by Our wedding was much more expensive than we thought. It turns out weddings cost absolutely loads. Who knows? I’m not saying we deserve sympathy, though. It is not necessary, for example, to be a harpist.
In the months leading up to the big day, a quick-fire money-making scheme needed to be hatched.
“How about listing our house on Airbnb?” my wife suggested. “Do you really think we’ll be interested?”
I wasn’t sure a two bedroom mid terrace in North Leeds would be high on people’s bucket lists.
The results, however, were surprising; Within an hour of signing up, we had attracted a lot of interest and, I’ll admit, the validation was good for my ego: it turns out that a stranger matching the color scheme of your living room can be quite the dopamine hit to produce.
In the days that followed, my wife was in charge of the admin, and my role was largely reduced to checking the profile pictures and ratings of our potential guests and assessing whether they looked normal enough not to murder us in our sleep. . Because of the urgency we had to make £3,000, I was lenient.
We eased our way in by renting the spare room for £40 a night while we stayed in the house. Our first guests were a Bulgarian couple in their fifties who didn’t speak any English, and the Bulgarians further hindered communication by shaking their heads and muttering no. They were, however, friendly and – beyond the language barrier, and when I walked in on the man while he was on the toilet around 2am, it was a smooth start to our new venture. They left a five-star review, paid up, and were on their way.
They were succeeded by a steady stream of pleasant, low-maintenance guests over the next few weeks: a French woman who worked for a record company in the ’90s and once took Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love for a night out in Paris (Kurt – “très agréable,” Courtney – “très folle”), a young scientist from Oxford, and a friendly university lecturer in Welsh. It looked like we were on to a winner. Maybe I could give up the day job?
Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last. First, a man from Derbyshire with a neck tattoo spent 48 hours doing little other than stomping up and down our stairs and needlessly slamming doors and opening drawers, before further emphasizing his social skills by bursting into our bedroom and asking, “What’s the Wi-Fi Code?” while holding my laptop wide open at the screen.
Then we were joined by an Instagram-friendly mid-twenties couple from Switzerland who had an early flight the next morning. They went to bed at 8pm and had a very restless night of intercourse for, if I’m being honest, a very long time.
As the floorboards creaked, I turned the volume up The Great British Bake Off and my wife and I pondered whether this was worth it after all (to top it off, they gave us a two-star rating, citing “bad night’s sleep – uncomfortable bed.”)
The novelty of an eclectic mix of people staying in your spare room soon wears you down and, after a while, I wasn’t enjoying coming home from work and making small talk with a lorry driver from Derbyshire, or the TV give your remote control. Hungarian man washing.
Still, we hadn’t reached our goal so, in a last ditch effort, we listed the entire house for a week. £120 per night. My mother let us stay alone and we gave our keys to two Latvian “academics” (their words). Trusting complete strangers in our home was a scary proposition but, knowing the price of canapés after the ceremony, we accepted it.
The Latvians came when my wife and I were working, so we didn’t meet them. However, I came in one lunchtime to check that they hadn’t burned the place down. I planned a transparent plan, “Hi lads, are there any jobs?” but they were not in so, instead, I went around my own house feeling like a burglar.
There was, positively, a pile of textbooks on the dinner table and, scouring the rooms, nothing untoward. In the kitchen cupboard, however, there were three empty liter bottles of vodka. I told my wife everything was fine and didn’t mention my results.
When we returned after the Latvians left, there were four more bottles of vodka in the collection of cupboards and there was a rubbish bag full of cans and bottles in our back garden. Something definitely went on here, didn’t it?
With knots in our stomachs, we walked upstairs to find that our bedroom looked like a crime scene; the mattress was turned over, a lamp was broken, there was a large crack in one of our windows, and a small plastic bag containing the remains of various white powders on the floor.
“Oh my God,” said my wife, “is that a condom on the radiator?” In one of my lowest trolleys, I retrieved it with a crowbar and put it in the bin.
We had young families waiting on either side of us and I felt a sharp pang of guilt about what must have happened in the last few days. This wasn’t fair to our neighbors, was it? Also, to be honest, I think there were a lot 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 repairs.
Shortly after, we closed the doors on our Airbnb for good. After a smooth start, it wasn’t the easy money we were hoping for – the road is no trouble if you have unverified strangers staying at your house. As with most walks of life, the majority of people were nice and respectful, but it’s the others – the whirrs, the boozers, the over-the-top funny – that will stay in my memory.
Overall, I regret our experience as hosts on Airbnb. I really upped my housekeeping game, we got some good stories out of it, and it was valuable practice for running a hotel in the South of France, which my wife and I mentioned during the dark years.
More importantly? We paid for the harp.
