(OHIO) Landlord wants to possibly illegally evict us.

[Pablo Martinez]

We have been dealing with a nightmare landlord. She is extremely rude, constantly bothers us about coming in to just fiddle around multiple times a week(with proper notice), and has been trying like crazy to break our lease. We have been very accommodating and have never once refused her entry to her house. Her realtor has made false claims such as we have to stage the house (she is allowed to tell us to take something down, move furniture, etc.. to their standards), we have to leave the property when they are working on it/showing it; If the house were to sell during our lease, we would have to leave the property because of the "right to occupy", or that the new landlord would be able to modify the lease. Claims like these have stressed us out, and are being made by her property manager/realtor (NOT A LAWYER). We have been dealing with this for months now, but we have simply just ignored it. She recently sent us a letter by her lawyer demanding that we leave the property as soon as possible, as we have breached the lease agreements. The lawyer claims that we have breached the contract in "2 or more" ways. Their claims are:

- 2 Dogs in the property (no knowledge of ANY dog living there)

- Hiring a separate company to do lawn work than the one stated in the lease agreement. 

So, for the first claim we found this one to be the most baffling and the most disgusting one as it is a straight up lie. We have only 1 dog and have had her in the property for 3 years! She's even pet her while visiting the house. Her attorney claims that there is no agreement of a dog in the lease even though there is constant documentation of her acknowledging the presence of a dog and it's residency in the house. We have many emails of her telling us to even lock up the dog as they will be bringing over workers.

The second claim is the most truthful thing she has claimed. We did hire another company to do work on the lawn as responsible tenants. The lawn wasn't worked on for a very long time and it was getting into rough shape. The company that she hired would always show up and leave the bill on our door. So, when we stopped receiving the bill, we assumed they just stopped showing up. I guess I made the mistake of hiring another company to do our lawn work and she didn't appreciate or like it (it was more expensive and extensive from the company that she normally hires, i think she has a relationship to the company owner). When she was upset about us hiring another company we immediately stopped and went back to the previous one. Is hiring a different company from the lease agreement because the flowers and lawn were in terrible state, enough to be a breach of contract and enough to evict us? 

Her constant letters, calls, visits, client calls, etc... are really wearing us down. She is actually coming tomorrow to bring a photographer to take pictures of the house even though we would prefer her not to bring strangers amidst the global pandemic going on. We feel as if we are being harassed and being forced to get an attorney to combat her demands of us leaving the property (she didn't give us a notice as she cant! we still have 6 months left on the lease!) We are actually landlords ourselves and own 2 properties in different states. We just went through the terrible luck of having to evict both of our houses tenants because of failure of payment for months which cost us tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of stress. Honestly, we cant catch a break.. 

I should probably mention this as she is going to bring this up as a break of breach. We did install a security system in the house without letting her know. When she asked us about it, we knew we should have let her know and gave her the password(s) and location of every sensor that was installed. She backed off after we gave her everything and she will probably come back saying that, that was a breach of contract. Would it though? She accepted the code and knowledge of the alarm months ago.Any advice would be greatly helpful sorry if a lot of this seems like i'm babbling we are just in a stressful situation.

Even now we caught her lurking around inspecting the property without any notice. It really is making us uncomfortable and stressing us out.