Need some advice/opinions
Myself and my partner let a friend lodge with us a few months back. At the time she had no where to go and we offered to help, as it’s just the 2 of us with 3 bedrooms. The original deal was a stop gap for her whilst she got herself sorted, we agreed she wouldn’t pay rent but instead pay for household bits and bills. This was a short term fix, she has a cat who we originally said would have to stay elsewhere as we have cats and a puppy of our own and our cats are female and not yet spayed and live inside and hers is a male, outside cat. She also informed us all her belongings would be stored elsewhere, it would just be her and the stuff she needed for a short while, whilst she got back on her feet.
She was unable to find anywhere for her cat to stay so we suggested he stayed downstairs in our dinning room which leads out into the garden and would give him access in and out - it’s a big space and cosy and would mean he was completely separate from our pets, we even suggested she could bring him up stairs at night - our spare room is tiny so this seemed a better option for him.
The week she moved in, we were informed she’d lost her job and the storage had fallen through, so suddenly we had her, alllll her stuff and her cat in our tiny spare room (and her belongings filling our garage and dinning room). She then refused to house the cat downstairs and instead insisted we put up a ‘shelf’ on the outside of our mid terrace house so he could jump in and out. We turned this down, so after a lot of trying to change our minds, she settled for him being let out the front door (carried down).
We realised within a month in, none of our ground rules had really been respected, she was regularly letting her cat mix with ours and then randomly dropped on us, her cat has a gum disease which can be transferred through salvia. She did not contribute to bills and would leave all her dirty washing up in the bowl for us to clean. She then began to leave her cat outside all evening and go out, which caused our neighbours to complain he was trying to get into their houses - to which her response was to tell them to ‘f off.’ She spilled some kind of ink on our carpet which she didn’t inform us of and it’s now ground in and the whole thing needs replacing, put posters on our walls and cracked our paintwork.
As you can imagine, we are very frustrated with the situation and became even more so, when she asked to write up a contract claiming she was paying rent so she could claim more benefits. We refused as she was not actually wanting to pay but transfer it to us and then us send it back and we said we cannot since that is fraud and we are in jobs that require a DBS.
This caused her to become even worse with us and she now regularly moans at us for things like letting her cat in when it’s raining or shutting her bedroom window if we’re going out for the evening and she’s also out till late.
We decided to inform her, we would need our spare room back by the end of jan (6 weeks notice), we stated this was mainly due to our cat ripping out her fur due to the stress of the male cat in the house, meaning until he’s gone, our poor girl is on steroids and stress relief which is costing us hundreds. This combined with the fact she leaves heaters and lights on at all times and has 2 hour baths which has caused our bills to triple, has meant we can no longer have her stay.
She has taken this awfully, threatening suicide and claiming she’ll be on the streets. We have suggested again and again, she contacts the council to try and get housing support but she refused to do so until we told her she had 6 weeks.
Was it fair of us to give her a deadline to move out? We genuinely cannot afford it and my partner grew up in a household with a parent who regularly threatened suicide so as you can guess, he is finding it all very hard