Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Illinois

We spent the past year renting from an absentee landlord (and I do mean absent, he lives in Europe and we had no contact information for him other than an email). When we initially viewed the house, we viewed it with a real estate agent who said she would be the property manager. He did show up for the signing of the lease, primarily because the house flooded just before we moved in. Half of the house had to be completely torn out and redone - another story - but we lived in another rental for six weeks of the start of our lease, and paid him a small portion of that month's rent as agreed upon with him, since we were paying to live somewhere else at that time. By the time we moved in (the house was not completed, that took another two weeks) and the property manager informed us that she no longer worked with the property owner (he was back in Europe and never again appeared, communicating solely by email). We went back and forth for several weeks on how to pay him for our rent - he initially insisted that we had to open a new bank account, at the bank of his choice, and provide him access to that account. Obviously, we refused. At this time, his bank came to the house several times, with pre-foreclosure notices and asking why the owner didn't reside in the house and what his address was - we informed them that we didn't have an address for him.

Later, he gave us what he said was his mortgage account number and related bank name and told us to pay there. When we went into the bank, they informed us that because his mortgage was in preforeclosure, and being held with another institution whose information we didn't have, we couldn't make payments on his mortgage.

It took several weeks from that for the owner to give us a bank account number on his end and asked us to wire transfer money into this account. We did this twice, but informed him that we were not comfortable with this situation.

Aside notes: the furnace didn't work from the time we moved in, he was notified on several occasions, refused to fix it, and we ended up paying to have it evaluated and fixed ourselves nine months into the lease. Also, the water was shut off when we first moved in because he hadn't paid those bills, so we paid for the water ourselves even though per the lease we were only to have paid for gas and electric (there's now a lien from the county utilities for his outstanding water bill. The company that did the restoration work on the home was never paid, the owner sent three different insurance companies to the house after the work was completed but they came under the impression that the damage had just occurred). The owner sued us late last summer for unpaid rent, when my husband appeared at the court date, he and the owner's lawyer came to an agreement to pay the monies due to the point and the owner would address property issues. He never addressed the issues, we ended up fixing the furnace ourselves and paying a portion of the rent owed but not all. At this time we were pursuing hiring an attorney to represent us that we could afford, in the meantime, we were summoned to appear again - the attorney we had planned to hire couldn't appear on that date and instructed us to ask for a continuance, which we did but the judge denied without any discussion. Just prior to that court date, the owner's attorney informed us that the owner wanted us to pay for the work that was done on the house (the water damage/broken pipes occurred prior to our lease and we had a standard lease, not a rent to own). When we questioned his lawyer regarding the non-sensical nature of that request, she didn't respond directly to that.

Now he was a default judgement (as the continuance was denied) and the lawyer we intended to hire as well as another lawyer we consulted with told us we had 180 days to request a motion to vacate the judgement - but we've just learned that we only had 30 days and today is day 32. Apparently there's a more advanced motion that we could file, but it requires us to serve this owner (he's the sole owner) and we have no address or contact information for him, and even if we did - he lives overseas in England.

So frustrated. What should we do??

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