The reason for our visit to Austin was a family wedding. My 2 sisters along with my family wanted to share a house and we needed a 4 bedroom. We chose this house for the location and in that way it completely met our expectations. Unfortunately, it did not meet many others.
First impressions were not great. The drive where you walk to get to the front door was covered with clippings from a recent gardening day. Certainly not a big deal, but turned out to be kind of indicative of the place. The front door has a code, however, it isn’t easy to get in. You put in the code and wait to hear the mechanism and then you have to push the door in at the right moment with the right amount of strength behind it. My teenage daughter turned out to be the expert in the timing with this door, but it usually took 2-3 tries to get in.
This is a house where people live and rent it out when either they are out of town or when it is requested. Had I known this, we would not have rented it. None of us were very comfortable living in rooms with people’s belongings everywhere. The master and one other bedroom were the most simple, but the 2 childrens’ bedrooms had stuff everywhere. Closets were full of clothes and laundry and there was nowhere that was indicated that we could hang clothes. None of us felt comfortable opening up the closets or drawers except to get a cursory look to see that they were all full of the belongings of the household. Also, it would have been nice to have sheets that were dedicated to guests. We felt like we were sleeping on the family sheets and some had stains on them.
The main room is very comfortable and appeared as it had in the photos. The kitchen was clean and organized. They had left a few items in the refrigerator such as eggs for us which was thoughtful. To use a toaster, though, you had to go into the extra room off the kitchen to get the toaster oven. Once again, it felt like you were intruding as there were laundry bins and other items near the doorway.
The 2 bathrooms were very clean and appeared functional. The master was overall really good except for the sink gave off a really funky, disgusting smell that my husband finally found some cleaning solution and that seemed to help. The second bath needs some handyman to come in and fix a number of items. First of all, the sliding door makes a lot of noise so everyone knows that it is being used. Especially during the night. The shower door handle feels like it is about to fall off and the glass shelf is not looking like it is attached well to the wall and so you don’t want to put anything on it. The shower head plate is also coming off.
The heat in this house was hard to figure out. We had very changeable weather as one night it was really cold – in the 40’s and then the next night it was balmy and in the 70’s. A description of how to make the house comfortable would have been helpful.
A book with suggestions of restaurants and coffee shops that were good nearby along with the things you could walk to would have been really helpful and that other Airbnb’s I’ve stayed at have done. By the 3rd day of our stay we had figured out that the Barton Springs pool and the pathways were easily accessible by walking from the house. We had a fantastic run by the river once we had understood the closeness of everything. A map and explanation would have been a great thing to include in the book as that way we would have been able to access these things right away and not just as we were about to leave.
The host was easy to reach and got back to us promptly.
I wanted to like this property, but this is the only Airbnb where I’ve had so many issues with the house as well as it not being a dedicated rental. If that had been obvious to me when renting, I would have chosen something different.