Hi there,
In today’s post I am going to tell you a little bit about Mar and Val, who, pretending to be nice, tricked us to try to get their friends into our house and systematically lied to justify their erratic and disrespectful behavior.
As I have told you in previous articles, this couple contacted us in mid-July to do a 3-month home exchange.
They asked us to do a video call to get to know each other as we were both new to the platform at the time.
Here comes the first red flag. We were talking for almost an hour and from the beginning Mar would turn the camera towards her every time she spoke, leaving Val off screen, so Val had to turn the camera back every time he wanted to talk. They were like that for an hour turning the computer back and forth.
We thought it was funny at the time, but now I realize it was a sign that they weren’t right in their heads.
At that point the video of the house I had showed the two bedrooms and Mar immediately asked for an exception to use the 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms since “they worked different hours and slept separately”.
Another red flag. First, they only had one bathroom in their apartment. So how was it that in my house they needed to use both bathrooms?
Secondly, even if you have different work schedules, there is no need to sleep separately.
At the time we agreed to make the exception because we were looking forward to going to Australia and because we wanted them to be comfortable for the 3 months they were going to be in our home.
Just for asking for the exception, I should have cancelled their request. If they read the description of the property and it said that only one room was shared and they “needed 2 rooms”, it would have made sense to look for another property instead of asking for exceptions.
After that we didn’t talk for months until after the exchange with Heidi I sent them the updated guide to the house with more emphasis on cleanliness. Mar immediately asked what had happened and I told her that Heidi simply hadn’t cleaned all month.
Several times Val wrote weird things in the Home Exchange chat and gave the impression that he was drunk.
I was always very communicative so they would tell me the things they were going to need and at the end of January I asked them if 2 sets of towels per person was enough, and Mar said yes. You can see in the previous posts the problem they had with this after they got to our house.
In all those months we only talked to Mar by WhatsApp since Val supposedly for security reasons of his company “could not use WhatsApp”.
On February 4th they requested a second video call. We spent almost an hour talking and right at the end they said very nicely that Mar had invited her friends from Italy to stay at our house because “in Australia they never visited her”.
We were shocked by the revelation, and we didn’t say no because we didn’t have time to assimilate the apotheosis way they tricked us with the supposed different schedules so that we would make the exception.
Diego said that from the very first moment they had planned to bring friends to our house.
To make the situation even worse, they didn’t say when, or for how many days, or who they were, or how many.
The situation was very murky. At that point we should have cancelled the exchange. From then on, we felt cheated, but we didn’t say anything.
Then Val, who supposedly could not use WhatsApp because his company did not allow him to do so for security reasons, one day writes to me via WhatsApp because it turns out that his company now allowed him to use the application.
He immediately proceeds to create a WhatsApp group asking me to put Diego in it when we already had a WhatsApp group with Mar months ago.
Where was this man living that he did not know that months ago his wife was in a WhatsApp group with us?
We thought again that maybe he was drunk.
Three days before our departure I was still sending information of vital importance for the use and care of the house and Val just responded that his parents had had an accident but that it would not affect our stay since they were staying at his parents’ house.
We arrived at Val’s house and there was not even a message to welcome us. The next day they didn’t even write to us to see if we were comfortable or if we had slept well.
From this moment until the end of the exchange we were thinking about Heidi, who, although she left us a filthy house, was impeccable in her manners and communication.
I was struck by the fact that they had about 100 bottles of alcohol in their house, it was impressive.
When Mar and Val arrived at the house and started acting erratically, we didn’t understand it because in the 2 video calls they seemed nice. Then we thought that maybe they were drunk at the time and that’s why they seemed nice.
The truth is that we would never have expected such a drastic change of personality.
The rudeness, the passive-aggressive messages, and then when we offered to cancel the exchange, they stopped responding to the messages and we had to ask Home Exchange to intervene because it seemed like we were dealing with spoiled children.
These people never had a “Good morning” or a “Thank you very much” or anything like that. Much less a word or anything positive to say regarding our home.
And I can tell you that our house is much better than the apartment we were staying in at Narrabeen.
