Legal Question in Landlord & Tenant Law in Virginia

Tenant and Landlord Dispute

We asked our landlord if we could vacate early due to her garage flooding horribly when it rained, her well running dry occasionally and a laundry list of other problems to include 3 out of 5 of her appliances breaking that she wasn't fixing and she agreed.

She had new tenants move in on 23MAR09 and her lease says she had 30 days to get us an itemized list of deductions from our security deposit and she failed to do so. She also failed to inform us of the closeout inspection which she claims was done the day AFTER the new tenants moved in already! Also, the lease says that she had 45 days to have our deposits back to us which she also failed to do.

She is trying to make us pay for damages done to her back yard (after two months of her new tenant living there with two BIG dogs) and a couple other issues that were not our fault before returning ANY of our security deposit back to us.

We feel that we shouldn't be obligated to pay for anything that this new tenant could have done since no damage was noted until AFTER they moved in.

We have all the documentation (e-mail) proving that she said we COULD move out early and that we weren't there for the inspection, etc.

What do we do? Can we win in small claims?

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