Renters Beware!
Posted 5 years ago
I had the displeasure of renting a room from Jim McGuirl at 918 Gladis Dr., Missoula, MT 59804. All I can say is renters beware. While the rooms are spacious, and the rent prices are average, the man is a terror. I moved out after ten months, and only wish I'd done so sooner. He has the bad habit of illegally entering your room without any prior notice or permission, and for any reason he can think of. For instance, when I was on vacation he entered my room to "water my plants", although they did not require any watering in my absence! More than once a roommate (since moved out) had alerted me that Jim goes into my room while I'm at work, and I have every faith that such is true since he does a bad job of leaving the place as he found it; he tracks in big, dirty footprints on the carpet, he messes with the room's thermostat, he unplugs my alarm clock, or he allows his animals to follow him into the room and leaves shedding pet hair behind. God only knows what he's doing in there. He'll wait until he sees your car is gone before letting himself in, and only give an excuse (like watering plants) if he gets caught, which tells me that he probably knows that what he's doing is wrong, but doesn't care and does it anyway. If, say, an electrician needs access to your room, Jim won't give you any notice, even though he's the one who schedules such appointments and would know well in advance. Instead, he'll knock on your door the moment he needs access, and god help you if you're wearing headphones and don't hear him, because there're no locks on the bedroom doors! But that's not all. He'll also take your mail if you're not careful! I was taking care of his animals while he was gone for the day, and whilst filling up a water dish in his en-suite bathroom, happened to notice a bottle of shampoo on the counter that I had ordered a month prior that I thought had been lost in the mail. He had opened my package, thrown out what he didn't want, and taken what he liked! When I confronted him about it, he denied everything and went so far as to suggest that a criminal must have wandered into the house, opened my package, and placed the bottle in his private bathroom, stolen nothing else, and left. I decided to resolve the issue by getting a post office box, but what I should have done was file a police report and move out then and there. To this day, Jim will deny that he took my package; when I moved out, he actually demanded I apologize for having confronted him about it! But unless I am very mistaken and packages have developed the extraordinary ability to grow legs and walk into other people's rooms, unwrap themselves, and settle themselves down among another person's private effects on a private bathroom counter-top, the only reasonable explanation is that the human who has sole use of that space put it there. Jim is a bully who, on the rare occasion you have a friend over to work on a project for an hour or two, will invent reasons to frequently interrupt, and you might think it's because he's old and lonely, but don't be taken in; if he's lonely, it's because he's mean to people. He often forgets that he's left a light on or a door open, and will ream out whoever he thinks must have done it, because he doesn't seem to believe himself to be capable of forgetting such things. He also forgets his dogs and cats in his vehicle in the driveway, such as a cat in a black cat carrier on a hot summer day, but if you so much as gently mention to him that you noticed his animals were alone in his parked car (while he putters around the house), he'll become irritated with you. He also likes to change the house rules without notice. Examples of this include saying that quiet hours are at one specific time, but then changing that time to suit his needs. You may be glad to hear him say no one ought to use the laundry machine past 10:00 pm because it's rather loud and will wake you up, but that rule only lasts until the night that Jim himself wants to do laundry well into the night, and there's nothing you can do or say because he's the landlord. He might assure you that overnight guests are welcome so long as they are known to him and not strangers, but when some of my very lovely roommates (since moved out) wanted their friends to stay for a night here or there, it didn't matter that Jim knew who they were; he had changed his mind without any notice, and the friends had to go. Meanwhile, a disrespectful roommate was permitted to have random hook-ups over nearly every night for a month before Jim did anything substantial about the racket this roommate was making. And Jim might say that he provides off-street parking, but the minute he decides he'd rather not share any of the four spots in his driveway, well, everyone but him is parked out on the street to get egged by what I hope were just neighborhood kids. Also, keep a copy of your lease agreement! He'll say that the lease is month-to-month, and that he requires 30 days notice to move out, (and such is written in the lease agreement,) but when the time comes and you give him 30 days notice in writing, he'll insist that, should he not find a new tenant before 30 days are up, you're on the hook to keep paying rent! And if you tell him that it's not right, or fair, or legal, well, then he'll threaten to keep your security deposit, even when you happen to work as a professional housekeeper and leave your space cleaner than it was when you moved in, and never put even one single nail into a wall, or anything! Oh, and he leaves "Jim's nasty-grams" around the house for people to find. God forbid you wait to do your dishes until after having finished eating your meal, as he'll get on your case and you'll be stuck listening to a lecture that seems interminable and touches on so many of his life stories unrelated to either eating or dishes. Some people are messy and need to hear when they leave a mess, but Jim has a talent for always finding a way to be nasty about it. I was fortunate to be a bit of a neat freak and so never received his nasty-grams except in error, but even then, they were very upsetting! Meanwhile, he only deep cleans right before a prospective tenant is coming to see the place, and the rest of the time there's so much pet hair from all of his pets wafting around that you can't cook in the kitchen without eating some of it. Oh, and speaking of pets, his macaw is smart enough to regularly break out of his cage, and Jim hasn't, in all the years he's had this bird, managed to outsmart him in this matter. Once out, the bird will attempt to get in your room, so you better hope the door is closed tight. Not only is he naturally a bit destructive