Alex Knight took in a lodger just a few days after giving birth to her youngest child. “I knew I would need someone who would be quiet and not wake the baby,” she says. “We took in a 19-year-old girl, who’s very sensitive about our family life but who also loves playing with the children. Coralee’s more like a friend now.”

Sonia Purnell, The Telegraph – 11 Dec 2008

Unusual perhaps, but it is not unknown for good lodgers to become great friends, or even house, child or pet sitters. Sadly, however, not every case turns out as happily – it is all too easy to end up with a lodger from hell.

One west London family were faced with an angry husband threatening to burn their house down because they had unknowingly taken in his bride under an arranged marriage, who was running away from him. The same family gave up taking in lodgers altogether when their next paying guests were an American couple whose outsize figures, it turned out, were the result of constant 12-hour cooking marathons in their kitchen. Full Article