In 2009, my fiance and I approached our landlord with a request to paint the apartment which was granted under the condition that we paint the walls white prior to vacating our apartment (a verbal transaction which we failed to get in writing). In December 2011, I informed our landlord that we were beginning to paint back to white and asked for specifics and he stated that this was fine. A week later, I started to paint and invited our landlord in to check on the status which he declined (at this point, I had only painted one wall). Recently, we have come to a disagreement about the tone of white we had used (we used ultra-pure white and he apparently wanted off-white, a fact which he neglected to mention). Today, May 8, 2012, we received a certified letter stating that the apartment must be painted off-white. There is no provision in the lease stating that this is the case and our move-out date is May 31, 2012.
From our landlord's self-disclosure, we know that he has had financial troubles as of late and we believe that this is a tactic that he is using to try to keep all or an unreasonable amount of our security deposit.
Is there a law that gives us protection against this kind of behavior? Specifically, is there a law that states how long prior to move-out date a landlord must provide a notice of this sort?
