[enron29]

I'll try to make a long story short. Rented a house in Brea, CA for almost 5 years. Great tenants, kept the place real nice and always paid on time. Get notice that we have to move out suddenly, with 6 month pregnant wife at the time. Sucks, but is what it is. Find a new rental, but have to change daughter's schools and again, move while my wife is pregnant and can't really help with anything.

We took a while moving and cleaning up the previous place. Patched all the holes and repainted, cleaned, etc. etc. Place looked awesome for a family of 4 with 2 younger kids living there for 5 years. Expecting to get full deposit back. Yet, not only are the owners forcing us to move at this time, now they are trying to charge me $500. $300 to shampoo the carpet, and $200 because we didn't put the exact same air filter in the a/c unit, so now the ducts/coils need to be cleaned blah, blah, blah.

First of all, there is no way those carpets were shampoo'd when we moved in. I'm not even sure they were vacuumed. But property manager is saying they have canceled check or something showing they did it. Is there a law that states we need to get the carpets shampoo'd because they did? Obviously we vacuumed and cleaned, but didn't shampoo the carpets.

Also, owner is saying the filter should have been a 4" filter, and we only installed a thinner filter. Is this 4" filter a standard filter you can buy from home depot or anything, or is it a custom filter? Should they have provided us with filters?

Just wanted to get some input from you intelligent people to figure out if this is worth fighting, or just eat the $500 and be done with it. Thanks.