Hi there,
In this post I am going to tell you about the problems Heidi had, and how I found my house filthy and with multiple damages after her stay. The filth was such that even the toilet was splashed with excrement and blood.
From the beginning we had stated in the ad description that we only shared the downstairs room. After sending her the video of the property, she seems to have been upset because “she had never found that there were restricted spaces in the houses she went to”.
After viewing multiple Home Exchange profiles, we realized that in reality most people have restricted spaces in their home where they leave their belongings under lock and key.
After explaining to her that the qualities were the same, she understood and there were no more problems.
But months later we closed an exchange for 3 months in Australia and the couple that would come to our house asked us if we could please share both rooms since they worked in different time zones and depending on the schedule of each one, sometimes they had to sleep separately.
We decided to make the exception with Heidi as well. Big mistake.
To receive Heidi, I left my house impeccably clean, I left grocery shopping for a couple of days and even prepared lentils in the freezer, and we left the car clean with a full tank of gas.
Since we were leaving early in the morning, we slept on the couch so we could leave the bed with clean sheets for her.
In addition, we left a guide specifying how to use and take care of the house. Especially, paying attention to the things in the house that in my opinion need some extra care.
My neighbor and a friend were left as emergency contacts.
Upon our arrival in Boston, as Heidi’s flight was arriving in the afternoon, she waited for us, and we met. We found her to be the most adorable person.
She was arriving in Porto very early and we set the alarm to wake us up in the wee hours of the morning to make sure she could get in. We had left the keys in a key lock.
We saw on the camera that she had been able to get in and she immediately wrote to us to ask how she could get the key out of the lock. We were shocked by the question and told her she had to turn the key back to its original position and remove it.
She reminded me of Aydin, the Turkish guy who had been my first Airbnb guest.
She then asked me if her place was as spotless as I had left mine. I lied and told her yes.
She arrived on September 2 and on September 4 the fire department had to come and open the door to my house as she had locked herself out with no keys and no cell phone.
That story is in this post:
From there I began to be afraid of how I was going to find my house.
One day she told me that the shutter seemed to be stuck. It should be noted that in the house guide it is specified that it has to be pull up and down very carefully because the walls are made of plasterboard.
This woman raised the blind with such force that she put the little plastic ball that is placed as a stopper on the rope inside the pulley. In other words, her clumsiness almost damaged the blind. In the end she managed to get the ball out and in theory from then on she was more careful.
Two weeks after returning to my house, the blinds she used have not returned to normal operation. In addition, from raising and lowering them with such force, when we got home, the screws were half out of the wall.
Another day she wrote to us that she had taken a glass into the bedroom, left it on the bedside table and in the morning when she got up, she broke it.
I was already having an anxiety attack from how extremely clumsy this woman was.
When I went back to my house 20 days later, there was still glass all over the floor. I mean, she wasn’t even able to pick up the pieces of the glass she broke.
In the house guide I have posted that the water heater is not to be touched because it is connected to a smart plug and turns on automatically at 3am.
Another day, she comes and asks what to do if the hot water runs out because she didn’t want to take a cold shower. I was shocked again because I didn’t understand how a single person was able to use 100 liters of hot water since we don’t even have a bathtub.
First, she had not followed the instructions to set the washing machine as instructed with cold water.
When I told her that with a shower and a washing machine with hot water, she was not going to use the full capacity of the water heater anyway, she told me that she was also washing the dishes by hand with hot water.
Who would think of washing dishes by hand in winter having a dishwasher?
“It’s just that since she often put the dishwasher in her house, her vacations were for washing dishes by hand.”
I told her that using the dishwasher was more environmentally friendly and generated its own hot water, that it didn’t make any sense to be washing dishes by hand.
Still, a shower, a washing machine and washing two dishes with hot water were not going to waste 100 liters of water either.
The electricity consumption of the water heater that day is something that had never been seen in my house.
Overall, she alone consumed in 25 days the electricity that the 2 of us consumed in 3 months.
It was also well specified in the house guide that there is an electricity limit and that you can’t plug in too many appliances at once, because the power goes out and you must go through a rather tiresome procedure outside the house to get it restarted.
Since everything she could do wrong, she did wrong, the power went out too.
In my house there is a Xiaomi robot vacuum cleaner that I have connected to an app on my cell phone.
In the house guide I left it explained how to use it (push a button) and how to clean it.
Another thing that caused me to panic about how I was going to find my house, was that this woman had not deigned to hit the button for the robot to clean the floor. She didn’t use it once in 25 days.
Something that really caught my attention was that she was constantly making comments about the house being burglarized, when we had already told her that Portugal is an extremely safe country.
What is most striking is that a person who comes from a country where there are shootings left and right is afraid of being burglarized in a country where there is practically no crime. As of 2023 Portugal is the seventh safest country in the world.
The return trip was on a Saturday. She was leaving early Saturday morning, and we were leaving in the afternoon.
Logically, the Friday before leaving we were arranging everything to leave the house perfect for her.
When I asked her if she needed anything special for me to do in her the house, she asked me where she left the keys. To which I reply that she must leave them in the key lock, just like when she arrived (this was also specified in the home guide).
There she asks me, “Should I twist the numbers?”
And I: “Obviously, just like you did when you took the keys out.”
There again my anxiety went to the skies.
If this lady had been so careless as to leave the password visible in a key lock, that meant that there was no one to leave the keys with when she left because that key lock would no longer be usable.
