This woman house-sat for her friends and received a £300 bill

Something doesn't seem right

Housesitting may be a dying tradition in the age of holiday rental apps, but if a friend asks you to look after their flat while they’re away, then that’s the agreement they should stick to, right?

You’re watering their plants, dusting off their bookshelves, warding off burglars and essentially agreeing not to be your usual messy self for a few weeks.

So what if after all that, you got hit with a surprise £300 bill from the people you helped out?

This is what happened to one woman, who was so taken aback, she asked for advice (and had a bit of a rant) on Mumsnet - before deleting the threads when they went viral. 

The housesitter, who uses the pseudonym Hake Lively, tells BBC Three that she agreed to housesit for her friends Simon and Liz (not their real names) for a month while they were away on their honeymoon.

Hake and her partner had just moved out of London to try and save money, while their friends – a couple they’ve known for more than 10 years – live in a “lovely flat” in a busy part of the capital.

“Off the back of us moaning about our 90-minute commute, they said their honeymoon was coming up in March and that they’d love us to housesit,” she says. “We agreed to do it, although it was mainly me, as my partner was away most of the time for work.

“But I was really surprised afterwards when they sent us a message asking for a ‘token’ payment of £300 towards bills. There is no way we’d used anything like that amount in amenities.”

Hake admits that her commute to work was a lot easier from her friends' flat, but doesn’t think that should matter.

“The assumption is that we’d had a bit of a treat staying in such a nice central location, and they’d given us a little holiday from our crappy suburban life,” she says.

Rather than just handing over the money for an easy life, as her partner suggested, Hake decided to confront her friends about it.

“We do a pub quiz with them, and when we met up for that I told them that I didn’t think it was fair to ask for payment when we thought it had been a bit of a mutual favour,” she adds. “The flat is old too, so in the freezing Beast from the East their pipes would have frozen if we hadn’t been there.”

That was when Simon and Liz apparently admitted that they'd "overspent on their honeymoon and had to put quite a bit on the credit cards". Yikes. 

Needless to say, the whole thing has soured their friendship.

“The atmosphere got a bit awkward and none of us have spoken since,” Hake says. “My partner was thinking of asking Simon to be his best man and I don’t want him to now.”

And things are a bit frosty with her partner as well.

“I'm seriously annoyed at my partner as he's saying that he'll just pay it and try and forget the whole thing,” Hake says, adding that she's glad they haven't taken the plunge and got a joint account yet.

But Hake does have plenty of supporters - namely, Mumsnetters.

“They sound deluded!” one person wrote, while another added: "How on earth can they justify charging you £300?!"

And one commenter fumed: "£300 is NOT a token amount. That is loads of money and completely unreasonable."

Ah, the internet. You can always trust it to be on your side.