Small Double In Eco/Diy House

Hi, my name is Rachel, my current lodger's name is Noufa. I've run a lodging/boarding house for about 15 years on and off. Currently it's me, three cats (2 elderly females: Whisky and Babushka, and 1 young male: Monsieur Cuddles) and Noufa - Noufa is a Masters graduate in Environmental Architecture from Kerala.

The house is a four bed, I use two rooms and rent two out to lovely fxlks who love cats and want to be part of a chill, friendly household.

About you/my Mary Poppins Dream List:
Noufa and I are both Libra's so we think it'd be cute/fun if you were too! haha but defo not a necessity :D

Essentials:
ADORE cats and actively want to share your room with one of the babies
Love cooking and food and eating together and sharing favourite dishes/learning new dishes/experimenting
Care about the environment and already reduce/reuse/recycle
Familiar with soft plastics recycling, and, regular recycling
Care about water conservation and happy to use the shower water to flush the toilet so we're not flushing waste with clean drinkable water
Clean, neat and tidy
Enjoy socialising and playing card/board games with the household
Interested in building a home and making friends with your housemates/landlord
Practical, logical and sensible
Queer friendly
Feminist

Desirable:
Experience with DIY projects and happy to have them going on around the house during your stay
Fxmale/non-binary
Familiarity with composting
Environmentalist
Into gardening
Activist

About the house:
The house was built around 1910 in the English Victorian style, I've uncovered some beautiful features that need some tlc and it needs a little bit of modernising. I’m renovating the house as I go and occasionally have contractors come round to do bigger jobs or things I’m not qualified to do. There's only one big job left to do (the damp proof course in the kitchen) and that's scheduled for the October half term 27th-31st. For all other jobs I will let you know well in advance of any work and if any work is scheduled to take more than a day I will reduce the rent for that time period to make up for the inconvenience. When we did the damp proof course in the living room/hallway/half the kitchen we went out exploring the local restaurants for dinner which worked really well and I had everything cleaned up from the workpeople by around 5pm every day; this team usually comes 8.30am-16:30.

About Me:
I'm an environmentalist, an activist, non-binary and aro-ace. I volunteer with various gardening projects around the local area and run an online quiz for activists fortnightly on Monday evenings.
During term time I'm a lollipop person my hours are 8.15-9.05am and 15.05-15.50. I go to bed around 10pm on school nights, sometimes earlier.
I'm in the process of moving my narrow boat up north from where we were living on it in Milton Keynes so am looking for lodgers/boarders who are responsible and caring and are happy to feed the kitties and take care of them some weekends and for a couple of nights here and there during the holidays so I can spend a night or two on the boat and get further along on the journey than I can on day trips.

More about You:
I'm looking for people who are easy going, clean and tidy, understand the shared roles/etiquettes around sharing space and will do their share of the house work without being asked or chased. I'm most happy sharing with people who are outgoing and up for a chat and understand the importance of communication and community. I’d also like to have lodgers who like eating and cooking together and are keen to make time to go out for walks exploring the local area and further afield. The community feel and vibe of my home is important to me and I’m interested in people who can give and take equally. If you don't know the difference between being a lodger and being a tenant please read up about it, if you're a lodger you're living in someone else home so their rules and ways of doing things has to be respected; ie: you are passing through, even if you stay for a year or more, it's my home, full of my possessions, my life savings have gone into it, and while I want you to be comfortable in my home you do not have an equal say in my home :) so please always ask permission and check in with me about anything house, home, cat, garden and household related.

Eco side of things:
I’m very passionate about conserving water and reducing waste. I think it’s beyond obnoxious that westerners use clean drinkable water to flush their waste which creates sewage and is causing catastrophic damage to our inland water ways and to our sea life. I’d like to switch the house over to compostable toilets at some point but while they are still flush toilets I save the shower/bath water and use that to flush the toilet instead, I also have a “if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down” policy to further reduce sewage and water wastage. I mostly use environmentally friendly cleaning products and am very particular about keeping the house clean and tidy and expect everyone to clean up after themselves as well as do their share of the weekly cleaning. I’m not zero waste but I do expect people to reduce, reuse, and recycle as a bare minimum.

The room that is currently available is Room 3 - it has pink walls and is pictured with an orange coloured duvet. It's the cosiest and cutest room in the house, it has a textured ceiling, an adequate amount of storage and space for living and is primarily used by Babushka (the 10 year old calico female) and Monsieur Cuddles (the one year old tuxedo male). There are toys, a scratching ring, a water bowl and a litter tray in the room for the kitties.

About the cats:
All of the kitties were strays at some point in their lives, Whisky was born to two strays that a friend of mine was feeding outside her flat in London, once they became friendly enough to be handled she got the male neutered but the female was already pregnant so my friend encouraged her to live in her flat during her pregnancy and I met Whisky when she was 2 days old. She came to live me when she was 4 months old and has been a fearsome hunter all her life, sadly there are no mice for her to catch in this area as all the other kitties that live around here have made short work of them! Whisky is still playful but has a serious side to her, she also has arthritis in her hips and forearms so she struggles to jump as high as she once could, there are little platforms and piles of books etc dotted around the house and rooms to help her get up to where she needs and wants to go.

Babushka was born underneath a different friends uncles neighbours house on the outskirts of London. Sadly they mis-aged her and took her away from her mum too early, she arrived at my house in a box without a lid in the back seat of a car aged only 2 months old :( she's struggled with her weight since getting neutered and is a little phatty now so she needs extra encouragement to get up and move around, she loves playing and there are toys in every room in the house for her to play with.

Monsieur Cuddles got his name because he looked like a kitten that my first cat gave birth to when I was 11, that kitten was a girl so I started calling this new kitty "Mr Cuddles" until my friend Laura Magic Wands said he looked French so we started calling him Monsieur Cuddles :D he followed me home from down by the Leeds Liverpool canal (about a 10 min walk from the house) and made it very clear that this is his home now and that I'm his mum now. The vet checked him for a micro-chip and he didn't have one so he was allowed to stay with me, he got snipped a month after coming to live with me and is such a sweet little pudding, very cuddly and super playful but he is still a kitten, the vet aged him at about 1 years old, and does sometimes bite my ankles/calves when he's hungry O_O

The cats are still phasing together as it can sometimes take quite a long time to introduce cats especially ones with such vast age differences so the two old ladies are separate from the kitten all the time and sometimes I separate the older two as well so they can have their own space and alone time.

Council Tax band B - included in your monthly rent payments. Students and care leavers are exempt so please provide documents that I can forward to the council to reduce the tax bill (council tax savings can go towards utility bills).

Utilities:
I split the bills depending on usage, if you shower at the gym or at work then there’s no point splitting the water bill.

The house is heated by gas so we’ll all split that in the winter months - I have the heating on low from about mid/late October till the end of April/beginning of May.

Electricity bills will naturally be higher in the winter months so we’ll split the bills in the winter but if you’re not using a lot in the summer then I won’t bother splitting the bills during the summer months, however if the bill goes up by a lot then we’ll all split the bills unless it’s clear that one lodger is using way more electricity than the others in which case the person using the most can pay a larger share :)

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