Lodger from hell

Hi all, some of you may know that we rent out a room in our house to try and make some additional cash to put towards our financial independence fund. Currently renting the room for £625 a month.

The room is a lovely spacious double room in our quiet house. We only look to share the house with people we feel we can get on with and that we think will respect our lovely house. To ensure this is the case, we make sure we have a meeting with the person and try to get to know them. One of our key criteria (even mentioned on the advert) is that we want someone clean and respectful.

You can see a picture of the room that we advertised below.

So this time around we decided to rent the room to a nice young girl who wanted to stay with us for a short period of time of around 4 to 6months.

She came across as someone who was respectful and easy going but wanted to keep herself to herself. She sounded like the ideal type of person for us to share our house with.

However, as the weeks and months passed, it was becoming clear that something wasn’t right.

Every now and then when we would speak to her outside her room she would only open the door slightly. When we were able to glance past her we could often see that she was leaving a lot of her clothes on the floor. We didn’t see this as a major problem at the time.

However, now at the end of the tenancy, we have unveiled the problem was not a small one. It was a worst nightmare for us as people who like to keep our property very clean and tidy. She was like those hoarder people you see on TV. Stressful.

There was no space to be able to walk in the room without standing on something that had been left on the floor.

Not only that but, because she had been keeping the curtains and window closed whilst also hardly ever leaving her room, the walls around the window had become full of mould and the windowsill was covered in water - resulting in damage to the paint.

Today she has said that she has “moved all of her stuff out” and will clean the room tomorrow so we decided to take another look. You can see what we saw in the picture below.

Although she still has to the end of the month to sort things out, it still gives us quite a lot of anxiety knowing that the room is really not in a great state whatsoever. We hope she will be able to clean and tidy it to the same standard that she left it but let’s see.

I guess the silver lining is that she will be moving out and at least she hasn’t left without taking responsibility. Well, at least so far.

Another question we have asked ourselves is - was it really worth it?

In response to that, on reflection, although there has been some stress with seeing the room like that and that we will likely need to fix the mould problem and thoroughly clean the carpet, we still think it is worth it. At the end of the day, we are getting paid to have to put up with this sort of stress. Plus so far this is the worst experience we have had. All other lodgers have been very respectful and left the room in as good a condition as they received it.

We think the main learning is that really we should have done regular inspections of the room and potentially we could have pushed a bit more to understand her cleanliness and tidiness prior to accepting her as a lodger.

All in all, I hope you found this useful and that it gave you some insight into the less glamorous side of renting a room out in your own house.