I lived there for 19 months. Upon moved out, they send me a bill of $790 (plus deposit) for remodeling the old apartment w/ no clear proof of bad condition or damages.

I first received the bill with no details at all. There was only the amount with threatening sentences like "if no pay by XX/XX/XXXX, we will put it to collection service". I stopped by three times and finally got the chance to talk to the manager and got the details. The main part of the charge comes from "replacing the carpet", "replacing the kitchen counter top", "replacing the cabinets in the kitchen" and "professional cleaning". Seems they did a huge remodel and want me to pay for it. At that time, the apartment was occupied already so no way I could tell if she was telling the truth or not. But I am pretty sure that when I moved out, the house is in a pretty decent condition.

I have a kid who likes to play on the carpet so I tried to keep it as clean as possible. I have a electronic broom which I used several times a day and I also have a professional vacuum which I used once a week. I also have a carpet shampooer which I used once a while to keep the carpet clean for kid to play. Sometimes when the carpet got some stain, I used Oxygen to clean it. At the time of moving out, I did do a thorough clean of the carpet in the whole house. I might be missing some spot by my child but those are water-based markers and could be easily removed. I am sorry to miss those but those several spots should not justify the replacement of the whole carpet in the room.

For the kitchen, there are some grease on the counter top so I bought a power steamer from costco to do the cleaning. Together with some cleaning chemicals, most are cleaned pretty well, including the fans on top of the oven. Still, I may miss some part but they are definitely cleanable with some effort. Replacing whole thing and put it on me doesn't sound reasonable.

And the charge for professional cleaning is also ridiculously high, not to mention that they don't include the kitchen and the carpet. I recently bought a house which is twice bigger than the apartment and it is cheaper.

WA law specifies that landlord must not charge renter for normal wears. For a 1000+ sqft apartment w/ thorough care, $790+deposit is way too much.

One more thing I mentioned to the manager is that we once had a leaking from the roof which significantly hurt the carpet & kitchen area. They have somebody come and fixed the leaking but didn't take care of the damage. We blow the area for a whole week and put significant effort on it.