Everyone, I’m back.
I didn’t actually go anywhere. It turns out keeping up a comic blog while holding down a job is harder than I imagined — I figured I’d write on evenings and weekends, but the reality is that once I’m home, all I want to do is lie down.
Recent events, however, have made lying down impossible. I had to crawl back up and vent.
You’ll remember Niu-ma hauled the whole family off to Texas in a hurry back in January. Which left one question hanging: what to do with the Seattle house.
Niu-pa said, what’s there to discuss? Sell it, obviously. I gave him the full eye-roll: are all men like this — hand them a house and it burns a hole in their palm?
I wanted a way back. If Texas doesn’t work out, I’m not dragging two kids around with no place to land.
Rent it out long-term, then — except here’s the thing about America: rentals are expected to come empty. A furnished long-term listing, even if it’s a palace, just sits there. And we had less than a month to move. Hauling all that furniture to Texas wasn’t worth it, there was no time to sell it, and tossing it felt criminal…
So we made the only reasonable choice under the circumstances:
Short-term rental. An Airbnb.
Niu-ma has always envied the landlord life — collect rent, lie flat. And now it was about to be mine!
But renting out a furnished house is not just “move out and post the listing.” The management company sent over a mountain of tasks — paint, repair, deep-clean, upgrade — plus a shopping list a mile long:
Everything from a king-size bed down to an ice-cream scoop… I always thought my house was drowning in stuff. Then I started prepping for guests and discovered I’d been scraping by in survival mode this whole time.
Fine. The customer is king. In the Airbnb business, the only thing that matters is that five-star review.
A month of round-the-clock chaos: still buried in our own move, while remote-directing the management company’s people to buy furniture, receive packages, stage rooms…
Time ticked by and the house was nearly done — the only thing missing was a sofa for the small living room. And I refused to buy some forgettable big-box thing just to check the box. I wanted something beautiful and particular — a piece with personality that still matched everything else.
That day I was scrolling a local Facebook buy-and-sell group, as one does, when a vintage chaise stopped me cold. Classic lines, newly reupholstered in a black-and-white tiger print. Delightful. My house already had animal accents everywhere, and the size was right. Was this not my dream sofa? Thrilled, I messaged the seller and arranged pickup.
The tiger chaise entered the house, and the whole room lit up. Prep complete. The photographer came and took the glamour shots.
My beloved home, scrubbed and staged like a bride on her wedding day: clean, elegant, fully equipped, warm and inviting.
All I could think was: it never looked this good when we actually lived in it.
And here’s the chaise I fell for:
A few days after listing, the first booking came. On check-in day I watched through the doorbell camera as a couple and a little boy walked through the front door, my heart pounding like I was watching my kid interview at a private school:
Will they like my house? Will they notice all my carefully arranged little touches? Will they leave a good review?…
I couldn’t focus at work at all.
Before long, my phone buzzed. A message from the guest:
“Is the heat not on? It’s freezing in here.”
What? How? The management team was just there yesterday!
I opened the smart thermostat and — good lord, it was set to 55 degrees!
The manager must have forgotten to turn the heat back on. I cranked it to 75 and apologized like my life depended on it: I’m so sorry, so sorry! The heat is on now, it’ll warm up soon — light the fireplace in the meantime!
All those weeks of preparation, and the very first guests walked into this fiasco.
Terrified they’d freeze, I checked the thermostat every few minutes. Suddenly I noticed: it was set to 95.
The guests must have done it themselves. But 95? Are we running a sauna? I set it back to 75.
A while later: 95 again.
It’s almost bedtime, people. You may not be scared, but I’m scared — of you getting heatstroke in my bed.
Or did they think a higher setting heats the house faster? A furnace warms at one steady rate until it hits the target. Set it to 200 if you like — it will not turn one hour into ten minutes.
What happened next proved that I was too simple, too naive.
That night the guests wrote back that the house was warm. I set the thermostat to 75 one more time and went to sleep with my mind at ease.
The next morning I opened my phone to a string of messages sent at two in the morning:
“Sorry! The upstairs toilet clogged somehow.”
