Can I break my lease after a week?

[neemon]

We just moved started moving in 7 days ago and took residence 6 days ago. The first day of moving in my $3000 flat panel was damaged due to a surge coming through the cable line or so it seemed. Cable says the house was not properly grounded and that it was not their fault. A friend of mine who is a retired electrician discovered that the hot and neutral is swapped in all outlets and that they invert when you turn a 3 way upstairs/downstairs hallway switch on and off. Her observation, though not yet proven, is that that the hallway circuit is feeding hot back into the living room circuit's ground and that during the surge the cable box and TV became the ground making them mor susceptible to being blow out. The set seems to now function in a room that we know is grounded properly however, the room turns out to be an addition built without a permit. The landlord volunteered this information along with how she has previously committed cable theft.

The house is completely electric and has old recessed electric heaters upstairs, some of which have only an on and off and no thermostat control. We were were told that all rooms were zoned and fully controllable but didn't realize the true nature of these controls. The heater in my daughter's bedroom keeps turning on by itself and the knob has been removed. I had to shut the breaker off to the heaters to resolve the problem. The house gets very cold in the morning and it is only July. While there are therma pane windows, there are no storm windows, most screens and/or screen frames are are missing or broken and the windows frames have cracks around them that allow bugs and cold air in. I was told to make my own screens and given a tool to do so. "If you prove yourselves, we will would buy new frames and replace the other screens that are missing." Currently I can't open the majority of my downstairs windows since they have no screen frames. Bugs get in and I'm constantly spraying.

My landlord conveniently timed their vacation to Florida on the day we moved in so getting any of these issues resolved has been met with hostility from the landlord. We don't feel safe with the electrical and stated this dozens of times. A week later, an electrician is supposed to finally come today. Two days ago a pipe started leaking in the bathroom wall adjacent to an outlet and trickling water over an an electric baseboard heater. A plumber is supposed to come today. They let things go until I threatened to move out and then they started to back down. It shouldn't go that far esepcially where a child's saftey is involved.

Throughout this past week, we have heard from an existing tenant that the landlord will do barely anything to maintain the house and that they expect me to pay and treat it as if it were mine. They expressed that they have spent thousands of dollars of their own money and urged us to leave while we still can. The cable company, local bus drivers, school and town personnel are all familiar with this landlord and she has a bad track record.

The driveway is somewhat hazardous and we were reassured numerous times that is is plowed in the winter 5:30 in the morning for the landlord to go to work which coincides with my work schedule. After signing the lease it changed to "we don't leave this house on bad snow days and the plows comes later in the day" and finally to "see that truck, if we put an engine in it you will plow yourself." I explained that I don't drive stick and was told to learn how. The other tenant tells me that the hired plow they use can't make it up the driveway to where we have to park and they were snowed in for days one year.

I discovered that I am the sixth tenant in six years and that no one stays longer than a year. My wife and I are deeply concerned about future relations with the landlord and our saftey in this house. The honeymoon is already over a week into our move.

Can we break the lease and not get stuck paying the remaining 11 months? Any chance of getting back my 2 months security? If they fix these problems it's sounding like I have less of chance to break the lease since it's hard to prove that it's uninhabitable. I just requested a case history with the Freedom of Information Act. I understand that the landlord has a track record of taking tenants to court.

[dealing3000]

If for some unexplained reason the house were to burn down you would be release from your lease due to the fact that the LL could obviously no longer provide a dwelling per the lease terms. These things sometimes happen in houses with electrical problems. Just be sure to move out your big TV before the unexpected fire as football season is fast approaching and you don't want to be without that sucker.