London Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Fold-Out Sofa, Sort of in Dublin!

What is it? The phrase "a fold-out sofa in a kitchen" seems somehow diminishing of what the owner/operators are trying to do with this space, so as a show of good faith I'm willing to mark this up instead as "a fold-out sofa in a nicely decorated kitchen";
Where is it? Co. Dublin, just about fucking barely;
What is there to do locally? Well, it says here that there is a beach nearby, so I suppose you can imagine for a moment your life as a beach bae – imagine your hot bod, flexing on the beach all day every day, and all the surfing in the sun you’ll do, and how lush and tousled your hair will look sprayed in the salty air of it all day, you in a thick-knitted cardigan over a bare chest gripping your knees in front of a fire pit as the sun sets behind you, gently strumming an acoustic guitar, you and your friends all grilling simple foods and talking to each other about how that was The Best Summer We Ever Had – but then you realise it's in Ireland and the beach will have about four functional days a year, and the rest of the time you will spend being directly blasted by sea winds every single time you leave the house;
Alright, how much are they asking? €1,050 (£922) pcm, a price we will: get back to!

Let's assume you are a sensible person of sound mind and solid enough logic. Let us assume that. You are not, of course – all those times you stay up until 2AM re-watching old Vine compilations! All the times you have to go to the work bathrooms just to do weeping! The sheer! Amount of money! You don’t have! That you spend! On Depop! Every! Month! – but let’s, for now, just assume you’re mentally well and OK. Riddle me this, then:

Say you're a sane person (see above). You're renting a one-bed studio apartment. You put it on the market in March, for €950, and it doesn’t sell. So you list it, again, in May, for €40 more. And then when that doesn’t sell, 12 days later, you list it again for €1,050. That is illogical, right? To you, as a sane person. That is "quite mad". For numbers' sake: that's a 10.5 percent increase over 82 days. Keep that up and we’re looking at €1,155 by the 20th of August this year. By October of 2019, taking a more modest 10 percent rent increase every two-and-a-half months, we're looking at €1,859.40 pcm. We have not even looked at the flat yet (it is a bad flat), but that is not the point. When an estate agent or landlord tells you they are increasing their rent because of "market prices", this is the uneasy quicksand on which they are building. If everyone is knocking up the price of their shithole on a monthly basis, people who don’t knock up the price of their shithole on a monthly basis are left behind. That’s just business, baby!

Anyway, rampant and deep-to-the-bones corruption aside: how do you fancy paying 10 percent more than you could have two months ago for a fucking fold-out sofa in a kitchen?

Let's go through this, piece-by-piece. It's an overly decorated kitchen done up in the tastes and styles of someone else's mum, which somehow makes it worse than the magnolia-and-IKEA-bed décor we’re used to seeing in these places. As the listing states, the flat is situated "above a pottery", meaning it is "very warm", which sounds good in the winter, but I feel like being directly above a blazing kiln you can’t temperature control will be less-than-ideal for summer. You also have a tiny bathroom with an enormous and mad sink.

You should know that "excellent references from previous landlords will be required in advance of arranging a viewing". You cannot live here until you have proven yourself, repeatedly, to be excellent. Excellence is the least your new landlords deserve. They require €1,050 of excellence, from you, and they will give you too much Laura Ashley fabric in too small a space in return.

Wait for it. You are allowed to share a washing line with the other two tenants in this building, who I’m assuming are either the owners who lovingly over-decorated this place (eerie smiles, I imagine the people who decorated this as having, weird unblinking smiles and every conversation always seems to come back round to God) or two, separate, extremely unhappy people paying far too much for a tiny space.

Wait for it. Your living room is a laminated-tablecloth with a lamp next to it. Wait for it. Your kitchen is the same room, and it is a kitchen.

It’s coming. The bed: here we are. The bed is this: the bed is a fold-out sofa that intersects with a small haberdashered bench w/ matching curtains. The landlady starts screaming if you change the bedding to anything that doesn’t match. It sounds like it is directly above a kiln and you wake up each day sweating. It costs you €1,050, a month, (£920), in not-even-the-central-part of Dublin, to live here. You cannot afford it, and even if you could you wouldn’t want it. The housing market in a nutshell. I deeply hope your references are excellent.

@joelgolby