Hi all, need some advice! You may remeber I wrote a post about 3 months ago, but I will recap:
We rented a house from Feb '07 until Oct '08, while we saved a deposit to buy our own home. Our landlord was always a dodgy character. When we first moved in, we paid the rent in cash, he refused to let us set up a direct debit, so he collected the rent in cash at the end of every month. After 6 months of this, he then decided that we should have being paying the rent 4 weekly, instead of monthly. He claimed that because of this, he would have to keep our deposit ( a months rent) as he claimed we had missed a payment ( basically we were paying 13 months rent in a 12 month year!)
Our boiler then broke in the July, and I phoned him. We have a friend who is a plumber and he came and looked at it for us. He said the boiler obviously hadn;t been serviced in more than a year and it would need replaced. I told him this, he denied this being the case and blamed us for breaking it. He caled in his own 'plumber' who was a friend (and not a plumber) who replaced the boiler with an old one that he had at his house. After 'fixing' the boiler, there was black thick smoke coming out of the vent, which we reported, and he never took any action with.
So roll on October when we bought our first house. We gave him a months notice, he requested that he couldnt pick the keys up the day we were leaving, so to put them through the letterbox.
He then arrived on our doorstep about 3 weeks later in a threatening manner, accusing us of stealing his TV stand and bed (the house was partly furnished when we first moved in) I told him to come into our home and look, he did and admitted we obvisouly didn't have his stuff. (his son had previously picked up the tv stand and bed a few months after we moved in as we had bought our own.)
6 months passed, when we received a letter from the small claims court to say that he was making a claim against us for the following:
- He states that he had to pay £400 to have the house repainted
- he states we broke the boiler and had to pay £250 to have it fixed.
Now we know this is lies. We drove past out rented house and looked in the window, and the living room in still the same colour we had it painted (with his permission). The court hearing is next week and I'm so nervous as I hate confrontation (and the fact that I am almost 8 months pregnant). Does anyone have any experience of being wrongly accused? How does the judge decide what is lies and what is truth?
Thanks for any advice and sorry this is long.
