Or, the least-sensical, most rewarding course of action for when your roommate moves out and you can't afford your rent.
Like most good ideas, it was born on a drunken night in Paris. Days before I'd left for the trip, my roommate unexpectedly decided to move out halfway through our lease. The better part of a bottle of Bourgogne deep, in a cramped Parisian airbnb rental with one of my closest friends, I bemoaned the imminent task of endeavoring to find a suitable replacement within mere weeks. As the denizens of Craigslist, with all their certain sociopathic tendencies and hygienic oddities, began to sound less and less appealing, my friend looked around our rented place. "Why not use airbnb?" she posited. And so it began.
The idea was that if I could transform my apartment into an enticing enough space, I'd rent it out at a high (but still competitive in the oh-so reasonable real estate climate of New York) price for a weekend or two a month, preferably while I was out of town, and make up enough of the rent to live in it solo the rest of the time. The only trick? I couldn't begin renovating until my roommate moved out, leaving mere days to turn my "flex" (New York realtors' euphemism of choice for an apartment that anywhere else in the world would fit one person, but also theoretically, feasibly could fit two) into a pristine one-bedroom with a living room sleeper couch. The need for the security of a few reservations before taking on the challenge of renovations presented an interesting Catch 22 for the listing page on airbnb.
Over another bottle of wine, this time stateside, another friend and I scraped together a few Instagram photos that somewhat showed various corners of my apartment, and put old creative writing classes to good use in an embellished description of a home that was, for the most part, existent only as a vision in our Cabernet-fueled imaginations. We had dinner and waited a few hours. Nothing. We drank more wine as I slowly resigned myself to the grim necessity of continuing my cramped existence with a hastily-selected roommate who, by all SVU-inspired logic, would most certainly be a serial killer.
But when I awoke the next morning, the airbnb fairy had visited. Eight (eight!) reservation requests gleamed in my inbox, awaiting my action. I perused my options (I had options! I was airbnb popular!). Gingerly, ecstatically, I accepted my first one. Well, I told myself, this is really happening. And the renovation countdown began.
