Having lived my whole life in the same three-room apartment, first with my parents, then with my husband and children, I did not want to leave it at all. It was my paternal home, and in general a place that was dear to me. There was so much going on there that I couldn’t sell the apartment. And paying for it alone was hard for me. My son helped out partially, but he had kids of his own, and they were worth thinking about. So I had the idea of renting out a room or two. I figured that if I have neighbors in the apartment, I will get enough for rent – and enough for utilities and other needs.
I could not do the search myself, and my son did not want to bother, so I found a realtor on the ad, a piece of paper with which was pasted outside the door. He seemed like a good man, though I wanted to charge a decent percentage. But in a week he found me a young family with two not very young children. I was more than happy. And people are clearly responsible, since they are already parents, and the kids are over four, thanks to which there will be no sleepless nights.
Everything seemed great at first. We signed a six-month contract right away. I don’t know why I was in such a hurry, but the advance made my head spin. And then the first week the tenants started being rude to me. They demanded to share the kitchen so Samantha could cook without me being there, and they wanted me to share the living room and the TV with kids who wanted to play. I basically let them do everything because I wanted to seem like a normal person, and it made them sit on my neck.
To get away from them for a while, I went away for a day or two to visit my son, but I didn’t warn the tenants about the exact date of my return. And for good reason. I had just caught Samantha and the children rummaging through my things in my room.
There was a scandal, I demanded that they move out, but Samantha’s husband reminded me that we had signed a contract and I would have to pay two hundred percent of the entire rent that they had paid and only planned to pay. I didn’t have that kind of money in the first place.
That’s when I had to complain to my son. He scolded me for getting involved, for finding a suspicious realtor. He personally studied a copy of the contract and came to the conclusion that we had the right to evict them earlier with a much smaller amount of compensation. To protect me, he took the day off and came to my house. He introduced himself as the buyer of the apartment and asked them to leave quickly. To their objections about the contract, he promised to pay the minimum penalty for the remaining three months that they had to live with me.
Since it was not me, but a grown, serious man, the family could not argue much. Anyway, their eviction was delayed, which caused me to stay with the kids for another month and a half, but my son paid even less and gave a good kick in the ears of the nasty realtor for moving such people in with defenseless elderly people.
