So you wanna be a landlord ….
Not quite a year ago we bought the little 1940’s house next door, mostly to keep it from being torn down and replaced with a 2015 McMansion on the hill above our gardens. Trouble is, now we got a house to deal with. I suppose we could board it up, let the mice and the rot have at it, or maybe use it for a woodshed or storage unit, but we figured, being citizen-capitalists, we maybe ought to ‘monetize’ it. We didn’t want to rent it by the month because for the past twenty years or so we’ve had to deal with the folks who rent the cheapest place on the South End. I mean, I like mean dogs, girlfriends who go off their meds and shoot up the neighborhood, heroin addicts and all the rest as much as the next guy, but we thought we’d try renting by the night, offer it up as a romantic get-away, bring in the honeymooners and the nostalgic, pay off the utilities and the mortgage.
This week we had the first paying customers, a couple who just got married, honeymooned in Vancouver and needed a few nights down at Viagra Falls here to fully consummate their wedding. Three nights would do it. The day before their awaited arrival they called to say they would be a day late, stay a day longer. Odd, but okay, we’re not your ordinary hoteliers. Yesterday, their new arrival date, they didn’t show up either. This morning we get a call to inform us they rolled in at midnight, took one look at the place and vacated. Spiders, they said. The place had spiders. They couldn’t stay in a place with arachnids. Just couldn’t, just wouldn’t.
I guess there’s a lot of reasons not to stay at our little bed and breakfast. Flies. Mice. Mealy bugs. Coyotes outside howling. Deer stomping through the yard. Raccoons peeking out from behind the shed. Birds making a racket at dawn. Trees menacingly swinging in the wind. Moles leaving mounds in the yard. Nettles growing over by the woods.
I maybe forgot to mention we live in the country. Or maybe they just figured the place would be a Super 8 or a Motel 6 nestled next to a suburban shopping mall. I don’t know.
In the end we gave them back their money, lost three days rental and probably the innocence we had when we embarked on landlordship. The mizzus feels bad about this and so do I. Me, I’m liking the idea of a storage unit or a woodshed. One more bad rental and I’ll start hauling in this fall’s alder supply.
Hits: 71