In general, Jill’s place is great, especially for a short stay. The location is perfect - 10 minute drive to the beaches in La Jolla/La Jolla Shores, but close enough to other neighborhoods that nothing really felt far away. The house is very nice. It’s spacious. The kitchen is really great, and all of the furniture is super comfortable. The backyard is huge and really pretty. The neighborhood is friendly and quiet. Jill is super friendly, and a really helpful host. She was great throughout our stay.
There are two main reasons why I’m giving Jill’s home 4 stars rather than 5. Keep in mind that these things really only matter if you’re doing a long term stay, though. If you’re just staying for a few nights, then these critiques are negligible and Jill’s place is 5 stars. We stayed for a couple of months, so we noticed some things that you wouldn’t normally notice at a place you stay at for only a few nights. First off, it was pretty dusty when we got there. We had to do a couple of deep cleans of the place, and even after that it was still pretty dusty. It’s possible that the dust was from the previous renters, and maybe Jill’s cleaning service didn’t have time to get to the house. Jill offered us the cleaning service she uses, so if we really wanted to, we could have paid to have the house cleaned, but we didn’t really feel like doing that on top of the normal Airbnb cleaning fee. Second, the plumbing in the showers, toilets, and sinks is pretty old and malfunctioned multiple times during our stay. For the first 2ish months the plumbing was fine, but by the last 3 weeks of our stay there were problems every 7-10 days. Jill was super receptive when we needed her though! She had her plumber friend come fix it the next day each time, and she paid for it. So Jill handled it really well, and nothing was really disastrous. It was mostly just inconvenient to deal with a clogged drain or toilet every 10 days or so. I think the plumbing was abnormally bad during our stay, and it’s probably been fixed. She said it had never been like that before so maybe it was just bad luck.
All in all, Jill’s place is really solid, especially for such a low price. This is a rarity online, but I think it’s actually nicer in person than it looks in the photos. It has some flaws, but so do most Airbnb’s. We were really pleasantly surprised by how nice it was when we got there, and we had a great time throughout. Thanks Jill!