In January, finding the house empty again besides me and Mike, I decided to take another look at hosting for Airbnb. My brother and sister-in-law do it, my friend's neighbours do it and I have been a guest myself, once. I didn't imagine it would be so easy to set up (the website is very user friendly) and I hadn't planned to be hosting guests as quickly as it all took off. However, within 24 hours of posting one photo of our tiny, spare bedroom on the site I received a request for one night's accommodation.
We offer bed and breakfast and a shared bathroom. I vowed that I wouldn't loose sleep over it and stress myself out about how tidy the house was and whether I should offer a cooked breakfast or not. The room is relatively cheap and apart from clean sheets, a shining bathroom and a continental breakfast I did very little else.
The guests came thick and fast and at one point we had only 2 nights free over a 2 week period. Not only that, we were getting 5 stars nearly every time. Clearly it issn't difficult to provide good value accommodation. I don't blame the guests for liking our tiny, spare room though. Its quiet and the bed is incredibly comfortable; when we are guest free, I love to sleep in there myself.
So, what's all this about a sticky knob then?
Well, there's a knack to closing the bedroom door of the guest room. It's easy once you know how and I always give a quick tutorial but some guests just don't get it and more recently we had a guest who revealed after she had left that it really worried her that she couldn't work it out. If you don't set the latch up to close, it just wont close and you can push and pull and wiggle and shove but the door will simply pop open again. I realised that I needed to have a look at the mechanism more closely and removed the knob and mortice latch. After spraying liberally with WD40 and discovering that it still stuck I replaced the mechanism. It still sticks. And so I am doomed to go through the instructions and listen to the struggles for the foreseeable future.
Well at least until I take the knob off and have another look.