From there, many theories arose about this couple who slept apart and didn’t seem to even speak to each other, even though they lived under the same roof.
After seeing Mar’s 2 Instagram accounts, it was evident that this woman neither worked nor did anything. On the one hand, she was an “artist” and had made all the crap with which she had decorated the apartment and on the other she was a “relocation coach.”
Our theory is that she had gotten together with Val to support her and for the residency.
On the other hand, Val was divorced and had become poor after his divorce; that’s why they lived in an apartment in such poor condition.
When Nena went to the house while they were in Rome to check the alleged problem with the water heater, we realized that they were actually sleeping separately. It was all very strange with these two individuals.
Even having a giant empty closet in the downstairs bedroom, Mar had all her clothes on the dresser and lying around on the floor. What’s the need to live like a homeless person?
Although no confirmation was needed, we corroborated once again that this woman could not be right in the head.
During the last week, after 7 messages on the Home Exchange platform, we were finally able to make them understand that they had to reconnect the Smart Plugs to their devices.
Mar, who was outraged at having to obey the house rules, immediately started stalking all my social networks to see if she could find anything to bother me with.
Within 5 minutes of finishing the conversation regarding the plugs, she writes to me saying that she had seen my YouTube video with “certain comments” about her apartment and that she was formally asking me to remove it because it was a “very serious matter that breach privacy law”. (What bothered her was that in the video I also mentioned the bad things about her apartment).
I deleted it and replied exquisitely thanking her for her feedback.
Since she wrote again on the same subject, I decided to reply as they replied, “I can confirm that the video is deleted”
The way these two individuals wrote or responded to messages is also worthy of psychological study.
In addition to being mythomaniacs and rude. Mar and Val were adept at answering questions with something else entirely; that is, answering without answering.
For example, when Nena found the robot vacuum cleaner outside its charging station, I asked them if the device had ever malfunctioned.
The response was, “We can confirm that we left it charging.”
Everything was like this… “Can you confirm…?” “I can confirm…”.
Given how troublesome they had been since they set foot in our house, on March 29 I sent a message reminding them to please leave the house exactly as they found it and to leave everything clean.
They responded with an even longer message and a much longer list of things we needed to do before we left, saying that their house was “impeccable and spotless”.
As you can see from the screenshots of the messages, they always had to be the ones who wrote the longest message and the ones who were always right by lying and even contradicting themselves.
I replied again that not to worry, that we were going to leave everything clean and to please let us know the time of departure from the house to reactivate the camera notifications.
There they sent a mile long message again complaining about the security cameras. In other words, these people who had known for more than 6 months that there were 2 exterior security cameras in the house and that supposedly since the first day they arrived they were upset because “their privacy was being violated” decided to complain just now when they had 4 days left to leave the house. Really?
Then we thought that they were probably drunk as usual, because in the message they also contradicted themselves.
If what they were saying in their multiple messages was true, why didn’t they leave?
If your privacy is supposedly being violated 24×7 and you are in “subhuman” conditions in my house, why didn’t you say yes when we proposed to cancel the exchange?
Once again, they responded by complaining that we had been disrespectful and asking us to apologize to them. The same 2 people who had tricked us to try to get their friends into our house, who had violated the rules since they arrived, who had lied over and over again to justify their erratic and disrespectful behavior and who had been a psychological torture for a month, now pretended that we apologized to them.
Since they had 2 days left to finally get out of our house, we decided not to waste any more time responding.
I got the feeling that they spent a month at my house just scheming how they were going to annoy us or find a way to play victim the next day. After finding the YouTube video, they also seem to have been daily stalking my social networks.
The funny thing is that even though they were complaining about the humidity and cold, they always had the dehumidifier off (for playing the rebel) and only had one stove on. Because in March it was not necessary to put the heating on.
On April 3, when they finally left our house, it was the best feeling in the world. You don’t know how happy we were.
I don’t know if it’s because of old age, alcohol, bad education, mental problems, or all together, but they are the kind of people who should not do home exchange or travel. I hope they don’t ruin anyone else’s vacation in the future.