What’s going on in our lives? Well, moving and AirBnB, along with a lot of other stuff.
Today we discuss a bit of what’s been going on in our lives: moving (again!), renting out our house on AirBnB, renting an AirBnB ourselves, getting damages to our house remedied from AirBnB, and … still moving. Next episode will be a continuation of this conversation, shifting to a broad view of what has been developing in our story writing, and hopeful business preparation.
Here is the text version, just as it appeared in the newsletter today:
Happy 2023!
First off, you can listen to this newsletter wherever you get your podcasts, including as a video on YouTube. In fact, this particular episode has images in the video that amplify what we talk about – in this case, the ramifications of a bad experience with AirBnB guests. 🙁
Watch/listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on thorn.link/Grendhill.
Now, I last recorded a video in February of 2022 which I published in March – what has been going on since then?
Well mostly, we’ve been moving.
Back in the spring of last year I was at a decision point of whether or not to continue with my current day job. In the end we decided to continue, but that did mean that we had to move again, all the way across the country. So starting in July we started packing, and in August we executed the move.
In July, my wife, Laila (hear her voice or see her in the audio/video versions of this update!), and the kids went to Utah and spent a few weeks there, taking care of my late mother-in-law’s house. They did not return to the west coast. Then in August, I packed up everything else in our house, loaded a Uhaul truck, and moved it all across the country to the East Coast.
We’ve previously lived in this part of the country before so we already owned our house out here. When we moved away we thought it likely that we would come back and we left some things in the house as furnishings to be used by guests on Airbnb. When we came back, our guests at the time were under a lease of six months for HOA reasons, so we could not boot them out without cause in order to make way for us to move back into our own house. That meant that we had some overlap, and to cover the gap we rented an Airbnb ourselves and lived in somebody else’s basement for a month and a half until we could officially move in.
Easiest move ever, right? We already knew where everything would go when we put it away.
Well. When the house reverted back to us, it turned out that our esteemed guests had been smoking in our house for the last six months. Not just smoking but smoking rather heavily. There were cigarettes left in ashtrays, a film of tar anywhere the cleaners missed, and there is still a smell of cigarettes all over the house. They also caused other damages. They had a dog that chewed rugs, they broke some things and made some things go missing, and they left a wooden table and chairs on the back patio for months, ruining them.
Fortunately, Airbnb advertises their air cover insurance which is supposed to cover the damages. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of time overhead. This required a lot of time from us documenting damages and getting quotes. First, we had our regular cleaning team do a lot of cleaning in the house. When they let us know they were done, we went in there. We used baking soda on the carpets, we had the carpets professionally cleaned, we ran an ozonator for several days, which is supposed to chemically break down odorous compounds. We also got quotes to professionally clean the interior of the house, to professionally clean all the contents of the house, to replace the carpet, and to repaint the walls to remedy the cigarette smell. Here we are three months later, and Airbnb has not yet come through for us. Initially they were waiting on our documentation and that took us some time because I’m working a full time job and we’re living out of suitcases and the kids were going to school. Then they sent an adjuster from an independent company, and…we wait.
We also went to a conference in the middle of all this, but we’ll talk about that in the next episode.
But here we are, and since we could not move back into our own house unless we wanted all of our stuff to smell of cigarettes. So, we bought a new house instead and we’ve been spending all our time moving. If you watch the video form of this podcast, you’ll see in the background in the introduction. Lots of boxes behind me. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, birthdays, all in the middle of so much upheaval.
I cannot wait to be done moving.
I also can’t wait for Airbnb to pay us for the damages so we can pull the trigger on these quotes to remediate the cigarette smell, and then we can either sell the house or rent it out. But we just bought a house that we closed on in December, at 2022 price and interest rates, so we definitely can’t afford to have the other house sitting there, empty.
That’s pretty much where we are now as far as what has been happening recently in our lives. Be sure to catch our next newsletter/podcast and you will see what we’ve been developing as far as on the creative side of things. Inventing stories and developing stories and making plans to write stories. In fact, even to hopefully build a successful business Based on these stories.
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-Don