traped in Oxford

liliana · July 9

Hi everyone, I really appreciate your advice. I have been living with my son in a private house in Oxford for 7 years....we have suffered a lot in this house due to the lack of heat and hot water The landlords are two brothers who don't want to make any improvements to the house. We paid the rent correctly every month as they asked us to...before we moved into the house they asked for three months rent and a deposit so they could make the house habitable. I agreed because I thought that being teachers they would be fairhonest so dull that you could see the floor underneath it and there were moths We paid three months before we moved in, they didn't tell us that the boiler was always breaking down and we were left without hot water. ....one wall had fallen off, all the plaster, the carpet on the stairs was old ..the day we moved into the house I saw that only the plaster had been glued to the wall, nothing else, dirty doors without paint, with an unpleasant smell, old sofas, unchanged carpeting, unpainted, old mattresses with springs that were digging into our ribs, at that time there were three people, me, my daughter and my adult son, I cried, I had a burnout crisis , my daughter and son told me that we had nowhere to go and we had to hold on...it was September at the time, I had a job in the hospital, my daughter I had a job at the university, my son had finished his master's degree and had just come from the mental hospital

liliana · July 9

I did not finished my story…We woke up that we didn't have hot water, we asked them to fix it, one of the brothers came and did something to the boiler, it worked for a few days and then broke down, and we kept going, then winter came, we had no heat, my daughter was pregnant, the two landlords behaved very badly as if we were emigrants and deserved this treatment, they brought us some electric pots to heat water to pour into the bathtub to take a bath, in the cold there was no heat they brought us 3 radiators to warm ourselves up so we had a hard time, my daughter had given birth and was a single mother, she suffered a lot when the child was 6 months old and moved out of the house... My son and I were left, my son had repeated crises due to stress and anger due to the ugly, bad conditions, and because of the landlords' wickedness we paid the rent regularly on time, they raised the rent price which should have decreased because there were only two people and miserable living conditions living..we buy spray chemicals for mold ...in the summer there is a smell of toilet in the garden and in front of the house because the wastewater from the bathroom, toilet, kitchen, washing machine goes into an open hole in the ground attached to the kitchen wall that goes under the house into a pit in the front garden. So all this made me think that we have to leave, we pay 1375 rent, the bills are also high, I got sick, I am on sick leave, I have a helicobacter that I can't get rid of despite many antibiotics, my son caught a bacteria in his eye, he is receiving treatment and washings that cost him 240. So I thought about moving to Clacton on Sea..I understood that it is a good area with good people, with quiet streets easy to walk with my walking frame and I understood that it is a good medical system for mentally disabled people like my son. I have described too much now please maybe you know what path I should follow to find a house, I am 65 years old and sick, I no longer have the ability to multitask and I have to pay attention to my son I am unpaid care worker

Rosie_Scope · July 9

Hi @liliana Sorry to hear you've had such a rough time of things with your housing. If you haven't already, you could look into making a complaint about your landlord. There's some details about that here: Complain about your private landlord - Shelter England

If you're looking for private rentals, it may be worth speaking to a few estate agents from the area you're hoping to move to. They should be able to notify you if something comes up that might be suitable for you.

At some point it will probably be necessary to make a trip to the area you'd like to live in and visit some properties, but I can understand that this might be difficult. You could also ask the local council housing team whether they've got any lists of private landlords.

Do you get any extra help caring for your son, or is it just you? Would he cope with a trip if you had to go and look at properties?

liliana · July 10

Hi Rose thank you for answer , yes he is on PIP , thank God, is not easy sometime he spend money uncontrolabile when is a crisis , but he is an educated boy , and when is a little bit well he ask me abaut shopening so i have telling him,, no" how abaut removing with house we need to do he like the sea , we were to much bullied in this street where we liv ,the window in the living room was broken at 1 am, neighbours we don't know threw dog poo in our yard and we don't have dogs, they threw small amounts of money £5 through the mailbox door then they sent someone to ask for the money they threw invoking various pretexts, and we returned it, we found someone else's keys to a house then asking the neighbours we found out they belonged to our neighbour who had moved with the house right next to ours we understood that she was trying to get to know her neighbours, we found the keys in the hallway in our house.... these are just a few of the messes I had to face except that my son got sick going to hospital, I told the police I told the council I was treated badly and distantly as if I was an immigrant looking for work here... for us there are no rights char if I worked in a hospital in Oxford, disabled care homes, my son completed a master's degree in finance he worked in saisbury until the bulling destroyed him sending him to a life of mental ill....so I see that he can no longer stand the street the city tells me that he has painful memories that do not let him live, I also have painful memories I had to endure my son's illness and the misery of the neighbors even the landlord [2 brothers who leave each other], this made me ask AI😀where will be a good place to liv for my age 65 , with my son 35,...so AI said Clacton on Sea.

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