tenant rights regarding repairs

[Sharon Gilman]

In August I moved into a rental, and this is my first experience renting anything besides an apartment. The building I moved into used to be a garage, and has been converted into a living quarters (studio style). When we first came to look at the property, everything seemed fine, looked like a good-sized place for us, and so we applied. We did not meet the minimum monthly income requirements, but we had enough money to pay for a year in advance, which was agreed to.

Shortly after moving in, we have seen multiple things wrong with this place. The major problem that we have is that our landlord also operates an appliance business in their back yard (which is super noisy and constantly smelling of chemicals and spray paint), and when we've asked for repairs, they simply send in their appliance guys who half-*** the repair job, and a month later it's broken again anyway. Not to mention, they told us they were looking for a retail location to move their appliance business, and we've recently realized that was a lie. 

So my question is, if we have things that need to be repaired, do we have the right to request they hire a professional, or do we just have to deal with who they send in? I don't like having these men in and our of our house every week just to repair stuff that's going to be broken again later on because they don't know what they're doing.

Examples of things that need to be fixed: Front door is falling off the hinges (it's already been fixed once after over a month of us asking for it to be fixed), the swamp cooler smells like mold and we requested the filter be changed, refrigerator door has about a quarter inch gap in the door and is leaking cold air, we can't use the fan in the enclosed porch because it's off balance and we've already had the glass light cover fall off and shatter on the floor right in front of me, and kitchen sink disposal rattles the entire counter when it's turned on. Many of these requests are over a month old and they haven't mentioned anything about them being fixed any time soon.