Rental Opportunity of the Week: Only a Landlord Would Do This to a Nice Room

What is it? A formerly beautiful room that has been converted by a Gumtree Landlord (there is a hierarchy of landlords – huge faceless commercial landlords; Home Under The Hammer “entrepreneur” landlords; Kirstie Allsopp-style posh landlords who are renting out the flat they bought before they got married and that has appreciated 450 percent since the year 1999; and I do have to warn you there is an incoming class of “YouTube landlords” – and Gumtree Landlords are among the worst of them; the worst of the landlords) into something horrible, vibeless, actively depressing. Plus ça change.

Where is it? In Acton, “The Only Place In London That Wishes It Was Ealing”.

What is there to do locally? Normally I do use this section to be incredibly arch about postcodes I have never even been to (and, to be fair to me – which we must always be! Nobody is allowed to be mean to me! – I am also arch about postcodes I both have lived in and do actively live in, no postcode is safe from the prompt of this question) by just clicking on Google Maps and going, like, “Oh, there’s a big Sainsbury’s” or “there’s a climbing wall, so your boyfriend will be happy”, some little joke like that, some little dismissive joke about a vast postcode that hundreds of people consider beneath the warm emotional glow of the word home.

But I have just looked at Acton, which has a London Transport Museum Depot that looks like it goes absolutely fucking dummy: A load of cleaned-up old train carriages in a massive warehouse, right next to Gunnersbury Park and a short walk away from the Museum of Water & Steam. If I can find a semi-decent flat white and a place that sells a too-big £11 sandwich, then that really is a Saturday for me. I now refuse to be mean about Acton. 

Alright, how much are they asking? £190 per week, which by the maths I have used since I was first forced to engage with maths to make this calculation, is £798 PCM. I think we all know the landlord (a Gumtree Landlord, remember) is rounding that up. Let’s call it a neat £800.

I want us to play a brief imagination game called: “Hey, What Fucking Pose Is The Photographer Taking This Photo In Right Now?”. The rules are fairly simple: we look at the following photographs, and try to figure out what in the fuck shape the body of the photographer taking the photo was in at the time. Bonus points can be collected for suggesting what in the red fuck the photographer was thinking, also, while doing these things. For example:

This is a fairly simple one: the photographer has walked in, held their phone above their head at just the height where they can’t actually see the screen, allowed the phone to slip into a lazy tilt, and taken exactly one photograph. They have not checked the photo to see if it’s OK, they’ve kept it moving. For my bonus point I would like to suggest the photographer’s tongue was sticking out of their mouth, just slightly, when they did this. 

Now we’re getting a little bit spicier: I think here the photographer has stood right at the base of the bed, with their feet hooked underneath the bed base and their shins pushed against the frame for balance, and again taken a photo by holding their phone quite high above their head and pointing slightly down with it. For my bonus point I would like to suggest the thought going through the photographer’s head was:

I truly think the photographer has now stood on the bed and taken a photo where they can see the screen of their phone (to ensure the chandelier, which is a particularly deranged touch in a room of this size and timbre, is in the shot) but they haven’t got a good straight shot because the springs of the mattress are making their footing uneven. The thought going through their head is, simply: ‘I’m an insane person! And I’m currently doing an insane thing’.

The height of this photo is much higher and more confident than previous photos where the height has suggested the phone is simply being held above the photographer’s head. My suggestion as to why this is, is: The photographer has pivoted to now have one foot planted on the bed and one foot planted on the futon. They are still holding the phone at head- or above-head height but they just got a lucky shot.

They are thinking: ‘Which one’s Ant and which one’s Dec? There must be a way to get black mould off that windowsill. Do you still need to use hand sanitiser anymore or was that just a COVID thing? Remember that bit of COVID where you had to buy a meal every time you had a single pint in a pub. I should get my teeth done in Turkey. How much is it actually to get your teeth done in Turkey? Surely they’ve made some new inventions with teeth since I last checked. What is a tooth? What’s a fingernail? Do you think we need fingernails and toenails to close out the loop of our entire body’s worth of skin? I think that’s what it’s for. Like a full stop on a sentence. I am fairly sure that’s what fingernails are for. They couldn’t figure out how to make skin go smooth around the end of a finger so they did fingernails. It’s weird how you don’t notice your fingernails ever until the exact moment they grow one molecule too long and then suddenly having fingernails is unbearable.

‘Also weird: a fingernail is a completely inoffensive thing when it’s on your finger, but the second – the second – you clip off a little crescent of fingernail, that fingernail detritus suddenly becomes disgusting. Isn’t that weird? Like when it was on your finger two seconds ago, it was fine. Now it is somehow the most disgusting thing in the world.

‘Hmm maybe that’s not a universal feeling, actually. I always forget whether my thoughts and feelings and emotions are the same as other people’s. I am, as aforementioned, utterly insane. Someone out there probably has a fingernail kink don’t they. I’m not going to Google it but I know already that they do. Now I’ve thought about it I’ve got mad at it. Ah that’s — that’s ruined my day.’

Stood up, shot down. The thought in their head is: ‘Yeah this is the angle of a kitchen people want to see. This is a photo of a kitchen people like. I’ve seen estate agent listings and this is typically the angle that the photos are taken from. The best way of seeing a kitchen is: two to three feet above the microwave.’ 

Anyway, the room. Some notes: I know I often talk about landlord-issued furniture, and how it’s either ugly or impractical or such a bad version of a functional piece of furniture – a bed, for instance, a sagging wardrobe – that having to live with it for a year is essentially a form of punishment, but in this place there is far too much furniture, for no real reason at all.

There’s no way you need two wardrobes, for instance (though there is a depressing suggestion that this room could be shared by two flatmates, both using a wardrobe, one sleeping in the bed one sleeping on the futon – this idea really is very depressing). The futon is adding very little to the vibe of the room beyond ‘being in the way’.

Again: I often criticise landlords for their aesthetic choices, either somehow choosing the only unappealing shade of white it is possible to paint on a wall or going for that grey Hinchesque new-build finish that is suddenly in vogue, and so though I should be praising brave interior design choices, that really is a shade of yellow on the walls there, isn’t it?

And then the various impracticalities: The kitchen is a microwave and a combi oven, I don’t even know where the kitchen is in this situation (I think it is behind the second wardrobe), the high ceilings and the space heater combined with a bed next to a bay window means this flat is definitely really fucking cold right now, and we can all see that a freestanding shower that has been fitted behind a wardrobe and next to a bed is powerfully bad energy.

But worst of all is this room could have been nice: Take all the furniture out, paint those high walls a nice colour, and use it as an actual room in an actual house – a cosy little study, for instance – and this, with its bay windows and decent spacing, could have been a really nice little room. Instead a Gumtree Landlord filled it with wardrobes, somehow wedged a kitchenette and a shower in between those wardrobes, covered up the fireplace by putting a wardrobe in front of it, then got an insane person to take exactly five photos of it. No, reading that back: it’s actually good that the UK rental market is a practically unregulated Wild West-style space. I actually think it’s really good, and not at all a problem. 

@joelgolby