u/Jolly_Professional15

England

Been lurking a while so I have a rough idea of what I need to do but I need some guidance about how to actually go about it since I have never had to do it before.

As the title suggests, I have moved out of my old house and have received an email from my old agency about my deposit return, saying that they want to take 120 quid for "cutting down and tidying up the rear garden". The garden was cut down the day before my tenancy ended and it was left tidy.

They further want to take an additional 230 quid for painting all three bedrooms, claiming there was "excessive wear and tear" in the master bedroom, the second bedroom had to be repainted "following patch repairs" (whatever that means) and the third hat some filler not sanded smooth and therefore the wall needed to prepped, sanded and painted.

I am also calling bull on all of these things. The walls in the master bedroom showed virtually no sign of wear and tear, other than 2 screw holes which were filled, sanded and painted over.

I have no idea what patch repairs they would be talking about but if it is what I think it is, then it's patches on the wall where the wall bulged outward, as if there was a bubble behind it. This is something I had been flagging up on inspections for over a year and it's possible that it's due to moisture coming in from a broken fascia outside which has been a known issue pretty much since I moved in 4 years ago.

The third one, I admit, may have some truth to it. I had forgotten about a few nail holes from where I had hung a tapestry and i forgot about them until the last weekend of my tenancy, so I filled them in on the Saturday, sanded and patched over the paint on the Sunday the keys had to be handed in, so it is possible that I didn't sand that down perfectly smooth.

For context, I handed the keys back in about 5 weeks ago on the 24th of May and hadn't heard anything about the final inspection until Friday gone.

So far I have requested to know the date when the inspection took place to put a nail in the garden claim. With the weather we had, the garden would have been overgrown within a week or 2 and of course I did take pictures and videos when I moved out to pretty much disprove all claims.

The deposit is in custodial protection with TDS but I have not contacted them yet.

I really just want to know to best proceed from here in terms of disputing their claims.

Do I just email them and say I don't accept their claims and then request my deposit back on TDS and will that open the dispute process?

As for the painting I seem to remember seeing comments on similar posts saying that the deposit can't be used to just repaint to spruce up the place in between tenants, which this would basically amount to.

Is there any official documentation that outlines what constitutes fair and excessive wear and tear?

Any help on this is muchly appreciated!