On being a renter after 17 years of home ownership

I've been a renter for most of my adult life. I've always paid the rent regularly and on time and I've never had a serious issue with the property management.

But recently we sold the house we had been living in for the past 17 years and rented a palatial estate on 20 acres:

The house was built in 2007. The landlady lives in a smaller apartment over a shop across the street on the same property. She's a reasonable person and we've gotten along fine.

But the property management company who's accepting our large rent checks is something else again.

The initial minor conflict we had was over keeping the yard mowed. This place is at the end of a dead-end street and we didn't see any point in keeping it mowed down to the nubs ... and in fact the landlady said she kept it longer ... but the property manager wanted it mowed down to middle-city standards, which one interpretation of the lease required.

I wrote to this person and got a small compromise on this point and we hired a guy several times to mow the place ending a couple of weeks ago.

But we've also had two maintenance requests and those have both been uniquely unsatisfying:

Us: "our refrigerator's icemaker has stopped making ice. Help please!"

Them: "We don't normally fix icemakers. You could just use ice cube trays." [ We just want rent checks and we don't care about your little problems.]

We instead contacted the nice landlady and she got it fixed for us.

Now one of the garage door openers is having a serious problem ... for starts it was bolted not to the stud but just to the drywall and finally pulled out after these 11 years. We happened to have a handy friend over who  reattached it through a board to the stud. But then the whole thing sagged and you can only now open it with the cord and with difficulty.

I went in and paid the rent yesterday and I got the maintenance request in, and I started getting emails from this manager:

"Considering the door had worked and opened and closed with no problem, are you sure that with the amount of items you have in the garage, you did not somehow bend the brackets? " [It must be your fault, stupid!]

I don't know what's behind this sort of reaction; my wife and I aren't the tidiest people around and this manager seems super-tidy. So maybe the reaction is just against that.

Or maybe it's company policy just to resist all maintenance requests until the renter gives up? I don't know.

But I've been dealing with garage door openers since July 1995 and I think I know what I'm looking at and we didn't "somehow bend the brackets."

But we've had it ... I don't know if there are tons of potential renters out there for this high-priced place; I'd think that since we are regular on time payers we might get a little more help and respect ...