Kind of a rant, and looking for advice on how to approach this with my landlord. What I can or should say, etc.

Backstory:

We live in a relatively new (2019) rental house with a pier and beam foundation. Out in the country on some good acreage for a good price. Nice and quiet and no neighbors. Double-paned windows, spray foam insulation, high efficiency AC, etc. We are extremely happy here, having moved out of the city. We currently have 1 year left on our lease and want to stay long term if possible.

The house owner lives a few miles away (we found this out after we moved in of course) and even though she uses a rental management company, I'm really not sure what all they really do because she's been involved in about 90% of any communications, repairs, etc. She employs a handyman full-time for all her rental property repairs who, in our experience, is rather inept. He actually built this house (much to our chagrin when we learned this).

Issue:

We have flooring issues. The flooring is floating vinyl and the entire downstairs floor has been warping and cracking. It's mostly prevalent in the kitchen, but is spreading into the living room and the 2 downstairs bedrooms. We had to actually delay our move-in date in 2021 by 3 days because they were 'fixing the floors'. Annoying, but not really a red flag or anything. Shit happens, whatever.

The kitchen floor started cracking a few months later, and after a lot of back-and-forth with the flooring company, the handyman, the owner, etc, they replaced the subfloor in the kitchen with 3/4 plywood and laid new vinyl again. They said that it was because there was not enough ventilation under the house and the original subfloor was warping. (the whole underside of the house is closed in with cinderblocks and siding, so it looks like a solid foundation at a glance. There was literally only 1 vent at the back of the house. Once they fixed the floor, they cut 3 new vents in around the house to help with airflow.

Fast-forward a year and the floors started warping again. It came on slowly, but surely. We tried to ignore it, etc, but it's gotten worse the last few weeks and is starting to crack again.

We're planning on letting the landlord know, but need advice on how to approach this. This will be the 4th time the floors have needed attention in 4 years, and each time has been the work of that same handyman. She uses him for a lot of other things, and hasn't fired him yet even though he's pretty useless, so we don't want to possibly hurt our relationship with her by suggesting that maybe she have someone else actually do the work. That it was all done internally and not by a separate contracted company means that there's no warranty on the work, so each time she's paying out of pocket to fix it. No warranty, etc. I'm positive she'll just use him again and we'll be in this same situation again in another 6 months or so.

I really think that this issue will keep recurring because of the moisture and lack of airflow. Other pier and beam houses I've seen are very obvious. The whole thing is open underneath, and might have some latticework to keep out the racoons and hobos. The only way to REALLY fix this is to pretty much remove almost half of the external support cinderblocks (if the house will even be stable if they do) and replace all the warped subflooring and flooring AGAIN.

When they fixed the kitchen last year, it took 2 days. We were allowed to come home and just had dinner on the subfloor, and they came the next day and laid the actual flooring. We did not have to move anything except for our table. If they have to do the whole downstairs, we'll have to move EVERYTHING, and it'll take at least a week.

If we do have to stay out for more than a day, would she be required to pay for our hotel? I work from home, so I'll probably have to take vacation days for this because working out of a hotel with a 3 year old really is not possible. Would she be required to pay my paycheck for that week? We have a non-refundable vacation booked for later this year that I was going to use that PTO for. Would she be required to reimburse us for that if we use the PTO for this? I know that the answer should be 'whatever the lease says' but it's not NEAR that specific. Long and drawn out, etc, but this seems to be a pretty unique situation that isn't covered in it.

I guess I just want to have an idea of what my rebuttal could/should be, should the need arise. Thanks in advance