The host is very sweet and means well but in my opinion she should not be listing on Airbnb or at the very least she should change the listing to classify it as a “shared space”.
Our expectations were that we were renting “an entire home”. In reality it’s a single home with a thin sheet of plywood blocking a doorway, that separates the home into two areas. This might give visual privacy but every noise can be heard from both sides.
The host uses all aspects of the property and is outside the rental door working, brushing her teeth in the morning (yes, this happened), doing daily gardening, and she entered our space as if she was living there with us. At one point I came out of the bath barely dressed to find her in the kitchen. She let herself into our space on several occasions on our first night to reprimand us for opening up cabinets while we were looking for cooking supplies, or to give us instructions we couldn’t understand. My wife thought she would chop vegetables at one of the patio tables to enjoy the beautiful evening and quickly had the host standing over her shoulder watching her cook. Drinking glasses that we were using went missing while we were briefly out to be replaced by others... apparently we had chosen the wrong ones? To reiterate the point.... there is little to no privacy.
The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator were filled with the host’s personal items making finding things impossible and a struggle to make room in the fridge for the big grocery shop we did for the week. The host used the fridge to store a huge bucket of cheese that not only took up an entire shelf in the fridge but smelled horrible every time the fridge was opened.
The switch for the hot water heater is kept off...and is located in the host’s space which requires you to enter her side of the home each time you need to turn it on. Even though she mimed that it was ok even if she was sleeping, we were simply not comfortable with this.
The bedroom has an overwhelming smell of mothballs, they are tucked into every cabinet of the huge wall storage unit... which is filled with the homeowner’s personal items. We were told to close the windows at night to prevent cats from entering the house but with no AC and the mothball smell we just couldn’t do it. The listing says the beds can be put together to form one large bed... this isn’t accurate. The beds can be pushed together but the heavy wood frames leave an 8” gap between mattresses making it pointless.
This was our one big holiday for the year and instead of feeling relaxed and intimate we felt as if we were visiting with a nosey family member.
Needless to say, we left after one night.
I would not recommend staying at this Airbnb.