The Other Side of Traveling

September 15, 2007

We own a large house in Vancouver, BC, and share it most of the year. During the school year, it serves as a home-away-from home to college kids. Our downstairs suite accommodates two students quite well, and three in a pinch.

Open to experimentation, and relatively naive in landlording matters, we allowed three students to share the suite last year. While there proved to be ample physical room for the three, other aspects arose to cause us concern.

It turns out that our water heater will not accommodate five showers within an hour. Nor will the three beds accommodate an additional two or three overnight guests, who in turn add to the shower count in the morning. Our walls are a great sound barrier for two late-night chatting teens, barely adequate against three, and a dismal failure when challenged by weekend pow-wows of six or more.

So we dropped back to our two-students-only rule. Sure, it’s okay to have an overnight guest once in a while – but tell us about it first. And let’s see… Never leave your laundry in the washer or dryer, keep the place reasonably clean, be quiet after 11PM and before 7AM, put the garbage out, keep the outside door locked, tell us if you break something so we can fix it, and try not to burn your food and set off the smoke detectors.

This most recent Summer, however, was something different. The suite would be empty for three months, and we had already lined up our two tenants for the coming school year. This gave us plenty of time to freshen and upgrade the suite, and – what the heck – rent it out for a couple of months to out-of-towners.

Vancouver, BC, is a glorious city. It is the destination of countless tourists, artists, and businessmen, not to mention legions of television and film production crews escaping the union-inflated production costs of the US. Renting the suite was a foregone conclusion.

A free posting on Craigslist brought the usual deluge of responses. We spoke to summer students, visiting medical professionals and college professors, con men (“I’ll send you a registered check for a deposit, but I want you to send me a cash refund immediately if it’s too much”), and world travelers.

The world travelers intrigued us, and we decided to go that route. It was an opportunity to have a little of the world come to us, while we would play the gracious Canadian hosts. A very polite couple of Irish lads had charmed us with their emails, and we accepted their offer.

At the last moment, of course, they asked if a friend could join them. We had already decided that three is, indeed, a crowd, but now it was too late to find someone else for the suite. They insisted that since they would be working once they got here, they would not be around so much and they would be too tired to have guests over. It would only be two months. And they were so very polite.

Let’s cut to the chase, okay? There were five, not three Irish lads. None of them worked. They slept all day and partied all night. Noisily. They paid their rent late both months. They broke lamps, plumbing fixtures, curtain rods, and kitchen appliances.

They lived on pizza and beer, and set off the smoke detector more times than we could count by microwaving leftovers. Their garbage piled up. They never cleaned, except for that one night when they brought those two hookers home.

One good thing came out of it: Our local video store thanked us for all the sports and porn rental business our tenants provided during the summer. Glad to have helped! (New rule: no more male tenants.)

We hold nothing against the Irish, who happen represent half of our own genetic makeup. These lads remained as polite to our face as can be. But the experience will make us take a closer look at our own behaviour when traveling. Are we breaking to the house rules? Are we making a bad impression on behalf of our country and ourselves? Are we squandering our trip to a breathtakingly beautiful part of the world by staying indoors all day and watching porn?

I don’t think so.

Click here to “walk through” the Guest Suite

About the Author: I share a house in Vancouver with my husband, two wonderfully behaved female college students, and three female cats.