Detroit Area - Rental house, one room unbearably [uninhabitably] cold. Looking for advice. legaladvice

So I've posted this over at /r/tenanthelp as well, but that sub doesn't seem incredibly active, so I'm posting here as well. Hope that's cool.

So I have been renting a 2br house a bit northwest of Detroit. It's sort of a dumpy place, built in the 40s and not well maintained. I pay 1310/mo for it, but i'm sure I'm paying largely for the location.

I had the desire to move in to a house because my girlfriend and I had a child and wanted more freedom than an apartment gave us.

We checked it out in the early fall, and although it was a higher rent than I wanted to pay, it checked off all our boxes and had this extra back room off the kitchen that sold us - it's sort of my workshop/man cave + cat area. Perfect, I thought.

We move in around Thanksgiving and then winter hits. The house is so damn cold all around, but this back room is like a giant refrigerator. Air coming in from baseboards, from gaps in drop ceiling, from outlets, etc. If I keep the heat on in the house all day, @67 degrees, on a cold day, that room will get no warmer than 40-45 degrees.

It's part of the house, it was the part of the house that sold us on the rental. I really intend to use it, and it's not sealed off from the rest of the house, so I pay up the ass to heat it.

I spent time and money trying to fix it just enough to deal, but I end up having to run my electric heater down there for an hour or two to bring it up to a hardly reasonable 55 degrees.

I've complained before and they've sent a building contractor [literally the worst contractor I've ever encountered. I am shocked he had a license.] to try and seal up the leaks and replace the drop ceiling tiles.... But he did nothing but make it worse. [This guy cut the new ceiling tiles.... so a total of zero of them actually fill up the whole space now.]

I pay too much for this place as it is, and I feel like I am being cheated. That room was advertised with the house, so I had to assume it was habitable. It's simply not.

Any advice on how to deal with this situation?

Thanks, guys.

Edit: /r/tenantrights > /r/tenanthelp. The former isn't a thing.

Submitted December 27, 2017 at 09:12PM by Scozz554 http://ift.tt/2zDze6d legaladvice