Our wedding turned out to be much more expensive than we had anticipated. Weddings certainly are very expensive. Who knew? I’m not saying we deserve sympathy, though. A harpist, for example, is not essential.
In the months leading up to the big day, a quick money-making plan had to be devised.
“How about listing our house on Airbnb?” my wife suggested. “Do you really think we’ll get any interest?”
I wasn’t convinced that a two-bedroom, mid-level flat in North Leeds would be one of people’s dream homes.
The results were astonishing; within an hour of signing up, we had a ton of engagement, and I have to admit, the validation felt good to my ego: Apparently, a stranger complimenting your living room color scheme can cause you to release dopamine.
Over the next few days, my wife took over the administrative work, my role largely confined to checking potential guests’ profile pictures and ratings and assessing whether they looked normal enough not to kill us while we slept. Given the urgency of our need to make £3,000, I was lenient.
We made it easy for ourselves by renting out the spare room for £40 per night during our stay. Our first guests were a Bulgarian couple in their 50s who spoke no English, and communication was made even more difficult by the Bulgarian nodding and shaking their heads. They were friendly, though, and – apart from the language barrier and me catching the guy in the toilet at around 2am – it was a smooth start to our new venture. They left a five-star review, paid and were on their way.
Over the next few weeks, they were replaced by pleasant, inexpensive guests: a French woman who had worked for a record company in the ’90s and who had once taken Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love out for a night in Paris (Kurt –very nice,” Courtney – “too deep“), a young scientist from Oxford, and a friendly Welsh university lecturer. We seemed to have a winner. Maybe I could give up my day job?
Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last. First, a guy with a neck tattoo from Derbyshire spent 48 hours doing nothing but running up and down our stairs, slamming doors and opening drawers unnecessarily, then he further emphasised his social skills by storming into our bedroom, asking “What’s the Wi-Fi code?” and holding my wide-open laptop next to the screen.
Then we were joined by an Instagram-friendly Swiss couple in their mid-twenties who had an early flight the next morning. They went to bed at 8pm and spent an evening of not-so-secret intimacy for what was, to be honest, an impressively long time.
I turned up the volume as the floorboards creaked The Great British Cake Competition and my wife and I were wondering if it was worth it (and they gave us two stars because we got a “bad night’s sleep – uncomfortable bed”).
The novelty of having different people living together in your spare room soon wore off and after a while I no longer enjoyed coming home from work and making small talk with a Derbyshire lorry driver or handing the TV remote control to a grumpy Hungarian man.
We still hadn’t reached our destination, so in a last-ditch effort we listed the whole house for a week. £120 a night. My mother let us stay at her house while she handed our keys over to two Latvian “academics” (as they called them). Letting complete strangers live in our house was a daunting proposition, but we accepted, mindful of the price of the post-ceremony sofas.
The Latvians arrived while my wife and I were at work, so we never met them. But I dropped by one lunchtime to check that they hadn’t burned the house down. I had planned to say, “Hi guys, has the mail arrived?”, but they hadn’t, so instead I tiptoed around my own house like a thief.
There were, reassuringly, a stack of textbooks on the dining table, and when I scanned the rooms, there was nothing wrong. However, there were three empty 1-litre bottles of vodka in the kitchen cupboard. I told my wife everything was fine and didn’t mention my findings.
When we returned after the Latvians had vacated, four more bottles of vodka had been added to the cabinet collection and there was an overflowing garbage bag full of cans and bottles in our backyard. Something had definitely happened here, right?
When we went upstairs, our stomachs knotted, we saw that our bedroom looked like a crime scene; the bed was overturned, a lamp was broken, there was a large crack in one of our windows, and there was a small plastic bag on the floor filled with the remains of various white powders.
“Oh my God,” my wife said, “is that a condom on the radiator?” In one of my worst moments, I picked it up with a ballpoint pen and threw it in the trash.
There were young families staying on either side of us, and I felt a sharp pang of guilt about what had happened over the last few days. It wasn’t fair to our neighbors, was it? Besides, I think I’m honestly sick of people having sex and partying in our house.
The Latvians gave us five stars, which was nice, but they didn’t pay for the repair.
We soon closed the doors to our Airbnb for good. After a smooth start, we hadn’t made as much money as we had hoped — having unvetted strangers stay in your home isn’t without its bumps in the road. As in most areas of life, most people were kind and respectful, but it was the others who will stay in my memory — the whiners, the drinkers, the over-in-love ones.
Overall, I don’t regret our experience as an Airbnb host. I improved my housekeeping game significantly, we got some great stories out of it, and it was valuable practice for running a hotel in the South of France, something my wife and I have been considering for our final years.
Most importantly? We paid the harpist.