dans la merde

France, evening

Today I had a very horrible day. One of these days in which I hate French way of doing things. Actually, not French way of doing things, but the way people do things here. The general motto of real estate agencies here is "fuck as many people as you can". Today I left my old apartment and so I went over things with the person in charge of the agency.

The end of the story, to make it short, is that they will take out of my deposit the money to clean the kitchen wall, to clean the mattress and to clean the shower. The mattress was dirty when I got in, but apparently here you have to state any small thing that is wrong with the object, otherwise they can claim that you did it. Basically if I say the entire kitchen is very dirty, with cat shit on the floor and other disgusting things everywhere, and you take pictures of the dirt on the right side of the kitchen, this doesn't mean that the left side was dirty too. So, today they found some spot on the kitchen wall. The spots where there when I moved in, but because it was only reported that the kitchen was dirty, but not how dirty and where, these spots are my fault.

For the shower it seems that I convinced them that I have enough proof to show that it was that way before (calcareous), and for the mattress I unfortunately have no way to show that it was already not clean when I moved in.

Now, my deposit was of 900 euros. They cannot say at the moment how much of that they will give back to me. The owner of the agency said today that they may need to buy a new mattress...which may cost a lot. But the mattress I used was not new. It was two years old and it was not such an expensive mattress for which they may need to spend 900 euros. I talked about this with some of my co-workers and friends to ask an opinion and they all told me that here it is a common practice to use the money of the deposit to fix the apartments. The people of the agencies basically always find some problem with the apartment when someone moves out, claim it on the person who lives there and use this money to fix things that where wrong already before the person moved in.

I will be lucky if I can see some of these 900 euros back. It is a lot of money. And it is not only for the money, but I am shocked by my stupidity of not having taken pictures of absolutely anything that was wrong with the apartment and for how dishonest these people are.