October 30, 2026 · 7 min

A tenant, a damp wall and the word ‘reasonable’

A tenant told her landlord about a wet patch on the bedroom wall in the first week of August. By the middle of October it had grown to the size of a tea tray, and she had slept in the lounge for eleven weeks. This week a magistrate decided that the landlord had not acted within a reasonable time, and I sat through the whole forty minutes of it. The word doing the work was ‘reasonable’, and the magistrate was careful about it. She did not say how many days a repair should take. She asked what a sensible owner would have done once told: look at the wall, find the cause, and book someone. The landlord had looked at it once and then, in his words, waited to see if it dried. She ordered the rent reduced by $40 a week for the eleven weeks, which came to $440, and gave the landlord thirty days to fix the cause. Nobody in the gallery moved. The tenant, who had come on the bus, nodded at the bench. The landlord asked the clerk, quietly, whether he could pay in two parts. The clerk said that was a matter for the registry. I like cases like this because the ruling is small and the principle is large. The court did not say that damp is serious, or that landlords are careless. It said that once you are told, the clock starts. That is how a great deal of civil law is built: not on grand statements but on one reasonable week at a time.