“I didn’t catch it in time and the water overflowed. The carpet got wet.”
“We didn’t flush anything weird, just some toilet paper…”
“…”
OMG. The thing I feared most, and it happened on night one.
The bathroom is tiled — meaning the entire bathroom flooded, all the way out into the hallway…
We lived there ten years and never once clogged that toilet. You were in the house less than eight hours. What kind of toilet paper did you flush — an entire Costco family pack?
I was frantic. A soaked carpet is serious business; mishandle it, let the floor grow mold, and you are in deep, deep trouble. I bit back the profanity and scrambled to work out a plan with the management company.
Then another message sailed in: “By the way, your plunger isn’t very good quality. It’s plastic — it broke after I used it twice.”
WHAT. THE. ACTUAL…!!!???
By this point my rookie-landlord enthusiasm had evaporated completely. I wanted to climb through the phone screen, grab the guest by the collar, and scream.
But I held it in. There were more urgent things to fix.
Besides, I couldn’t afford open war — my five-star review was still clutched in his hands.
I, the great Niu-ma, have spent my whole life free-spirited and blunt, bowing to no one. One day as a landlord, and I had instantly mastered reading the room, swallowing grievances, and bending the knee — all for five little stars.
Fine. Fine. They check out tomorrow. I’ll eat the losses myself — the real mission is ushering this Buddha safely out the door.
Please, just no more surprises.
That night I dreamed the house caught fire, and the guest was texting me: “We didn’t do anything? We just cooked and it started burning…”
I woke up laughing at myself. Nerves much? They’re the first guests, twelve hours from checkout — how much more trouble could they possibly cause?
Then my phone rang. The guest.
The message read:
“My son was running in the house and accidentally bumped into the tiger chair in the living room. One of the legs broke off. It was a complete accident. You’re not going to charge me, right?”
With a photo thoughtfully attached.
……
……
……
My hand-picked, lovingly hunted vintage treasure. First day of service. Deceased.
This I could never have imagined.
We may all belong to the same species, but never underestimate the diversity within it.
Maybe his three-year-old is the Hulk reincarnated. Maybe the kid has trained in some legendary wind-god kick.
Maybe I should just be grateful that the leg that broke belonged to the chair and not to his son.
……
The property manager told me not to worry — the leg can be repaired, and the repair bill goes to the guest.
There’s a Chinese saying that the character for “endure” is written as a knife hanging over a heart. Half a lifetime and I’d never truly felt it — my very first guest gave me the full immersion course.
In America, the landlord is the servant and the tenant is the king. Lesson learned.
I white-knuckled it to noon. The guests left. No further incidents.
The boulder on my chest finally dropped. Whatever else, the damage had reached its full stop. I could lick my wounds in peace, clear the battlefield, collect myself, and decide whether to go another round.
But if you think the story ends here, you have clearly never been a landlord.
That evening, just as I sat down to dinner, a letter arrived from the HOA — the homeowners association, guardian of neighborhood curb appeal — in a distinctly stern tone:
“Your tenant drove into the flower bed beside the driveway, churned up the soil, and left two large holes! How do you intend to address this?”
Anyone who lives in America knows how badly things can go once you’ve angered the HOA.
Staring at those two craters, I was beyond tears.
The feeling wasn’t anger, or sadness, or heartache, or panic… It was as if the script of my life had suddenly switched genres — from drama and comedy to theater of the absurd, black humor playing on every channel.
I picked up my phone and messaged my realtor friend: “How’s the market looking if I sell right now?”
Postscript: the house is not sold. The carpet got dried out, the chair leg got repaired, the flower bed got replanted by the HOA’s crew.
Another family has stayed since. Nothing happened at all.
That first family must have been the universe’s hazing ritual for a rookie landlord.
And if you’re ever visiting the Seattle area and want a five-bedroom, sleeps-nine Airbnb in the suburbs — come stay at Niu-ma’s house!
That’s the listing right there. And when you book, be sure to tell me you’re a reader!