. Renter friendly…
SaveTheDeposit contains Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through one, we may earn a commission at no cost to you. The option flagged in red below has no link on purpose. Portable air conditioners get sold to renters on a single promise: nothing gets installed. The unit rolls in on casters, plugs into the wall,…
Three apartments in one afternoon, all in the same building, all being handed back the same week. The first one had been lived in hard. Wallpaper had gone up in the hallway and come back down, and if you stood close you could see where the seams had been. The second looked like nobody had…
This article contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t change which products get recommended, or which ones get left off the list. The kitchen was half done. Maybe forty tiles pulled up and stacked against the wall by the door, another…
SaveTheDeposit participates in the Amazon Associates Program. If you buy through a link here, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Products are chosen for how they affect your deposit, not for commission rate. There’s a version of the damp-apartment story that turns up again and again on move-out deduction lists….
SaveTheDeposit is reader-supported. Some links below are affiliate links. Full disclosure. The unit had been spotless. Renter of three years, kitchen wiped down, floors better than the day she moved in, and I was already mentally signing off on the full refund when I opened the cabinet over the counter to check the shelf pins….
Some links below are affiliate links. If you buy through them, this site earns a commission at no extra cost to you. Full disclosure. The call came in on a Tuesday, from the tenant in the unit below. Her kitchen ceiling had a brown ring in it about the size of a dinner plate, and…
Some links here are affiliate links. If you buy through one, I earn a small commission at no cost to you — full disclosure at the bottom. He had forty-one photographs and not one of them helped him. This was a two-bedroom in a building I managed outside Columbus, and the tenant had done everything…