The funniest thing is that the last day instead of being at my house cleaning and leaving everything exactly as she found it, she was walking around Porto and taking selfies.
When she finally got home late at night, she told me that she had turned the key lock numbers.
In other words, she was leaving early Saturday morning and on Friday she was walking around all day, as if she hadn’t had 25 days to tour the city, and she arrived home at night and went to sleep.
As if she was in an airbnb or a hotel.
I arrived home at 7:30 am and you can’t imagine how disgusting my house was.
In the room downstairs was the clothesline so she only had to go downstairs to hang out the clothes. Even so, the floor and stairs were covered in filth.
The towel that I use for the bibet was lying on the floor next to the dehumidifier. When asked, the explanation is that she is so useless that when she took out the water compartment to empty it, it dripped all over the floor.
Although there were plenty of cleaning cloths and rags in the kitchen, she found nothing better to wipe the water off the grimy floor than my towels.
I can’t tell you how much I regretted letting her stay in our room.
First, she had said that I didn’t need to make her bed because she had obsessive compulsive disorder to make her bed in a special way.
I had expected my bed to at least be well made. But no, it looks like my bed was made by a 6-year-old.
The worst part is that she didn’t even change the duvet cover after having used it for 25 days.
I mean, I slept on the couch the night before so the bead would be perfect, and she didn’t even leave my bed clean.
The floor was also covered in dirt and under the bed was a half centimeter thick gray layer of a mixture of hair and dirt.
There was this woman’s hair in even the most hidden places in the house. Two or three weeks after she had left, her hairs were still to be found.
The bathroom was the worst. She had cracked 3 bathroom tiles I don’t know how. I had already left one tile with a practically imperceptible crack and had warned her to be careful.The care she took was to break 3 more.
The shower was filthy and even had mold when my shower in almost a year and a half of living in the house had never had mold (we had to replace the silicone of the shower).
This means that she had not set the dehumidifier in the bathroom as she should have.
Mold is removed by simply spraying a little bleach, Heidi wasn’t even capable of that.
Diego went into the shower to clean with heavy chemicals that we never normally use, and I went to clean the bidet and toilet.
When I lifted the toilet seat, it was all splattered with feces and blood. I almost threw up.
To this day I can’t understand how an adult person could have a toilet bowl dirtier than a public restroom.
The kitchen and living room area were also disgusting.
This woman had also not bothered to wash the sofa cover and cushion covers. The sofa had balls of dirt and hair all over it, and another residue from who knows what.
We had to clean the kitchen thoroughly and re-wash everything.
Even the soap dispenser buttons were black from touching them with dirty hands.
All the things were out of place, the few things she had used, she had left them wherever she wanted.
In several parts of the house there were bumps on the walls and paint chips had fallen off. As a result, I had to repaint those areas.
The garden was also dirty, although I didn’t mind this as much. She had used a sun lounger that was logically clean before she used it. I found it covered in bird droppings.
In total there were 10 hours of cleaning by 2 people to leave the house halfway decent.
It took me a month to get my house back to the way it was before their stay.
When we used the car, we saw that she had also left it dirty and that she had used half a tank of gas which she did not bother to replace.
Repairs I had to make to my house after Heidi’s stay:
- Repair the garden fence (40 euros). Plus, the trip to Leroy Merlin and the 3 hours of work.
- Buy the broken glass (2 euros).
- Paint all the damage to the wall (40 euros).
- 3 broken floor tiles. We had to place sticker tile in the bathroom (around 300 euros).
- The blinds in the bedroom never worked as before.
- The dining room blind was half down. From how extremely hard I was pulling it up and down, the blind screws were half out of the wall. The only solution was to replace everything (100 euros)
- She put the Italian coffee maker in the dishwasher, so it was damaged. She ordered one herself from Amazon (60 euros).
- Replace the silicone in the shower (30 euros).
Extra expenses generated by her stay in addition to the damage caused to the property:
- She spent in 25 days three times as much electricity as we spend in a month. Approximately 50 euros more electricity consumption.
- Half a tank of gas (40 euros)
- 10 hours of cleaning by two people to leave the house halfway decent.
- The number of washing machines I had to run to wash the things she should have washed.
- 14 euros of tolls
3 or 4 days before her departure, Heidi told me that there was a spider that scared her, and she started telling a story that I didn’t even understand. I told her to just leave the spider alone and I would take it out of the house when I returned.
When I returned, I found the spider dead under a glass. This woman is so ignorant that she doesn’t know that a living thing will die if you deprive it of light, oxygen, and food.
We arrived at the house on a Sunday and the following Monday my neighbor saw us on the street and ran out to give us the key I had left him for emergencies.
So, Heidi’s infinite clumsiness also cost me not being able to count on my neighbor as an emergency contact for future exchanges.
Initially the experience had not been bad because, although her house was dirty, what interested me was finding my house as I had left it. But having to deal with an adult who is worse than a child or a pet every day was quite exhausting and returning to find my house destroyed was traumatic.
Heidi of course left us an excellent review because she found her house better than when she had left it. I left her a good review because I didn’t want the first review I left to be bad, but I didn’t mention anything about the state of her house or how she left mine.
The learning for future exchanges is that I must go out of my way to ensure that the people who come to my house are not dirty, clumsy, and irresponsible like Heidi. As a result of this experience, I was going to make a video call before accepting an exchange, I modified the house guide leaving everything more detailed and demanding and I was going to be much more selective.
I thought that, by exchanging houses, I would find people who would take as much care of my house as I would of theirs, but that is not the case.