Hi there,
In today’s post I tell you how I found my home after the month-long exchange that was a psychological torture thanks to Mar and Val’s erratic and disrespectful attitude.
As I have been telling you, even though we had closed the exchange more than 6 months in advance, it was just a month before our departure that Mar said she had invited her friends from Italy to our house.
After they spent 2 days in a row complaining non-stop and it became very clear that they were going to be troublemakers, we forbade them to let anyone else into the house since we had closed the exchange for only 2 people.
When we decided to cancel the exchange, we were already terrified of what they might be doing in our house.
First, we had the problem with the smart plugs as these two beings had unplugged all the appliances from their smart plugs. This is something we could see on the app.
Then we saw that they were not using the robot vacuum cleaner correctly. Normally, in each space the vacuum cleaner works for an hour, and now we were seeing in the Xiaomi app that the robot vacuum cleaner was working for about 10 minutes a day. We were afraid that they had damaged it.
When we asked them what was going on with the smart plugs, they made the excuse that they had been without hot water for several days. Since they were in Rome at the time, I asked my friend to please go to the house to check on everything.
We were afraid that these two individuals had even left the heating on during the week they were going to be gone.
When my friend came into the house, the first thing she told me was that the garden was filthy, and they hadn’t even swept the leaves.
Fortunately, the stoves were disconnected and there we took 10 kilos of anxiety off our shoulders.
The bad thing is that we saw that the house was a complete mess. Everything was untidy, appliances out of place, clothes lying on the floor, dirty, etc.
We also saw that they were actually sleeping in separate beds and using both bathrooms. Until that moment, we thought that the excuse for using both beds was because they had planned from the beginning to bring their friends to our house.
There again we thought that there was something very strange with these two people because it is not normal to sleep separately and use each one a bathroom, especially because in their apartment in Narrabeen they only have one bathroom, and the small room was not big enough for much.
It was also curious that Mar, having an empty closet in the downstairs bedroom, preferred to have her clothes all over the floor. It was as if she didn’t even want to have her clothes in the same closet as her partner.
Still, what gave me a little peace of mind was to think that it was impossible for them to leave the house worse than Heidi (the American from the first exchange).
Here is a detailed description of how we found the house:
- The first thing we noticed is that they had left the lock box password exposed when it was perfectly explained in the house guide that it had to be left closed so that people could not see it.
- The garden was a mess as they had not even bothered to sweep it all month.
- A plant outside had dried up due to lack of watering.
- For some reason they had left everything unplugged, even the microwave. When they had been told ad nauseam not to unplug appliances, they had left everything unplugged.
- All the kitchen utensils had been moved.
- The cutlery tray was dirty with coffee.
- The house reeked of fabric softener. I had to rewash everything several times to try to get rid of the strong smell of fabric softener.
- The robot vacuum cleaner was again out of its charging base. I don’t know what the problem was with these people always leaving the robot vacuum off its base. After using it, we realized that it had been damaged and we had to spend 300 euros to buy a new one.
- Even though it was well specified in the house guide that the furniture cannot be attached to the wall since it is made of plasterboard, all the tables were attached to the wall.
- I had to repaint several walls as they had been splattered with coffee.
- The walls of my room were stained as if they had touched them with dirty hands.
- On the floor in the upstairs room there were black stuff spots, which was strange because it looked like the floor had been cleaned.
- They left a booger stuck in the shower downstairs.
- The downstairs room was filthy, and we thought that since these two individuals did everything separately, maybe Val got to clean his room and did it wrong.
- The downstairs toilet had splashes of excrement (although it wasn’t as horrible as Heidi’s).
- The bed was warped as they stretched it too far and it had come out of the frame.
- One of the mattresses had a urine mark on it, so we understood that Val had a prostate problem and added to the alcohol consumption, it resulted in him peeing on at night.
That’s why their mattress at Narrabeen was covered in yellow stains.
We also realized that maybe that’s why Mar was disgusted to sleep with her partner.
This was something that left us in shock since we do not accept children or pets precisely to avoid such situations and it turns out that adults also pee in bed.
The worst part was not having the decency to wash the mattress cover.
Given Val’s incontinence problem, we also washed the covers of the office chairs and the sofa just in case.
Overall, we found the house a lot worse after Heidi’s stay. Still, the house was dirty and messy, plus the details of the peed bed and the snot stuck in the shower.
Learning from how Heidi left the house was very helpful because our things were put away and spotless.
As I told you in previous posts, we were never going to make the exception of giving access to both bedrooms again. But now we practically rule out the possibility of exchanging houses again.
If adult people are capable of breaking things in the house, splashing coffee on the walls, wetting the bed, sticking snot on the walls and leaving the toilet splattered with excrement, we had little hope.
In fact, we realized that those profiles that have many exchanges in which they have not received the evaluation, it is surely because the situation did not end well.
In fact, Heidi had a lot of exchanges for which she had not received the evaluation and it was probably because she had left their houses as disgusting as she had left mine.
Another change we made in the house guide is that, if we did exchanges in the future, we were going to charge 150 euros for the cleaning.