Renting the Rooms

So in the ongoing saga of my house situation, financially, I needed to rent out the rooms in my house by September 1st.  Mission accomplished, as they say.  I have a renter and she's paid as of September 1st.  And she doesn't have a dog, which is great.  She does have fancy rats, which is kind of creepy, but they live in cages and shouldn't be able to do anything to the house, so I don't care. 

As you may recall, I had to get the rooms painted to be able to take the pictures to list the rooms for rent.  These are the lovely (sarcastic font) pictures that I posted:

 If I had know how awful I would be at taking pictures, I could have rented out the rooms a lot sooner. 

Anyway, once I had my pathetic pictures, I went on ebay's site, renters.com to list the rooms.  Except that they don't have a dedicated place for rooms for rent and somehow for my $49 per month, I was stuck in one bedroom search result.  I had many calls and e-mails for the one bedroom apartment from people not at all interested in renting a suite of rooms in my house.  Also, ebay said that if I didn't have 14 actual leads from the ad, then I would get another month free.  Some of the e-mails came from very odd names and after the generic "please send me more information" I never heard from them again.  Scam?  Innocent computer browsers?  Inquiring minds don't care enough to pursue the line of
 inquiry.  But I digress.


Since it was free, I also placed an on-line ad in the penny saver, but again, somehow it was viewed as a one bedroom apartment, and somehow, the penny saver gave out my address too. I know that I did not put it in the ad, but I
received a few calls of people stating the address, asking me about my one bedroom apartment for rent.  When I asked, they saw the ad in the penny saver.

Then, also free, I put a posting on Craig's List under rooms for rent.  That one was pay dirt.  The four actual showings that I gave came from Craig's List.  The first showing seemed really promising.  Her name was Francis and she owned her own consulting business.  She was relocating from Florida and needed six
 months to check out the real estate market. She recently rescued a small dog (who looked so adorable in the picture). Well you can guess the rest. Fran is a guy and the business is defunct. He came to see the place, but he said he wasn't willing to pay what I was asking. He could do better. His dog probably would bark too much anyway.


The next person who called to set up a time to see the place was named Saphire.  She sounded very young.  It would be for her and her boyfriend Brice would stay there sometimes.  I was not hopeful.  When she showed up, she brought her dog--a six hundred pound rotweiller.  I met her at the door and apologized profusely--no, no, no rotweillers.  At least she brought the dog up front.

Next came the lady that is now my renter.  Am I the luckiest person on the planet or what.  She's employed, my age and has good credit.  She's renting rooms now, but the owner of that place is losing their house in foreclosure, so she has to move.  She's looking for a little stability.  No worries--I'm very stable.

The last person (the insurance in case #3 changed her mind) was a young guy.  He had just enrolled in makeup artist school.  He has a job at Forever 21 and he took out a large student loan to cover tuition and his living expenses.  He told me the numbers and I told him that he couldn't afford my house--he needs to look for roommates and I wished him all the best.

My renter says that while she likes the flooring, she'd prefer carpeting (sigh) and she definitely needs air conditioning in both rooms, so I am having a second air conditioner installed in the bedroom.  And so my life as an actual paying tenant's landlord begins.  [Full circle as my Uncle Marcel pointed out--my Grandfather was a landlord for years.]