A handyman I fixed problems that occurred in house and landlord knew I did, can I be reimburse for work on rented house at end of lease?

... Would you in turn accept full liability for any and all harm your 'repairs' might cause?

You see the reasoning here? By not securing a contract of some kind with landlord before beginning work and ironing all the liability issues that attach if your work somehow causes injury or loss, you've left yourself wide open. Can you see how easy you've made it for landlord to make you responsible for anything at all that goes wrong with your work directly or indirectly? ... What were you thinking, handy? Not so handy, after all!

Your best course at this point would be to document all the work you've done with receipts and dates and so on and a line or two indicating each time landlord agreed to each repair. This will at least create a limitation period after which landlord (and his insurers) WON'T be able to bring suit against you.

Please, please in future take the time to put this sort of thing in writing! If not for yourself, for your dependants, who might suffer over your liability.

P.S. Hope you're a really good handyman and did not attempt work for which you're unqualified!

What you should have done was gotten the agreement in writing before the work was done. So at this point you can either have the charges deducted from your rent or ask the landlord to sign off on paying for the repairs.

The law varies by state, but in most states the answer is no. If there is something wrong with the property that goes to habitability, then the landlord has a duty to fix the problem. However, you have to put the landlord on notice and give him or her a reasonable time to fix the problem. In some states you can fix the problem and recoup the cost by a reduction of rent, but only after you have giving the landlord a reasonable amount of time to cure the problem.

Unless you had an agreement with the landlord in advance you cannot collect anything.