Weird Burden To Ask Your Tenants To Shoulder

I live in a second-floor apartment, an old “mother-in-law” suite — the smaller and less desirable half of the house. It’s accessed by a set of external stairs. There used to be internal stairs as well, long before I moved in, but they had been removed and the staircase converted into a closet with a flimsy floor.

One day, I came home from work to find that my external staircase was gone. I called my landlord, and it turned out that he was having the stairs “redone” out of safety concerns. He told me to grab a ladder from the shed.

I can’t easily climb ladders due to an old shoulder injury which means I can’t reach very far above my head on my right-hand side, so instead, I went to a reasonably priced hotel and spent the night there. The next day, I had to go to work in the same clothing, but I could grab a friend after work who could climb a ladder to get some of my closet for me.

It took them a full week to get the work done, and I submitted the hotel bill to my landlord. That led to a nasty argument, but in the end, and with some legal threats, he folded and paid for my hotel. He’d forgotten that I work as a lawyer.