As I Cleaned a Stranger’s Blood Out of My Curtains, I Wondered if My New Side Hustle Was Worth It

Airbnb hosting was not exactly passive income

I was standing on the send floor landing of my new home holding a pair of soiled gray curtains in my hands.

As I rubbed the stain remover into the fabric and watched the lather turn pink with another woman’s menstrual blood, I couldn’t help but wonder if this plan for extra cash was worth it after all.

Blood stains aside, our new side hustle was earning us about half of our mortgage payment a month, and it was mostly enjoyable.

We were newlyweds with limited income, no kids, and a full basement apartment to spare. So we signed up to rent it on Airbnb.

My husband and I quickly developed an efficient division of labor with our budding basement business.

I handled all communication, customer relations, and an extensive visitors’ guide I wrote from scratch. He cleaned our basement with the speed of a guy who wanted to make a killing out of the very affordable $25 cleaning fee we charged our guests.

For the three years we ran this little basement business of ours, we met some lovely people and made enough money to live comfortably in our new home.

But our years as Airbnb hosts weren’t without some bloody moments.

We hosted hundreds of guests in our basement, but a few stand out as particularly memorable.

The overly-honest prospective guests

We weren’t picky with accepting guests, but sometimes our prospective guests were just too honest to have a fighting chance.

My favorite was the local high school kid who kept requesting to stay in our basement to host “evening parties with friends.” Once it was for his birthday party. Then it was a graduation party. He insisted he and his friends were responsible, and he even mentioned he was on the math team.

But this enterprising teen didn’t stand a chance with us. I figured I had enough years in my future to be blocking my own kids from hosting underage drinking parties in my basement one day, and I wasn’t about to start with someone else’s kid.

There was another guy who kept asking to stay in our basement because he was frequently in town as a dog breeder. He mentioned he would be storing his “dog breeding equipment” in our basement, and was respectful enough to ask if that was okay.

I am not an expert on dog breeding and the equipment it requires, but we decided we would need to charge more than a $25 cleaning fee if we started letting guests store anything with dog semen on it in our basement. We respectfully declined.

The lost and confused foreign guests

One rainy Saturday afternoon, my husband and I were reading comfortably on our living room couch when we heard a knock at the door.

We opened our door to 4 weary young people from Thailand. They looked about 18 years old, and they were exhausted and drenched from the rain.

These kids had actually booked our basement for the following night, but they arrived a day early by mistake. And they had been on quite a journey.

The tired travelers were in the United States on an exchange visa to work in a motel in rural Tennessee, and they had taken an overnight bus to reach our city on their weekend off.

When they arrived, they couldn’t find our home because they had mistaken “Kansas” with “Arkansas” Avenue, and they had been walking around in circles in the rain for hours.

One mentioned they hadn’t realized the bus wouldn’t serve food, so they hadn’t eaten anything in 18 hours.

We quickly gathered whatever we could find in our cupboards and loaded these kids up with crackers, soup, and cookies. We ordered pizza and fed them all of the American junk food they asked for.

We let them stay in our basement an extra night without charging them, because what kind of heartless assholes would put travel-weary Thai kids out in the rain this far from home?

I don’t know how they survived a weekend in our city on their own, but that weekend our basement became more of a cultural exchange headquarters than a money-making enterprise.

The guests with complicated family dynamics

People have all sorts of reasons for booking an Airbnb in a major city. Some are on holiday, others are visiting relatives without space to host them.

Some are looking for a place to bone their boyfriends without their conservative parents finding out.

One weekend, we booked a guest who explained that her out-of-town boyfriend was coming to town to meet her family for the first time. Her boyfriend couldn’t stay at her apartment with her, because her traditional Indian parents wouldn’t approve.

This meet-the-parents weekend turned into the loudest f*ckfest I’ve ever experienced as a humble spectator one floor up.

These kids did it morning, noon, and night, and so loudly that I sometimes wondered if they were pounding each other right up against the top of our basement stairs.

Though their animal screams were amusing at first, my husband and I were happy to have our morning coffee with fewer sound effects once they checked out.

I truly hope they’re still together and have managed to keep that spark alive.

The guests who stretched the maximum guest limit (and soiled our curtains)

Our guest limit was capped at four. A reasonable limit for an apartment with just one queen-sized bed and a pull-out couch.

Unfortunately, some guests stretched that limit quite far.

One weekend, a group of young British women booked our basement while visiting our city. As they were checking out, I received a message from them in the app:

“Thanks again! Everything was great. I’m so sorry, but my friend got her period while she was sleeping and we couldn’t get the stain out.”

Of course, cleaning up a stranger’s menstrual blood from your sheets is a little gross. But nighttime accidents happen to the best of us.

It wasn’t until I went downstairs to clean and saw what the menstrual blood was staining that I realized the fun that had gone down in my basement that weekend.

In addition to the bed and the pull-out couch, there were little nests all over the apartment that had been made into makeshift beds. Rolled up towels, throw cushions from the sofa, and yes, curtains — had been taken down and used as bedding.

The garbage can had enough empty bottles of Tequila to confirm my theory that approximately 8–12 British girls had spent the night in our basement that weekend, and these girls had had a blast together.

Unfortunately, the girl with the unexpected period chose our curtains as her bedding of choice that night.

My stain remover never quite got that crimson spot out of our curtains. We had to toss them.

They became an unexpected cost of doing business with 8–12 British girls who were down to party in an apartment meant for four.

Our basement no longer hosts strangers from faraway lands. We closed shop over 6 years ago, once our first son got loud enough to wrack up a few noise complaints from our guests.

Our basement is now a storage space for Magna-Tiles and toy trains, and we only host grandparents these days.

But I learned a thing or two about Airbnb hosting as a source of income during the three years I rented out my basement for some extra cash.

When you spend your weekends ordering pizza for hungry Thai kids and washing strangers’ period blood out of your drapes, an Airbnb business is not exactly “passive” income.

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