Renting blog: What to do with others people’s junk, asks Jeannie

My housemates and I decided to spring-clean this weekend. Many hands make light work, until you start opening cupboards and drawers and realise that you have accumulated a lot of other people’s junk.

Moving into an ongoing shared rental property means the house has never been empty. Forgotten boxes from previous renters remain hidden underneath stairs and in hallway cupboards. All the landlord cares about is that what’s on the inventory is still here.

So what do we do with old satellite dishes, broken furniture – and a biltong maker? What’s that, you ask. And so did we when we saw it: a giant box-like structure made of wood with a plug and hooks – is it a sideboard, drinks cupboard, Ikea bookcase gone wrong? It stayed in the lounge, too heavy to move until a previous tenant, who was a South African, popped by to collect some post and explained.

He said he’d constructed this wooden box the size of a sofa when he planned to start a business making the South African delicacy of dried meat, called biltong, to sell to other expats.  He promised to bring a van to collect it the following weekend, so we cleared the magazines and junk mail off it and couldn’t wait to wave it goodbye. That was a month ago and he hasn’t been seen since.

We decided to move it to the garage. Until we opened that up and realised we had bikes, office chairs and a suitcase of photos and travel mementoes all of which didn’t belong to any of us but had filled all the empty space in there.

So the biltong maker has remained part of the living room furniture, much like the Egyptian artwork over the mantelpiece and the neon pink faux-fur scatter cushion on the couch – part of the legacy of a rented home.

Tags: cleaning up, diary of a renter, Jeannie's blog, junk, London, Renting, sharehouse