In the autumn of 2010, at the age of 25, I moved into a tiny, terraced cottage in a Stoneybatter cul de sac. It was the first time I’d ever lived alone.
The cottage was one of a handful built in the early 20th century in an area with, I once read, the lowest ratio of green space to buildings of any in Dublin. The homes had been built to house workers for the nearby Guinness factory, and gardens had been low on the list of priorities.
My house, number 61 Kirwan Street Cottages, had what was described in the listing as a back yard – a space maybe four feet deep and twice as wide, enough to accommodate a washing line above and a bicycle below.
The day I moved in, my mum helped me get things set up. We cleaned the kitchen – it had been left in a somewhat rough state – discovering pretty quickly (but not quickly enough) that someone had left a large package of Donegal Catch frozen cod in the freezer, which had been unplugged for who knows how long.
It took days to rid the kitchen of the lingering odour of rotting fish.
It was on that first day that we discovered, too, that the house had no hot running water. The owner, a man in his twenties who lived in London – as so many men in their twenties did, in the early ‘oughts – had bought the house three months earlier and done what the letting agent had optimistically termed “renovations”, cosmetic improvements that turned out to be more style than substance, which was not a lot to begin with.
In his attempts to maximise the space, he had converted the one-bedroom home, all 450 sq ft of it, into a two-bed.
The original bedroom had been divided in two, adding a wall and knocking into the attic space above to provide a skylight in what was now the “master”: a room that fit a double bed, a small, single-width dresser and not much else. If I wanted to dress – or undress – in comfort, I did so in the other bedroom, which I quickly turned into my walk-in wardrobe.
In removing the attic space, though, he’d also taken out the hot water tank – who needs one of those, I imagined him scoffing, tossing it into the back of his car and bringing it to the nearest dump – and decided to just… do without.
As someone who’s never renovated a house, I can only guess at his thinking –although, really, he’s never renovated a house, either.
The shower, thankfully, was electric, but I had to boil the kettle to wash up; when I washed my hands, it was in an icy cold stream, water that grew ever more frigid as the weeks wore on. By October, I was trying to dirty my hands as infrequently as possible; rinsing grease or potato crud off felt like a Wim Hof style endurance test, except with less of a sense of superiority.
I adopted two kittens from the local animal shelter, because I had the space and worked, mostly, from home, so had the time to dedicate to them. But mostly, I wanted the company. I named them Calvin and Dexter, after the DJ and the TV murderer, respectively, and spent long nights cuddling them in front of the television, one asleep on my lap and the other on my shoulder.
They were house cats, in the sense that they ate and slept indoors, but I let them out, too; I had been raised in the country and firmly believed cats belonged outside. I would come home, after a few hours in town, and find them lazing on the path outside my front door; once, a neighbour admonished me for leaving them alone.
“They were starving!” she said. “Crying for their mammy!”
Another day, another neighbour – right next door this time – knocked on my door to let me know she’d found Dexter on her couch.
On a chilly winter afternoon, they both came barreling in the back door at high speed with a sky-blue budgie, dead as a doornail, in tow. I shut the door immediately behind them, praying I wouldn’t be forced to ignore a series of heartbroken “missing budgie” posters in the weeks to come. (Either there were no such posters or, so determined was I to ignore them that I didn’t see any.)
That year, there was a snowstorm that stopped the buses and cancelled the trains and had drivers stuck in their cars on the motorways for hours. We heard tales of babies being born in Nissan Micras and people abandoning their vehicles to walk miles in the snow, afraid they’d be stuck overnight, running out of petrol and freezing to death in their back seats.
My mum came to stay with me for a week; she was working in town then and, with no trains running, it made more sense for her to commute from my house than to try to make the twice-a-day journey to and from Kildare.
We slept in my double bed and watched the 9 o’clock news every night and, though she complained about their enthusiasm, I would come home from work to find her sitting on the couch, covered in kittens.
She was still there when the snow started to thaw; though the temperature had risen and piles of snow, shovelled by hand either side of people’s driveways, had turned to brown slush, public transport wouldn’t pick back up for another few days.
So it was she who walked into the kitchen one evening and found icy water dripping, straight down, through its flat roof. It had been built as an extension on to the original house and, I was not shocked to note, shoddily so. As a result, when the snow started to melt, the sheer volume and weight of it had meant that it couldn’t slide off the roof quickly enough, instead melting straight down, into my kitchen.
I loved that little house, and my life in it, but this was the last straw. Having seen how long it took my landlord to rectify the hot water issue – he had, four months in, eventually put some kind of heater beneath the kitchen sink, so that the kitchen tap would produce hot (ish) water, not quite hot enough to get grease off a pan but better, I was resigned to think, than nothing – I couldn’t see this costly roof issue being rectified with any great haste.
When I told him I was leaving – forgoing the required month’s notice because, well, it was raining in my kitchen – he informed me that he would not be refunding my deposit. Quite aside from my lack of notice, he said, there was the issue of the paintings I had hung in the living room; for each hole in the wall, he seemed to be saying, I was to be charged a €100 fee.
It was the first – and only – time I’ve dealt with a truly difficult landlord, and I was at a loss as to what to do, but I was also characteristically determined not to let him away with it.
Tempted as I was to talk to Joe, he had recently – for no reason I could discern – blocked me on Twitter, and so I was forced to contact the Residential Tenancies Board for advice.
I don’t quite remember what information I gave them – too much, I’m sure, probably detailing the ins and outs of our hot water drama; the leaky kitchen ceiling; and then the back and forth we’d been having about my €850 deposit – but they responded quickly, letting me know that I could take my landlord to the Small Claims Court, if I so wished, but also that they couldn’t find any record of him in their system.
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is a glimmer of hope, I thought, and immediately emailed my (now ex) landlord.
“I contacted the RTB to get their advice,” I told him, “and they noted that they didn’t have any record of you as a landlord. Would you like me to pursue this further, or would you like to give me back my money?”
I have never been as delighted with myself as I was in that moment; the moment I read his response came a close second.
“I’ll transfer your money now,” he wrote. “I trust this is the last correspondence we’ll have.”
Calvin, Dexter and I moved across the road, into another Stoneybatter terraced cottage, this time with hot water and a bedroom that had space for a bed and a few belongings, and a housemate who cooked artichoke hearts and served them with Kerrygold butter and sea salt.
A vast improvement.