Landlord Is Trying To Increase Our Rent After The Lease Was Signed

hello reddit!

This post is about a 2 bedroom attic apartment in an old house that is owned by a single man (no management company) in Colorado. I can provide more info if needed.

My roommate and I toured this apartment back in February. We really loved the unit despite it not having one of our requirements: a dishwasher. We hit it off with the landlord while touring it, so at the end of the tour, we decided we might as well ask if that was something he would be ok with installing, IF we paid for the appliance itself. To our surprise, he said yes, so we applied and got approved to move in April 1st of this year. He sent us a lease that didn’t say anything about the dishwasher at first, so we responded that we would need our agreement in writing. He made an amendment that said, “Tenants will provide a dishwasher for their apartment and landlord will hire a plumber to install it.” and we all signed. This is all the lease says about it.

We purchased a dishwasher that he apprently wasn’t happy with and he immediately went out and bought a different one. Alright. It was more expensive than ours but we bit our tongues and remained appreciative that he was installing it. Fast forward a couple months…the installation has been a process, to say the least. Because the building is so old, he had to hire a plumber to fix all of the pipes to increase the water pressure and hire an electrician to rewire for the installation of a garbage disposal. He also hired a contractor to remove cabinets, bought new cabinets, bought a new countertop for the whole kitchen (he chose granite btw) and has chosen to work on other units’ kitchens in the building, although I’m not sure what exactly is being done to those.

Now that most of the work has been done, he claims to be 30k in the hole for building’s renovations and has emailed us asking for an increase in our monthly rent by $220 or $110 each. This will be an additional 5k+ total paid by us by the time our lease is up. We are pretty sure this isn’t legal but every time we push back he lists all of the work he has done to the building, saying it cost way more than he thought it would initially. While I sympathize with that, my lease clearly states that I am only liable for paying for the dishwasher itself, which I have told him I am willing to pay for in full right now. He won’t budge. Rent was due today and we paid what we signed on to pay. We did NOT pay the additional $220, but we’re worried if we put up too much of a fight that he may try to evict us. I don’t really know enough about the laws here to know where to go from here.

Any advice is helpful. So far it has all just been talk but I’m nervous about it escalating. The landlord is actually very nice and agreeable compared to most I’ve had so I don’t want to create tension, but I also don’t want to pay money I don’t have that I never agreed to pay in the first place. It’s very unfortunate that he had to pay so much more to install this damn dishwasher and had I known this would happen I would have never even asked for one, but per our lease, I don’t think it is technically my problem? Am I legally in the wrong?