10 ways to survive renting rooms in your home

Use www.spareroom.com
They are brilliant. I have never failed to get a lodger within a month in 15 years.

2. Paint everything magnolia and put things in the room you will never see again in their original state. No lodger will take care of your belongings the way you do. Carpets get wrecked. Watch heavy women with a propensity for kitten heels on floorboards.

3. Be yourself when you interview and show the house warts and all. They will be buying in to you as much as the house. My lodgers have stayed with me through extraordinarily disruptive house renovations, adolescent children and irritating habits of all occupants.

4. Don’t ask nosey questions. I avoid getting emotionally close.

5. Never interfere with their room, although I might look in sometimes to check they are alive, hoover if there is floor space, put in the 10 pairs of shoes they have left in the hall. I don’t allow locks. There has to be trust.

6. Spell out when the central heating is or isn’t on before they commit, then check every so often they have not installed an electric heater or are leaving the lights on when not there. I don’t have a tumble drier and once had to tell one guy that no, he could not put the entire central heating on to dry his bed linen in 2 hours. I supply a spare set of bed linen.

7. Get an ensuite and leave them to argue about who cleans the bathroom.

8. Be prepared to do lots of washing up, for pans to get burnt and crockery broken.

9. Accept they may bring back a girlfriend/boyfriend on a weekly basis.

10. Buy them a Christmas present. When I get tired and irritated with sharing I remember that I would not be in my house without my lodgers. They pay my mortgage.