What deposit?

How long does it take to paint white apartment walls white?

I was surprised to find the answer when my roommate and I received our security deposit settlement letter from Campus Walk Apartments.

From our deposit, we were deducted $100 for “general cleaning,” $305 for “painting labor,” $37 for “paint” and $69 for “carpet cleaning.”

I’m going to accept the charge for carpet cleaning because I did not pay someone to steam clean our apartment before we left.

As for the ambiguous $100 charge for “general cleaning,” it smells rotten to me, especially after spending a weekend with a vacuum and a bottle of bleach in an already clean apartment. But I’ll let that charge slide by.

It’s the $342 for painting that does not seem squeaky clean to me. My apartment at 312 S. Dunn St. was left in as good of, if not better, condition than we found it.

According to the latest numbers on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website, painters make, on average, $14.87 an hour. For a $305 labor bill that means Campus Walk paid painters to spend over 20 hours repainting our undamaged apartment.

Well, perhaps they hired perfectionists. The paint job I experienced as a tenant would say otherwise, but they may have gotten it right this time around.

According to the latest prices on The Home Depot’s website, a cheap gallon of white semi-gloss paint runs for $15.94. And that’s the cheap stuff.

If the price Campus Walk paid for labor is any indication, they may have bought a single gallon of premium paint for that price. But, giving them the benefit of the doubt for a $37 paint bill, that buys around 2 gallons of paint.

Using 2 gallons of paint in a few hours is a reasonable task. Two gallons in twenty hours is simply unacceptable. This leaves me, a former tenant at Campus Walk, with two options regarding their move-out policies.

Number one, Campus Walk cares so much about their properties they are willing to spend extensive amounts of their tenant’s money on labor and in turn, greatly improve their apartments.

It would seem this is not the case after having rented from Campus Walk for two consecutive school years and finding the paint job done during our intermission was less than ideal.

Number two, Campus Walk is continuing a trend that has been highlighted by the Indiana Daily Student: Landlords will capitalize in any way they can on people who are not aware of their rights and who have to suffer a set of state laws which disproportionately favor landlords.

Not only are college students often scammed out of monies or renter’s rights, they are also not entitled to have their non-returned deposit money spent on what it is line-itemed for in their deposit settlement letter.

The $342 taken from our security deposit for painting labor and 2 gallons of paint, which may have not even been spent on either of these things, could have been used to ensure an outrageous quality of craftsmanship not found elsewhere in Campus Walk Apartments.

If so, this craftsmanship only improved regular wear and tear of the apartment.
It appears a great deal more likely this money was pilfered from two more college students who were not supposed to do anything about it.

­— schammoo@indiana.edu