BE SURE TO CHECK OUT THE VIDEO AT THE END OF THE POST!

When we were getting our Airbnb off the ground, speed was the name of the game. Well, sort of. It still took about six months from the time we closed until the time we actually started hosting, but we were moving as fast as we could with two full-time jobs and a toddler in tow!

After purchasing the house, we didn’t have a lot of money left over to work with for renovations, so the plan was to do what was absolutely necessary to start bringing in income ASAP and make more improvements down the road once we’d started making money. 

Our upstairs bathroom is the perfect example of this.

(I apologize for the horrible photo quality. The only ones I have are stills pulled from the video I took during our walk through–yes, all this stuff was in the house when we took possession of it!)

It needed help. A gut renovation would’ve been the ideal scenario, but that definitely wasn’t in the budget. We’re about ten months into hosting now and we’ve only just started to save for that. 

So, in the meantime, I started making some minor cosmetic improvements that would make the bathroom a little more appealing. 

I painted the walls. I tore down the gross old plastic tub surround and installed a fresh new one. And I put down peel and stick floor tiles. 

Choosing Peel And Stick Floor Tiles

When you Google ‘peel and stick floor tiles,’ there are a few options that dominate the big-box stores. 

After comparing the designs, I decided to go with these ones from FloorPops. 

Side note–I’m surprised by how few designs there are and how there aren’t more basic ones, like plain colors. I probably would have ordered something less busy if it were available, but I thought this was the best one from the selection available online.

They come in boxes of ten tiles. I ordered eight boxes at ~$12 each. 

This was a little more than I needed, but between having to cut some odd size end pieces and making a few mistakes, I wound up using all of the boxes. If you order them on Amazon like I did, you can always return any extra. 

Installing FloorPops Peel And Stick Tiles

When you first start sticking the tiles down, your first instinct will be to stick the corner of one of the tiles in the corner of the room and build outward from there. Don’t do this. 

Why? Because there’s a good chance that you’ll get to the other side of the room and be left with an awkwardly small strip for the last row of tiles, which looks weird.

Or, the more likely situation is that the walls of your room are not perfectly square, and as you move down the wall, your tiles will start to slant. 

So, instead of starting with one full tile in the corner of the room, you want to start in the middle and work your way toward the corners. 

I saw a mathematical equation somewhere for how to determine exactly where to start based on the size of your tiles, but it was so confusing. Since we’re using peel and stick tiles and not the real thing, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to just lay them out and eyeball how it will look best. 

Ideally, you want to have the pieces on the edges of the room be somewhere between ¼ to ¾  the width of a full tile, like this:

I hope that makes sense. 

Listen, if you get to an edge and it’s an awkwardly small strip, it’s not the end of the world. It’s much easier to cut these FloorPops tiles into thin pieces than it is to cut real tile. Believe me, I tried to cut thin tile pieces during this project. It was next to impossible and almost caused me to have a mental breakdown  

Once you have the layout decided, you literally just peel off the back of the tiles like a sticker and stick them into place. I stuck mine down right over the existing vinyl flooring. 

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND adding some additional sticking power using a product like this Gorilla Glue spray adhesive. While the tiles stuck pretty well on their own, I did have a few that started peeling up at the corners that I had to re-glue. 

I used the Gorilla Glue linked above on a peel and stick backsplash in my kitchen and have had no peeling!

As for cutting the edge pieces, the instructions recommend scoring the tile with a utility knife and breaking them. This works, but I think it’s a lot of effort for this kind of project. 

I used a piece of paper as a template, drew a line on the tile and used these heavy duty scissors to cut them. You can kind of get an idea of what I mean in the video that accompanies this post, in the part where I’m stenciling around the toilet. 

Again, I am plugging these scissors. Buy them. You will not regret it. 

I bought them at the start of the pandemic and they continue to be the most useful purchase I’ve made since. I whip them out for everything: DIY projects galore, cutting open that crazy annoying clamshell packaging on products, breaking down cardboard boxes, you name it. Using them brings a smile to my face.

The Verdict

Are these peel and stick tiles going to fool anybody into thinking they’re real tile? No. It’s very clear they’re vinyl.

But for the price–under $100 for a bathroom–they’re pretty darn good. For a cheap bathroom makeover, I don’t think you can find a better option, and you can do the whole room in a day.

If this were going to be a long-term update, I might have taken the time to use tile spacers and grout in between the tiles, which really takes the look up a notch. But at that point, you probably just want to go for actual tiles, which aren’t that much more difficult to install. 

I love that they were so inexpensive, so I won’t feel bad if we do end up gutting the bathroom within a year. And they made a dramatic improvement in the look of the room for minimal effort. 

While I don’t love the status quo of this bathroom, it works for the time being. So far no guests have complained about it, so it’s a win in my book!

Find the FloorPops tiles I used on Amazon here.

The post FloorPops Peel and Stick Tile Bathroom Update appeared first on Cabana State Of Mind.

Should you accept a booking from an Airbnb guest with no reviews? We did, and here’s what happened.

When we first launched our listing, we knew we’d have to set the bar a little lower to get our first bookings. For example, we set our prices lower than other listings in the area and offered a super flexible cancellation policy. 

