Finish the sentence friday...EPIC FAIL

Whenever I hear the term EPIC FAIL, all I can think of is the beach house we rented this past october. It was a gorgeous house..on paper anyway. When we signed the contract, a year before we got there, it was in great condition and came highly recommended by the realty company and the housekeeping staff (we're friends with some of them). In a year's time, the house had been hit with a hurricane and then went in to foreclosure. Didn't find that little piece of information out til we got there. This house was a mess..why'd we stay? you could sneeze and hit the beach and we had already lugged our stuff up a million flights of stairs before we realized the problems and we weren't doing that again until we left to come home. Pool heater? didn't work. Bedroom door leading to the outside back deck? lock didn't work. Main bathroom? toilet ran all night and the tub was clogged. Window and door screens?  Nonexistent. Main house phone? HIDDEN in an unused bedroom. the line in the kitchen didn't even work!  Kitchen window? couldn't open it without breaking it. Roof? epic leak. Electrical system? great during the day, but at night, you didn't dare plug anything in to charge..it was posessed. Ice maker? frozen over. Dryer? full of sand. Outside showers? mosquito pits. Back wall? COVERED in poison ivy. Handrail going into the ice cube, i mean pool? disconnected. Front deck? kinda scary. (we sat on it anyway) Now, i do have to admit, we got a break on the rent once housekeeping reported the zillion problems we had with the the place and they were apologizing all of the time. There was lots of stuff that they WANTED to fix, but because they had to call in outside vendors, they just couldn't because then THOSE folks wouldn't get paid. it was THAT bad. From what we understood, after the last hurricane, the owners let the house go, but the bank wanted to continue renting it to bring in SOME income and an occupied house shows better than an unoccupied one. We even gave a couple tours, telling a couple prospective buyers EXACTLY what was wrong..one guy said that it needed a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of repairs and i have to admit that i think he was drastically underestimating the cost..i mean, if we could see a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of damage, i'd hate to see what we couldn't see. Yikes. The vacation itself was a BLAST and looking back on it, we laugh hysterically about the things that were going wrong with that dump, i mean house. it truly was one of a kind and we did learn a valuable lesson when renting property...when you sign a contract on a place a year in advance as we always do when renting at the beach, make sure that you get the right to refuse the place if it goes into foreclosure before you get there. Once a bank owns the property, they're not going to do anything beyond basic maintenance and sometimes, that's iffy.