To be or not to be a landlady: Alas, poor Yorick finds no mouse kidneys

IT’S well for some, that’s all I can say.

Well for some who can swan around this glorious Easter weekend, eating chocolate on the beach or stripped to their scanties in the back garden, getting the sun.

Me, I’ve been getting the house ready for the renters. I’m going to be a landlady, part of a new demographic, caused by the general political waffling around stamp duty.

Because house-buyers live in hope that the incoming government will eliminate or reduce it, they’re putting off their purchase until after the election.

Or indicating to house sellers that, yes, they really love your semi-D, and if you were prepared to reduce your price to take account of the stamp duty thing, they’d even buy your semi-D, but otherwise, well, you know yourself, life is tough.

It’s created a domino effect. A decides he’s not going to sell his house at a knock- down price. He’ll rent it out until prices come back up. He rents to B, who’s in the same position somewhere else. B rents to C.

Now, A, B and C are all banking on the housing market reversing its soft landing, which is a bit like holding on to this year’s wedgies in the belief that they’ll come into fashion again sometime in the future. They might. But breath should not be held.

Renting out your house, if you’re an amateur, is like Lent, only worse: you give up everything.

You telephone the agencies to describe your des res and they ask you oral exam -type questions. What’s the square footage? What schools is it near? How far is it from public transport?

Now, like 90% of women, I can tell you on any day precisely what I weigh, although I won’t. That’s because 90% of women weigh themselves every morning, tilting to the right because that sometimes fools the scales.

Nobody I know measures their house each morning to work out its footprint, or counts the rooms.

So the agencies sigh and say they’ll visit. The home-owner tidies like a mad thing, which means the husband finds cans of diet Coke in his sock drawer and the TV remote control gets lost.

The agency people get bothered by the fact that you’ve taken down some walls and doors to make one worthwhile room out of three pokey little kennel-rooms (never mind the spaciousness, your room-count has gone down) and want to know if you’ll take out the feature fireplace in the middle of the sitting room, because it’s pyramid-shaped and potential renters might feel their children would impale themselves on the pointy bit.

The fireplace stays, you say, and they sigh some more, telling you the price you’ll get is half what you hoped for.

But look at the built-in beds, you cry. Look at the brand-new couches, not to mention the hand-made kitchen table.

They look surprised and tell you all “that stuff” will have to go. Nobody wants to rent furnished houses. They want to bring their own furniture.

Then they start to bring potential renters to view your property.

You fill bowls with fruit nobody in your house has ever eaten, like star fruit and mangoes.

You fill vases with flowers. You fill the oven with baking bread, to permeate the house with a welcoming smell.

Of course, because you never bake, you forget to take it out when they’re late, which means that when they eventually arrive, the house smells like an incinerator.

In my case, I also had to check for kidneys. One of the two cats — the one that looks like a polar bear and is as thick as a plank — is a ruthless hunter, constantly arriving through the cat flap yelling in triumph about its latest trophy, which it then eats.

Dissects and eats. Scruffy, this thick cat, has no problems ingesting tails, feathers and gizzards, but for some reason draws the line at kidneys, neatly eviscerating its tiny victims so that two small perfect kidneys are left on the floor after every safari.

These kidneys had to be removed before the agency people arrived with potential renters.

“What a lovely home,” the visitors would say, before recoiling.

In our house, they mostly recoiled at the kitchen.

Well, OK, fire-brigade red walls might be a challenge at breakfast, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

And if they wanted to re-paint, would I stand in their way?

Some of them, however, couldn’t get over the kitchen. It put doubts in their heads.

A SWEDISH woman who had doubts about the kitchen did her major recoiling when she found the entire house shelved, those shelves occupied by 20,000 books.

They would have to go, she told me. It would be like having someone else’s life looking at her in every room.

And here’s me, thinking it would be a huge advantage to have a ready-made library on the premises, thrown in for free.

I quickly learned to get the hell out of the house when visitors arrived. It was too humiliating.

Particularly the woman who opened the freezer and clearly thought I was storing a murder victim in it. It was only three shirts in advanced rigor mortis, shoved into it one week when I knew I wasn’t going to get the ironing done (freezing clothes prevents them from getting mildewed).

Eventually, a couple we liked opted to rent the house and a truck the size of a chemical plant arrived to take the rejected furniture/books/socks/cans of diet Coke to their new abode.

The lead guy was named Carl, and I didn’t get the names of all of his team, distracted as I was by the moniker of his side- kick Yorick, as in “Alas, poor.”

I was a bit worried about what might be revealed when the beds were moved, because desiccated mouse kidneys might have put Yorick off his game, but three iced- caramel wrappers, two pens, a pop-sock and the TV remote control he took in his stride.

“We take fridge?” he asked.

No, I said. It’s white goods. He looked at the stainless steel fridge in doubt, but I told

I didn’t tell him about the agreement, which enjoined the renters not to hang clothes in the windows.

Why they might want to do this wasn’t clear.

They didn’t look to me like the kind of people who’d get their kicks out of stringing underwear across the kitchen windows, but what do I know? I’ve never been a landlady up to now.

Today, the house is an echoing desert with nothing to sit down on other than the cats.

The floors are littered with old newspapers that fell out from behind furniture, long-forgotten photographs and bits of computers which were saved in the belief that they would some day come in useful, and which now require a special trip to the electrical waste recycling place, wherever that is.

This bank holiday will be about bagging items to go to a charity shop.

And doing a final kidney-check.