Just to bring you up to speed, we’ve been renting for a few years now.  Since before we got married, actually.  We are renters.  We rent.  We don’t own our own home.  Sometimes I’m really defensive about this, other times I’m smug as all get-up.  Like when people are whinging about the size of their mortgages?  Smug.

But today I was defensive about it.

We had the first of our bi-annual (is that twice a year, or once every two years? I’m going with ‘twice a year’) inspections today.  Somebody from the real estate agency that property-manages our house comes and pays us a visit every six months to check that we haven’t trashed the house or allowed a family of boat people to move into one of the kids’ bedrooms.  I guess that’s what they’re checking for, I could be wrong.  So anyway, today the lady showed up with her clipboard and her checklist of things to check, and she was pleasant enough and everything, but then she came out of our toilet and said

“You might want to dust the cover of that air vent.”

Might I?

Truly, how important is it, for the well-being of this old house with its crappy insulation and missmatched curtains and peeling bathroom paint and falling-down fence pailings and faulty wiring and clogged plumbing and dodgy wok burner and creaky floorboards and c1960s light fittings and apricot-laminated kitchen benches to have DUST FREE AIR VENTS?

I really wanted to punch her.  Just for a moment.

I know we’re renters.  But we’re really good ones.  We pay our rent on time every month.  The carpet cleaner who came late last year was shocked to learn the carpets were seven years old, he said they looked like they’d been laid six months ago.  The guy that cleaned our windows for us was surprised to know he was the first to be given the job in all the years we’ve been here.  We look after this house as though it was our own, goddammit, and so when somebody comes along and tells me that I need to dust the air vent above the toilet I take it personally.  How would it make you feel, if you had to get your house ready for inspection twice a year?  It’s a little bit humiliating, that’s what it is.

The thing is, we really love this house.  I was SO excited when we found it, because we’d been looking for a while and nothing seemed to be available and suddenly I found this house and then it was ours.  I still love it.  The location is awesome.  Our landlord is terrific.  Our neighbours are sensational.  The verandah is lovely.  The kitchen is enormous.  I don’t even mind the apricot laminate, really.  Granted, I didn’t think we’d still be here nearly seven years later, but this is how things have turned out.  And so even though this isn’t, technically, our house, this is our HOME.  And to have someone come in twice a year and wander around, into our bedroom, into my daughters’ bedrooms, like this is just another property they have to keep tabs on… well, it bothers me.  Fair enough if we were a group house of constantly rotating University students but we’re a family and we have lived here a while and they should know us well enough by now.  They should have a file on us, and it should have a Post-It note attached that says “they have been taking excellent care of this house longer than you have been working in this agency, so show some respect.”

I’d like to see her bloody air vents.