The location is great, less than a 10 minute walk to St James St overground station that goes straight to Liverpool St and only about 12-15 minutes walk from Walthamstow Central Vic line tube. I know the area well as I used to live in E17 for many years. The house is quite large, has 3 stories. There's a lounge room at the front of the house that goes through into a decent sized open plan kitchen with dining area and an extension at the back of the house which goes to the back garden. There are 2 bathrooms upstairs and a total of 5 bedrooms. Carol is the owner who lives here alone and she rents out the 4 rooms via Airbnb and possibly by some other methods too.
When I arrived, Carol was home and greeted me. She asked me to take my shoes off at the front door and invited me to sit in the lounge with her for a chat before showing me around the house. I sat down for about 10 minutes and had a chat and then told Carol I wanted to freshen up as I'd travelled a long way from Heathrow with a massive heavy bag and I was rather hot and tired as it was a 33 degree day. Carol told me to follow her up to the room which was on the 3rd floor at the back of the house. I really struggled to get my 16kg bag up the 2 flights of stairs which are quite narrow and winding as I have a back injury! I could see on my way up that the carpet on the stairs hadn't been vacuumed for quite some time so by the time I got to the top, there were lots of bits of dirty stuff stuck all over the bottom of my socks so I had to change them and put a pair of slides on to wear around the house as slippers as I can't deal with dirty feet.
I came back down to eat some takeaway food that I had purchased on my way from the airport and Carol showed me into the kitchen. It's quite dark in the kitchen, even when you turn the lights on as there are some extremely dim lights above the sink area and it's quite a large room and due to the extension, the back glass doors are quite far away so don't let much light into the kitchen. I used the communal dining table to quickly eat my takeaway out of the packaging it came in. I could see the dining table was very dirty so after I finished eating, I looked in the kitchen sink to see if there was something to clean up with. The sink was blocked with chunks of old discarded food and there was a filthy dark brown coloured scourer sponge in the sink sat in the stagnant dirty water. The cupboard under the sink didn't seem to have any kitchen cleaning spray or clean cloths so I decided to go up the road to buy some so I could clean the kitchen as it was very very dirty and I wanted to be able to eat my breakfast the next morning before work in a clean kitchen. I purchased an entire packet of fresh scourer sponges, some multipurpose spray and wipe and a packet of cloths. I also purchased muesli, fruit and soy milk for breakfast and I came back and cleaned all the surfaces in the kitchen including the plastic patterned table cloth on the large dining table and I cleaned the sink area too. There was SO much grease and so many spills and splashes of things such as ketchup and crumbs on every surface. I had to scrub the surfaces (especially the dining table) and rinse the cloths and respray cleaning product on the surfaces multiple times to get to a point where the cloth wasn’t covered in thick brown dirt! It was disgusting and I wish I had taken photos to attach to my review of the place.
I went up to my room and tried to go to sleep but it was very hot up there due to the heatwave so I had the window wide open which meant the train line (directly outside the back garden) was rather noisy with many trains going past until around 1am. I didn’t really sleep very well as I was hot, there was no fan, the trains were noisy and there were flies and mosquitos in the room because I had the window open. In the morning I had breakfast early, then a shower and got ready to catch a train to work. Just as I was getting ready to walk out the door, Carol asked me if I slept well and I said that I probably only had about 4 hours of interrupted sleep due to the heat and the noise and I made a joke that there was also a mosquito buzzing around which bit me too! I didn’t say this in a nasty way but I was just being honest. I left for work to run to the station and by the time I got to work, I had received many whatsapp messages from Carol apologising that I didn’t sleep well and Carol offered to buy me a fan. I replied and said it would be very helpful to have a fan and would be good for her other tenants too as London gets very hot in summer. I didn’t check my phone for quite a few hours as I was at work and then realised that Carol had been sending me even more messages (26 of them) telling me that she had purchased a fan and then lost it in a shop as “U made me feel so worried and nervous”. Things just went downhill from hereon. I had planned to go home straight from work, quickly get changed and then go