I'm not going to go into detail about the problems we had with our place from day one but I will touch on them. The house was "newly renovated" but as they say in the south, it was lipstick on a pig.
1. Day 1, moving in. The HVAC guys were there finishing up the install and tracked mud on all the carpets which their shoes collected from the inch of mud that lived in our driveway. The squaller of a driveway was due to an improperly-run gutter line that terminated directly in a pile of dirt underneath the front porch eroding the soil that supported the deck posts, the corner of the foundation, and providing lots of water to the forest of poison oak that would put Jack and the Beanstalk to shame.
2. The mud in the driveway was not the only unwelcome guest in front of our house. The sinister mud was hiding about 400 roofing nails from the roof they installed during the supposed remodel. I discovered this by locating the first one in my tire within a week of living there. I couldn't definitively prove where the nail came from since the other 399 nails didn't reveal themselves until a couple weeks later after spending 3 hours cleaning the mud from the driveway. The resemblance of the tire-popping culprit to its brothers was uncanny, but at that point I didn't bother pursing it.
3. The door to the downstairs bathroom/laundry was too narrow even to fit our small washer and dryer (part of the "remodel") so we had to call them to fix it. The "contractor" came out, ripped and banged making the bathroom entrance big enough to fit a standard sized W/D and left, explaining he'd come back to fix it later. He never did. We lived 3 years there without a door on the basement bathroom.
4. The HVAC quit working within a week which they did fix.
5. A month into living here, the main water line from the road burst ruining the basement carpet and laminate (btw who puts carpet and laminate in a partially unfinished basement with leaky walls? Mold city!). The contractor, who apparently is the only person they ever use to do anything, was out of town so we waited 3 days for him to fix it. No water in the meantime waiting for the only contractor in Radford they'll use to fix a simple water line. He finally came out to fix the leak and did but had to cut the driveway apart to get to the old line. He explained that he would be back later to fix it. He never came back... again.
6. Because of the ripped up driveway my wife and I got both our vehicles stuck in the mud and we had to call a tow truck on 2 different occasions to pull us out of the mess we claimed as a driveway.
After all these problems, when it comes time to receive our deposit refund, Bondurant did not refund our deposit. In fact, they wanted to charge extra on top of the almost $700 we paid for deposit. We aren't messy housekeepers whatsoever and I understand that things like painting and carpet cleaning are standard procedure when prepping for new tenants but Bondurant was somehow able to find enough wrong to take all our deposit plus some. Also, in regards to the "non-refundable" pet deposit fee we paid when we moved in, when they say non-refundable they MEAN IT. It did not apply toward anything, no standard pet hair ductwork cleaning, no standard carpet cleaning, nothing. What is the point of the deposit if it doesn't cover inevitable cleaning and maintenance that is associated with having pets?! When all was said and done, we were NOT able to get out of the extra charge, so my warning to all is BEWARE THE GREED MONSTER THAT IS BONDURANT.
Document everything, disclose everything, and know that in the end, it won't matter. read more