when he's loose, but he also tries to attack any males (unless that male is Jim). I had a friend drop me off after a game of folf who needed to use the restroom, and in the two minutes he was inside, had to defend himself with a folf disc against a bird strong enough to remove a finger in one bite. Another roommate had to defend himself with a chair after said bird tried to end him. If you're a girl, however, this macaw will be your buddy! But back to Jim. Don't share your phone number if you can avoid it, because he'll leave you voicemails. Lots of voicemails. He doesn't text, and even when you're at the house and in your room, he'd rather call you than knock on your door. When he leaves these voicemails, he often doesn't press the button to end the call, and you're left with a ten minute voicemail of the news blaring in the background, and if your phone is like mine, you have to listen to the whole thing before you can delete it. And if you're like me, the voicemail will come through largely unintelligible anyways. It's my understanding that Jim likes to talk on the phone while he's driving, and that might explain why his voicemails are so hard to hear. Then he'll get upset when you inform him that you couldn't understand him Oh, and he'll also ask you to spy on your roommates for him! And if he asks you to watch his pets while he's out of town, and offers to pay you for it, decline. The headache isn't worth the money. He'll forget simple things, like to tell you when he's leaving or when he's getting back, or that a particular pet has a vet visit scheduled, and if you don't ask, he won't go into any detail about things like feeding schedules or think to leave veterinary contact information, and then get frustrated when you ask him to tell you these things. If he ropes you into it, though, keep a meticulous record of what you do each day, or he may try to short-change you as he tried with me. After I called him out and showed him my record-keeping, he quietly decided to employ a fellow roommate in this capacity, and I was off the hook. But not before he tried to get free services from me. I'd been taking one of his cats to the vet twice a week for free (in addition to paid pet-sitting services) while he worked a seasonal job on a fire, and he actually said that he expected me to continue doing so after fire season had ended and he was around, just to be nice! Now I'm a nice person, and I actually undercharged him for some of the pet-sitting I did, but that's besides the point. Who expects anyone else to take their cat to the vet twice a week in perpetuity?! Some of us have lives! If I wanted to take a cat to the vet twice a week for no pay, I'd get my own cat! He actually expected that I would turn down paying work and opt out of scheduled vacations so that I could take his pet to the vet for him when he is perfectly mobile and capable. Oh, and he'll also expect you to clean up after the mouse carcasses that his cats drag inside. One of the perks of living here! In short, living at 918 Gladis Dr., Missoula, MT 59804 is a swell idea if you would like to live with Jim McGuirl. If you'd rather not live with a bully, then I suggest you look elsewhere, because I think he meets the textbook definition of one. And this is coming from a model tenant, who almost always said yes when asked to go above and beyond, who was always clean and quiet and respectful of her roommates, and even regularly cleaned up after other people's messes, who never had an overnight guest and never had more than one dinner guest over at a time, and never for longer than it takes to bake a pie or cook a meal, and who is eco-conscious enough to be careful of things like electricity and water usage, who always paid rent on time and sometimes early whenever going out of town, who wasn't even there a good amount of the time thanks to commitments house-sitting for clients, who offered to go above and beyond by picking up groceries and planting all of his flowers in the spring, to name a couple, and who should have complained far, far more than she did when bullied by Jim McGuirl. And when the time came to move out, I went above and beyond again by stating that I was willing to be flexible on the move-out date so as to better accommodate the new tenant moving in. I thought I would get prorated rent when the new tenant moved in before my last thirty days were up, but no. Instead, he collected from me (and, I strongly suspect, the new tenant) for two extra days, since February has only 28 days and he based my prorated rent off of a thirty day month. And when I pointed out the error in his math, he became very upset; I suspected that would happen but since I was leaving anyways, I was willing to subject myself to his outburst one last time if it meant I got back what I was owed. But he dug in his heels, insisted on stiffing me, and practically ran me out the door. And I know two days of rent amounts to barely any money, but it's the principle of the thing. Oh, and I'm fairly sure he knows he was wrong with his math here, because he claimed that the reason he wasn't giving me my full amount of money back was because, whilst moving out that day, snow was tracked onto his garage floor. Are you kidding me?! We live in Montana, and it's February! Of course there's going to be a little snow on your garage floor; that's why garage floors are made of cement and have drains build into them! And I removed the snow before I left anyways! It took all of one go with a shovel to remove the dusting of snow, and literally took less than twenty seconds, even with my hands shaking, frazzled as I was by his outburst. But now I'm free, and less fearful of retaliation. And it feels so good to get all this off my chest. And long as this is, I could go into even more detail. For instance, if you're a woman, he's going to expect you to want to clean more often, and he's going to expect you to clean better than your male roommates. And he's going to assume you don't own a toolbox and are incapable of such masculine activities such as using a screwdriver to change out your license plates or moving a heavy potted plant. And you're going to have to choose whether it's worth it to challenge his views of you or allow him to just take over in order to keep him feeling happy and not emasculated. I regret that I chose the latter in an attempt to find some peace. But it's time to let this all go. I'm in a better place, with landlords who are kind, and who treat me with respect, and who don't engage in these sorts of behaviors. Best of luck to you, poor future tenant of Jim McGuirl! I wish I could have warned you sooner!
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