Starting a "Cottage" Business

My latest adventure has been taking up too much of my life—starting a “cottage” business, literally. In the beginning it seemed like a great idea, offer the new house as a rental, to help defray expenses. My mystery writer friend who lives in Door County was my guide. She’d built a house on spec a few years ago and then rented it out until she was able to sell it. According to her, the rental business covered her mortgage. Wow, how hard could that be? Put an ad on VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owner), hire a property manager, and sit back and luxuriate in the profits. Little did I know that not only would the business be a time and money drain, but that every time I visited my new second home I’d have visions of renters invading my dream place.

What set off my invasion fears was a warning comment from a friend. “You know renters will be having sex in your bed.” She must have read the incredulous look on my face because she added, “C’mon, they’re on vacation.” My brain immediately went to defensive mode. “But there are mattress covers on all the beds.” She smiled knowingly. “What about the couch, the chairs, the carpet?” Okay, I thought to myself when my husband and I retire there, we’ll throw everything out—mattresses, couch, chairs, carpet, and start fresh. But what about when we want to use the place before that? It didn’t bear thinking about.

To add fuel to my flaming imagination, one of the first renter inquires asked if we had a fire pit. A fire pit! I gasped. The house is surrounded by trees with a small area around the perimeter. When my property manager replied that many owners don’t have fire pits because of liability issues. The renter responded gleefully, “That’s okay, we’ll burn logs in the fireplace.” A burning fire in August? Was I renting to a bunch of pyromaniacs? My property manager said to me, “I hope they don’t burn a fire and run the air conditioning.”

Long lists of dos and don’ts began forming in my mind as well as how many surfaces could I artfully cover and with what. I was beginning to doubt that I was constitutionally cut out to handle renting my dream house to strangers. Even when my daughter and her family vacationed with us over Memorial Day weekend, I kept cringing over every wet glass on a tabletop, every crumb on the furniture, every grain of sand on the floor. Was the money enough to offset my growing anxiety? And when did I turn into a neat freak? No, this was about letting strangers into my dream place and losing control of that dream. Fears of showing up after the renters and discovering my getaway place nicked and gouged, scratched and grooved, stained and fingered like some crime scene I’d have to investigate.

“Renters are hard on your property,” my property manager said, trying to prepare me for what was to come.

Right now, we have four confirmed renters July into August. I study their phone numbers—Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, the number of people in their party—two adults, two children; four adults, two children, trying to decipher the kind of people they are as if that would tell me the damage they’ll leave behind.

My girlfriend who spent three nights at the house with me recently said, “Maybe in the future you should just rent to friends and family—people you know. Good idea, but too late for that now as I wait anxiously for the renters to invade. Even the owner’s closet gives me little solace. “The perfect place to hide your booze,” the site manager joked when we were designing the house. Booze being another worry.

Of course, worrying about this is useless, I tell myself. And as I’ve learned from experience, trouble never comes from the direction you’re looking. So I’m taking a chance on a new venture at a time in my life when most people kick back and cruise to the finish or start ticking off their bucket list items. Jumping out of a plane, camping in the wilderness, hitchhiking around Europe, all look pretty mundane to me right now when I think about the strangers in my bed.