Hello MMM hivemind. I am in the middle of moving house and a situation has arisen that is making me anxious, partly because I don't know what course to take. I'm stuck in a feedback loop of fretting. I don't even know if this is the right subforum for this thread! Maybe you all can help me think more clearly?
The situation: my boyfriend and I recently signed a lease for a new place. Moving will trim $200+/month off our budget, one of the primary motivations (though not our only one) for moving. We picked up the keys a few days early and discovered some major problems that weren't apparent at the initial showing. One of the worst: a cat pee situation with the carpets.
We have a couple weeks' overlap with our current lease, so we postponed our move date by another week, started cleaning the place up, and alerted the landlord to the problems. Cleaning included a thorough wet vac with a pet-specific enzyme solution, which sucked up a disgusting amount of dirt and cat miscellany but didn't help the smell (unless you count vaguely lemon-scented cat piss as an improvement). We also cleaned the baseboards and walls. It's been hot and humid here and the smell is still so bad it's unbelievable. The carpets are old and torn in spots and there are multiple types of carpet of varying vintage and quality in the bedrooms and staircase (the rest of the house is hardwood, tile, or vinyl). I have since read possibly everything I could find online about ways to treat old cat urine on floors and concluded that the carpet must be banished and the subfloors treated before it'll stop stinking.
Some of the other problems have been worked on in the past week, but the carpets are still in place and I have yet to hear whether they will get ripped out (and the subfloors treated appropriately) and when. But BF and I agreed that we're not moving in there until that happens, however we only have a week before we have to get our stuff out of our current house.
I'm starting to wonder if we shouldn't just ask for our money back and see if we can get out of the lease. We would have to try to find somewhere else on very short notice, pay to store our stuff, and stay with family an hour's drive from our jobs in the meantime. It took us 2 months of looking to even find this place, which we didn't think was ideal even before urine became such a potent issue... but we ended up going for it because it seemed like it would do and we were running out of time. We live in an LCOL area but there are not a lot of good options when it comes to rentals. It's cheap to buy here (e.g. estimate PITI on a comparable house would cost about half what monthly rent does) but for various reasons buying is not possible for us right now.
I've also wondered whether we should remove the carpet and treat whatever's underneath ourselves, just to get it done on our schedule and to our standards. But: it's a rental! I don't want to take care of this on a property that I'm paying to live in but don't own... My state seems to have really vague guidelines for what constitutes "habitability" too, and there's nothing I can find that says the landlord has to fix something like this.
TL;DR: cat piss is ruining my dream of a more mustachian home. What to do?
1. press landlord to fix the problem asap, and we'd arrange to store our stuff somehow if this can't/doesn't happen in the next week (highly likely and I would ask for a rent reduction if so since this will cost us)
2. offer to rip it up ourselves, treat subfloor, and subtract our costs from July's rent (house is old, no idea what subfloor is made of)
3. ask for our money back and run far far away
4. some other option my addled brain hasn't yet thought of?