I have never written a negative review before and I want this to be as kind as possible. It took me awhile to even decide to write one, but I know that Michael wrote me one and I want to share my side.
When we got to the house it was boiling hot. We turned on the air conditioning unit and the fans and were so tired we passed out....but the house stayed hot and continued to be unbearable despite playing around with all the fans and running the air conditioner. We would wake up bathed in sweat. We have a 6 month old and she really struggled with the heat. It seemed that the air conditioner blew the same temperature air as the outside air. So it was especially hot during the day. While the central heating/cooling system blew air, it did not blow cool air, increasing the temperature in the bedrooms. My kids were crying it was so hot. Do not rent this place in the summer unless more air conditioners are added.
We probably could have lived with that, but when we started looking around and trying to figure out the coolest places to sleep, we noticed the place was filthy. There were huge piles of dirt under all the beds. There was a pair of pants under the pullout bed (not ours). There was food caked to kitchen utensils. There were toys, crumbs, food, and general dirt under all the tables, the dressers, and between the couch cushions. The house looked worn and somewhat clean on the surface, but once we looked a little deeper, it was definitely not clean. There was mold on the air conditioner filter. Mold in the bathroom shower. Who knows what the filter from the central air was blowing through the rooms. Our 4 year old has asthma, and like I mentioned above, the baby is 6 months old. We couldn't have them breathing that air, and based on how dirty the house was, we didn't know what was clean enough to put the baby down on.
So we contacted airbnb services. Maybe we should have contacted Michael directly, but we didn't see how he was going to deep clean the house, change filters, and possibly make the house livable in terms of cooling it off in the time we were there- this was going to be a multi-day job. We got a partial refund, which I'm grateful for. I feel terrible about how this all happened. I hope that Michael gets the house cleaned for future guests and puts some sort of disclaimer on his listing about how the house is deathly hot in the summer.