Rent out a room?

This is the latest idea from an academic in another state. She claims there are thirteen million unused bedrooms in this country. Many of them are in the houses of elderly people living alone. Now she is suggesting that the bedrooms could be rented out to people in need.

Good idea? I think not. I can see all sorts of problems with this suggestion.

This house has four bedrooms - but really has only two. There is the bedroom my parents and then just my father used. There is the bedroom I use as both sleeping and workspace. That is not an ideal arrangement but the way we had to set things up.

There is the room we call "the office" which is where the Senior Cat had the professional part of his library and his teaching materials. It is a very small room. There are bookshelves and cupboards on three sides and they were crammed with material.  Used as a bedroom there would be room for a bed and a small wardrobe and nothing much else.

There is the room we call "the sewing room". It was my mother's den. She did her sewing in there of course but it also contained (and still contains) many things she owned - books, other craft material, the photograph albums of her grandchildren and more.  After her death it became a dumping ground. The Senior Cat would tell me, "Put it in the sewing room" if we did not know where to put something. Things have piled up in there and it is the next room I must tackle. It is the one I am looking forward to the least. It will not be easy. I doubt I will be sentimental about much of it but it will be a struggle to know just what to do with what is there. Too good to throw away? Who can use it? Who in the family might want that? There will be these sort of questions and more. 

Before we knew we would be required to sell this house there were discussions about whether we could work out a way of me staying here. The bedroom my parents had also has an "ensuite" bathroom. There is an area which might be called a "dressing room" too. It sounds very fancy but it is all really very ordinary. There was however a real possibility that it could have been converted into a very comfortable "bed-sit" for a student. We talked about it and decided against it. 

The potential problems and issues were just too many. Would they be noisy? (I need quiet in which to work.) Would they need English tuition? Would they be clean and tidy? What times of the day would they be coming and going? Would I be woken at night by their activities? How much would they be able to pay? What would happen if they did not pay their rent? What if they became ill? 

These were just some of the questions we started to think about. Now I think of even older people trying to adjust to someone else living in their space without even the benefits of the more separate accommodation we could have offered here. There is the potential for so much harm to be done, demands which might be made and more.

I don't see simply renting out a room as the answer even if there was no financial penalty for doing so.