This apartment is in a wonderful location with great amenities, but it didn't end up being as comfortable as we would have liked.
It's in a beautiful location on the North Shore, and is about a 1 minute walk from the beach. Because the apartment is on the 5th floor, it has the most beautiful view of the ocean at all times of day and night. It is a 5 minute drive to downtown Haleiwa, where there are an incredible variety of restaurants and food trucks, as well as great shops. The apartment itself is pretty modern, with new appliances (including in-unit washer/dryer!!). The shower itself is amazing, with double shower heads and lots of space.
Even with all the positives, our month-long stay was not as comfortable as we would've liked. The check-in time was 3:00pm, and the host was still cleaning the apartment until close to 5:00pm. We waited in our car. When we did finally get into the apartment, we found a couple of things:
- Crumbs in the utensil drawer
- Crumbs in the bureau drawers (as well as some belongings from a previous guest)
- A very dusty fan that we had to clean out to use
All of these little things are ignorable, especially because the apartment is SO nice and in such a good location, but one large issue stood out and made us not feel comfortable bringing up other issues directly with the host.
Our first night, we realized that the 2 down pillows on the bed smelled overwhelmingly of mildew (think: wet dog). We washed and fully dried the pillows around 5 times over several days using the provided detergent as well as using vinegar we bought at the grocery store and they continued to smell. My partner used the two smelly down pillows each night while I used the only other full-sized pillow in the apartment. Each morning, he'd wake up with his hair smelling of mildew.
We contacted the host to let her know about this issue and to ask for replacement pillows. She told us that it was typical for down pillows to carry a smell and suggested that we wash the pillows ourselves. She said she didn't have time to get us replacement pillows, and made no effort to solve the problem. We drove to Target at our first opportunity and bought 2 replacement pillows at $10 a piece, and were happy with them for the rest of the stay. Irony of ironies, we left the down pillows in the corner to air out for the month and they ended up smelling closer to normal. So, maybe not an issue for the next guest.
One other issue, the bedroom has a floor to ceiling window that lets in lots of noise and light. There's a lamp directly outside the window on the ceiling of the shared walkway that shines right into the bedroom. We'd often wake up in the middle of the night thinking it was dawn. The window also lets in noise from the surrounding neighborhood like Friday-night parties, loud motorcycles, as well as anyone who happened to be walking by the bedroom window at night. We ended up buying a tension rod so we could hang a makeshift curtain (a blanket) to keep the light out, and bought ear plugs to solve the problem of hearing parties and loud cars many nights.
We recommend that the host:
- Hire a professional cleaning service between stays
- Hang curtains in the bedroom to keep out light
- Move the floor air conditioner from the living room to the bedroom to allow the windows to be closed at night to muffle the noise from the neighborhood