The Consumer Complaints Blog

It started with cute little things and ended with frozen pipes. Not exactly the best rental experience of my life.

This story is about 1A Woodycrest Avenue, near Pape and Danforth in the east end of Toronto. 1A Woodycrest Avenue is a small two story apartment building above a cafe, with only 6 units. The landlord’s father owns the building and she lives in one of the apartments on the top floor, pretty much across the hall from the unit we went to look at. Like most people, I needed a place to live so I chose what seemed to be an okay little apartment with a south facing window for my plants.

It started innocently enough with a phone call in response to an online ad for an apartment. We showed up at the agreed upon time to meet the landlord. We waited 20 minutes and nothing. Okay…? We call and leave a message for the landlord. We’ll call her Lehen (a clever anagram). We get the answering machine and leave a message. Then we decide to go for a walk and check out the neighbourhood.

About an hour later Lehen, decides to call back. Now my instincts should have told me something at this point. If a person can’t keep a simple appointment to show an apartment, what kind of a landlord would she be? But after months of looking for a place to live, my wife and I were both starting to get a little desperate.

Lehen takes us up to see the unit. It’s not the nicest apartment but it was a sunny day and a corner unit that faces south on a sunny day looks great. We did the quick once over and the whole time Lehen was going off about how they had renovated the apartments and how the girl that was moving out had been there for four years.

It all sounded good. Someone had lived there for four years so it couldn’t be that bad. Lehen lived across the hall and her dad owns the building so she has to maintain it. So we thought. And she promised that the apartment would be cleaned, as it was pretty filthy. What more could a man ask for?

We end up in Lehen’s place signing the lease a couple of days later. She tells us about her trip to Greece and her family there and how she’s a published author and so on. All in a fairly flustered tone and at a rate that would either make your head spin or your eyes glaze over. I experienced the latter since I was trying to avoid the whiplash.

Deal done. Rent paid. Lease signed with a promise to get a copy of the lease and that we could move in a week early so we wouldn’t have to do it all in one day.

One last point I thought was strange and this one didn’t sit well but I ignored it. Lehen didn’t know much about the situation of the girl moving out. That is to say, she didn’t know if she was gone or what. Apparently she slipped the keys under Lehen’s door and didn’t say goodbye. After four years, I thought it was a little strange.

Anyway, time passes and Lehen never calls. The moving day comes and goes and she never calls. We leave messages and she keeps telling us that she’ll call us as soon as we can move in. Okay? But… WTF? Maybe they’re busy painting and cleaning and stuff.

We don’t get the keys till the Day our lease starts, just as Lehen is “cleaning up”. Now, while the kitchen floor has been mopped, nothing else has been done to the place. The walls are marked up in places, paint chipping off around the windows, still nails in the walls, some junk in the cupboards, and the bathroom is nasty. Another broken promise, but I’m not lazy and we were going to clean the place anyway.We frantically move all our things in overnight.

BANZAI!

We finish moving our things in when suddenly something catches my peripheral vision. Now, I have a serious aversion to this particular animal so I immediately know what it is.

“Is that a mouse!?” I say.
“Are you sure?” my wife counters.

I was pretty damn sure. Lehen, or Leheni, as her mother liked to call her while she was screaming and knocking on her door, forgot to tell us about it. Must just be the one little guy, so my wife decides to catch it in a small box. It looked like a very young mouse but quick as hell. Zoom! Jump! Run! Scream! Zoom! Pounce! Stalk… Slam! and the little fucker was in the box. To this day I don’t know how she did it but I was just glad it was caught. I took the box outside and let him go. He ran off across the street somewhere. He was cute but I sure as hell didn’t want him in my apartment.

Now that the excitement was over we finished moving things in and started cleaning.

Holy mouse droppings Batman!

That little bastard left something behind. It was mainly under the stove and the fridge, where Lehen did not mop. There was a small hole where the counter met the floor near the stove, so we plugged it with a temporary solution and went to sleep.

Unfortunately, there were more. The next two weeks were spent in a nightly ritual of catching mice by herding them into a long box and then tilting it up so they couldn’t escape. I think we ended up with close to 10 by the end of it. It would have been more but we were getting tired of it. After you see a mouse jump kamikaze style from the kitchen cabinets for the 5th day in a row, you tend do get used to it a little bit.

So what did Lehen do?

Well, upon being informed of the situation, she told us to plug the holes with steel wool, which we did. Every damn hole in that apartment was filled with steel wool. It was done on the second day we were there but we still had mice. I think Lehen had a wedding or something to go to when we talked to her so she was obviously busy and couldn’t deal with the problem properly (and she didn’t give us the lease, yet). I guess a little rodent infestation is not such a big deal to her.

