Lesson learned

If I ever rent out a property again, I am going to take photographs of
EVERYTHING. All the appliances, all the other myriad appurtenances of
the house, the condition of the yard...

My griffins have gone missing. We didn't notice, at the time of the
official inspection 11/29, whether they were in place or not. But Sunday
morning, we stopped by the house to check on it--make sure the pipes
weren't freezing and the like--and found them missing from their perches
on the front porch.

I called the ex-tenants yesterday and left a message enquiring whether
they had been moved by mistake. I got the voicemail reply, "We were not
aware of any ~griffins~ AT the house." I'd like to know how you can live
most of a year somewhere and not notice hundred-pound two-foot-tall
concrete griffins on the front porch! I'd also like to know how you
could possibly move them by mistake, but I suspect they were actually
stolen weeks ago and the tenants failed to notify me.

There's another $220 down the drain. I'd like to keep it back from the
security deposit--clearly the loss of appurtenances of the house is a
reason to do so--but I can't prove they were gone before the inspection,
and I don't have any physical proof that they were *there* on move-in. I
know they were, I'm sure they were there the last time *I* visited the
house for any reason, but I don't have proof.