"Leasehold Improvments"? Looking for guidelines.
I'm in the process of getting out of a lease. I rented/leased a shack on the beach of a campground and started a little boat rental operation. I'm now pulling my operation out and things are getting a little ugly with the campground owners (but that is another issue altogether). I'm not leaving under the best of terms; they are new managers who have slowly sqashed my operation over the last three years. When I gave them an ultimatum about leaving with my boats, they thought I was bluffing. I wasn't.
I gave my notice mid-March that I wouldn't be coming back, and they sent me notice today that I had to have everything cleared out by April 30th.
This includes all my small boats, equipmen, etc, and was expected. I'm on a tight schedule, but I've already made most the arrangements I need to move things out on the evening of the 29th and the 30th. The sticking point in 'Leasehold Improvments' that they insist must stay. The lease doesn't specify anything either way, and was drawn up and signed in better times with the previous campground owner/manager.
I'm not about to take the light fixtures. I'll even leave the lightbulbs. If I was leaving an apartment or selling a house, I would probably leave anything that was screwed down. But I want to clean the shack out. When I describe it as a shack, that is not an inaccurate term. It has power and it has a phone line. Of course, when I needed the phone line (for interact/credit cards), it was a problem to get. They did pay for the cable, but I dug the trench and made all the connections (into the campground network). I was broken into early on and installed removable bars in the windows. I put up storage shelves (standard rack style). And I built a counter/desk.
The counter is coming either way, it isn't nailed down and I can unwire the telephone line. Am I obligated to leave the bars and the shelves? There would be screwholes, but the interior paneling in the shack was salvaged from another building- there were many holes to begin with. If I should/must leave the bars and the shelves, is it too petty and immature to just leave the shelf racks (take the actual shelves, leave the vertical mounting bars on the wall) and to not give them the keys to the bars? I don't mean to be too childish, but I already have racks in (my dad's) shop for the shelves. And they refused to pay for the bars in anyway, so I don't think I should give them away now. I don't honestly have a use for the counter, but I had to invest a days work and a couple hundred dollars in material when I built it.
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