We eventually traced the entry points to holes behind the electric heaters where the cables came through the wall. No, these were not super mice. It was all part of the quality workmanship at 1A Woodycrest Avenue. The hole around the cable was covered with, wait for it…cardboard. That’s right. Cardboard! I’m no construction expert but I’m pretty sure that a cable coming straight out of a wall with no box and a cardboard cover is against at least one or two building codes. After we properly sealed the holes, the mice stopped. My only regret is that I didn’t take any photos. A couple of days later, making it two weeks since she was notified, Lehen had the problem resolved for the rest of the building.

Time passes and things are okay for the most part, in spite of all the little annoying things I won’t bore you with. Nails popping out of the floorboards and varnish flaking off, pathway to the front door not shovelled for two weeks, light bulbs not replaced in dark hallways, etc. I knew that the one missing window in the living room would be a problem come winter but thought it wouldn’t be so bad.

And, the lack of insulation. Now this was a problem. On cooler nights, water would condense all on the bathroom walls and other walls in the apartment from the shower steam. Not too bad in the summer but you’ll have to keep reading.

Then one day I wake up on a rainy morning to discover plaster splatters on my computer and new monitor. WTF? Oh, more quality workmanship. The window was not properly insulated so the water was seeping in and dissolving the drywall on the way down. I run out to the hardware store and get a can of expanding foam insulation to fix the problem. Thankfully the monitor and new laptop were not damaged. They just needed to be cleaned.

As the weather gets colder, I discover black and pink mold behind a few boxes against the wall. Is that why we’ve been getting a sore throat lately? The lack of insulation was causing condensation along the walls which eventually turned into mold. Nice. I guess those renovations Lehen mentioned really paid off. We cleaned the mold but it just came back.

What happened to global warming?

Then the real cold came. And holy crap was it cold. I slept dressed, with two blankets and all 5 electric heaters in the apartment on and still it was cold. How the hell did that girl live here for 4 years? I knew on my second week I’d be gone the minute the lease expired. Where is that damn lease anyway? Lehen was supposed to give it to us months ago. Oh well…

Then, one day I looked at a plant placed near the moldy wall. Why isn’t it doing well? It should be okay. I walk over with bare feet and feel a cold draft. I move the plant over and put the back of my hand down. Cold air is blowing directly into the apartment through the floor. Up through the floor! I’m not kidding. The wind is coming right in through the floor and where the floor meets the wall.

Well that explains why the plant was dying. IT’S TOO DAMN COLD.

Frozen bathroom window on the inside of the apartment with the heaters going at full blast. Mould from repeated condensation.

The last straw.

Cold. Paint chipping from everywhere. Mold making us sick. Accumulated condensation dripping down the walls. Lazy landlord. Ancient washing machine broken. Neighbours pipes clogged so they had to scream at Lehen at 2 in the morning because she wouldn’t open her door to talk to them. (please note violation of Part III of the Residential Tenancy Act, 2006, under Landlord’s responsibility to repair.

Yes the window is frozen. The heater is directly below it.

That was the situation when the pipes finally froze. One morning, it was -17 degrees outside and there was no running water. It was only a little bit warmer in our apartment. We knock on Lehen’s door to tell her, but there is no answer as usual. We leave a note. Nothing. We call. Nothing. Enough was enough.

We started packing our things, gave notice and got the hell out.

Lehen calls a little later. She got the notice but not the note stuck on the outside of her door, so she was obviously home when we knocked earlier. I remind her once again that we did not get a copy of the lease but we’re moving out anyway (please note violation of Part II of the Residential Tenancy Act, 2006, under Failure to comply.

A few days later, we returned to get some things and talked to the guy in the unit below us. He was staying at a hotel because the pipes were still frozen even after 4 days. He asked us how long we’d been there. We said 6 months. Lehen told him that we had been there for 2 years. Well, what can I say to that? We never did get our lease so maybe we had been there for 2 years. But after all the broken promises and double talk from Lehen, neither my wife or I were surprised that she was a bold face lying scum as well.

Now we thought that would be the end of it. Well no. A week later she asked for the keys because they had to “fix” the pipes, even though the frozen pipes are two stories down.

Well, apparently fixing the pipes to her means taking our remaining belongings and flinging them in a corner so her father or some other slime bag could paint the apartment so it could be rented again. And why is it so warm in here? Hey! All the heaters are on full blast, and we’re still paying for the electricity. Then leaving the door unlocked because who gives a shit? It’s not their stuff in the apartment. I’m sorry, aren’t I still paying rent here? I’m pretty sure I am because I can see the cheque cleared for the month. Unbelievable.

I often feel very sad for people in Canada. The law is always on the side of these crooks and charlatans.

I can’t do anything to them directly, so instead, I offer this article with photos that we took on our last day there. If you’re considering renting at 1A Woodycrest Avenue, Toronto, ON M4J 3A5, don’t. Turn around and run like hell. Then post here and thank me for warning you.

1A Woodycrest Avenue sucks and the people that own and manage it are nothing short of despicable, slimy, two faced, lying criminals. Run. Run while you still can.