After all, we were brand new and had zero reviews. We couldn’t expect guests to pay the same amount as they would for an established listing with hundreds of five-star reviews. 

We also set the bar low for our guest requirements. 

Airbnb allows you to set certain parameters for the guests you’ll host, like how many prior reviews they have and their star rating. If I remember correctly, we didn’t put any restrictions on these at all. We wanted to get our first few guests under our belt and start earning positive reviews! So, we had to be flexible. 

Within a few days of publishing our listing, we got our first booking request for an upcoming weekend. The guest had a brand new Airbnb profile and no prior reviews. Should we go for it?

What if they were a scam artist? What if they had a party and trashed our place?

On the other hand, they were taking a chance on us by booking our listing when it had no reviews from other guests. 

We decided to accept the booking. 

Airbnb Guests With No Reviews – During The Stay

Since these were our first-ever guests, I was on high alert. 

The day they were scheduled to check in I was glued to my phone, making sure to be available in case they had any issues. 

By around 10 that night I hadn’t heard from them. No news is good news, right? I turned my phone’s volume up as loud as it would go just in case any alerts came in overnight and went to sleep feeling pretty good.

Around 12:30 AM, I woke up to the ding! of a text. It was a short message from our guests.

“The heat isn’t working upstairs.”

Fuck. 

The heat has to be working, I thought. We just stayed there for a week!

My stomach turned. We lived an hour away and it was after midnight. If there actually was a problem with the heat, there was pretty much nothing I could do until the next day. I wanted our first guests to have a great experience, not run into issues on their very first night.

Sitting there in bed in the dark, I tapped out a response.

“Sorry about that! Have you tried turning up the thermostat on the living room wall?”

I had turned the heat down when we left earlier in the week. I was almost certain they just hadn’t turned it back up, but I couldn’t be sure. 

I sat there waiting for a response, unable to go back to sleep.

After about an hour, I messaged again.

“Has it warmed up yet?”

No response. 

At some point in the early morning hours, I finally drifted back off to sleep. 

The next morning, still no word from the guests. I weighed our options. Should I call them? Drive up to the house? Let it go until I heard back? 

I didn’t want to be annoying–after all, if the heat came on once they turned up the thermostat, they probably put their phones away and went on with their night. But I also didn’t want to leave them high and dry. 

I ended up calling around and finding a hardware store in the area that would deliver space heaters to the house. I put them on standby and messaged the guests again in the early afternoon.

“Let me know if the heat kicked in! I can set you up with some space heaters if it’s still not warm enough.”

Finally, they messaged back. 

“Sorry, just seeing this! Everything’s good, the heat is working!”

Phew. Crisis averted. 

We didn’t hear from them the rest of their trip.

The Turnover

As far as I could tell, our first guests had a smooth stay and hadn’t done anything crazy like robbed us or burned the house down, but I’d have a better idea once I got to the house to clean it. 

It was my first turnover and I was nervous about what I would find. 

I walked in the front door to find… things looking totally normal.

I was worried about nothing, I thought, relieved. 

I moved from the living room into the kitchen, where things looked a little messier. Clearly they’d been doing some cooking and hadn’t done a very good job of cleaning up. There was grease splattered on the stovetop and some unwashed pots and pans with caked-on food. Yucky, but nothing terrible. 

Then I went into the downstairs bathroom.

I was washing my hands in the sink when it came spurting up from the drain. 

Vomit. 

I’ll spare you too many details, but someone had puked in the bathroom sink.

Grossgrossgrossgrossgross!

Why?! Why not the toilet, which was less than two feet away? Drunk people know no reason. 

The sink was totally clogged, so in addition to turning over the entire house, I also had to make a trip to the hardware store for commercial strength drain opener and do three rounds of it before the sink was clear. 

I shot a little video to document the fun. 

What I Learned From Hosting Airbnb Guests With No Prior Reviews

1. Guests don’t read. 

They don’t read the messages you send and they don’t read the guest binder (where we had instructions/an explainer about the thermostat). After this stay, I taped instructions on the wall near the thermostat and other areas, like by the side of the roller shades and various light fixtures. 

2. Turnovers take longer than you think. 

Right after this stay, I started purchasing doubles of all our bedding so I can come in with a clean set of linens instead of doing laundry on site. 

3. Guests with no reviews are a wild card. 

These guests weren’t necessarily bad. They didn’t damage anything (aside from temporarily stopping up the sink) or break any rules. They left the house a little messy and finding a barf surprise was gnarly, but I guess that’s the whole point of having a cleaning fee.

After this, we turned on stricter settings for which guests could book our place. 

While I wouldn’t totally rule out Airbnb guests with no reviews in the future, I would definitely do a little bit more chatting back and forth to ask questions about what brings them to the area, who’s coming to the house, and set expectations for how Airbnb works.

Usually I prefer to be hands-off with guests, not bothering them with a bunch of messages while they’re on vacation, but being in closer contact with unreviewed guests might make them treat the property with a little more care. 

So, tell me: do you or would you accept guests with no reviews at your property?

Read more about the process of getting our short-term rental off the ground here!

The post Airbnb Guest With No Reviews – Our Hosting Experience appeared first on Cabana State Of Mind.