Hello! I'm a tenant in Washington state. Here's my story: around noon yesterday (Monday 10/29) my landlord called me and told me the apartment above me had bedbugs, so they're heat treating the entire building at 9am on Wednesday 10/31. I had to have my apartment ready for the heat by then.
The problem is that I have a very large (and very expensive) collection of records, which are likely to be damaged in the heat. I was already overbooked during the time two day time frame given, and the collection is so large that last time I moved it, it took six people 12 hours. (Records are heavy, and I have really a lot of them.) The landlord offered me an on-site storage space for them, but it's down two flights of stairs. Between work and two major projects, right now my schedule is such that in the 49 hour's notice I've been given, I could only be home six of them, and that time was spent sleeping by necessity.
Is there anything I can do about this? I've made the dilemma clear to my landlord, and he refuses to budge on the time frame. He just keeps telling me I have to make it work. It seems like there's nothing I can do to stop the destruction of my very valuable (not to mention grossly sentimental) property. Can I legally hold him responsible for any damage that occurs? I really don't want to because in the two years I've lived here he's been nothing but wonderful besides this, but we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage.