Shoe == dropped onto bubble gum
For everyone out there following our ex-landlady situation (which amounts to probably 1 person. Hi Beth!), we got a check from her on Saturday. Amazingly, we didn't realize we missed the mail on Saturday and found out today. She broke down the deductions for us - "broke" being the key word. Out of our $1200, she ended up taking out all but $105. Some of the charges would have been fair, and some were pretty bogus ($500 to re-landscape the yard!) She dated the invoice 4/17, the check 5/1 and the postmark on the envelope was stamped 5/21. Our next move is...to figure out our next move. Clearly, she broke some kind of law by not getting this to us 30 days after we moved out (which was the end of Feb.) but the burden of proving that the charges are bogus is on our shoulders, which could be very difficult since we were pretty trusting of the whole thing up until we moved out. Caveat renter.
Beth is gunning for blood big time at this point, so I'm going to call a lawyer in Austin tomorrow who specializes in landlord-tenant disputes and see if it's worth our time (and money) to pursue this. I think we have a solid case for "bad faith" since she didn't do all this within the 30-day window (which entitles us to 3x the full deposit, deductions be damned), but a judge may not feel so generous since her initial invoice was only 14 days late (even though the check and invoice got to us 1.75 months late).
Who knew I'd be spending all this space in my blog ranting about my ex-landlady?