Just divorced and wanting money, I took in a lodger and made £7,200 a 12 months. Learn from my errors and you’ll take pleasure in straightforward cash too: NAOMI CRAWFORD

I thought I’d hit the jackpot with my first lodger: a holistic yoga teacher who didn’t drink and loved to eat healthily.

But it turned out, as a strict vegan, she objected to me cooking meat in certain pans, and was obsessed with composting and organising the recycling to the extent I began to feel like a stranger in my own home.

When she said she was leaving because I was ‘difficult to live with’, I laughed at her chutzpah and helped her pack.

You don’t save up to buy the home of your dreams just so you can move a lot of strangers into it. But that is what I found myself doing in 2021, after breaking up with my husband and buying a place of my own just as the cost-of-living crisis hit.

With energy bills and mortgage rates rising, taking in a lodger seemed an obvious way to make extra income.

The trouble was, I hadn’t shared a place with anyone outside a romantic relationship since my 20s. Now, at 45, I was planning to live with complete strangers. My first problem was making snap judgments about potential candidates on a single meeting. Who would I like, who would scam me, and who was a psychopath?

After the yoga teacher, a well-dressed woman in her late 40s moved in. She seemed cultured, well-travelled and spoke sweetly about her grown-up children. The kitchen was so neat and clean, it took me a few weeks to realise that she wasn’t using it very often but instead staying in her bedroom all evening . . . with a bottle of vodka.

When she didn’t pay her second month’s rent, I confronted her and she moved out overnight – leaving a dozen empty cocktail cans under her bed.

Perhaps men would be easier? For a while I gave my spare room to a 50-something recent divorcee, whose ex, he told me gleefully, was rather suspicious of my motives. She needn’t have ­worried. Her delightful former husband would sit in my kitchen every evening complaining about her endlessly, as if I were providing therapy along with the room.

I can only hope the more than three million people who lease a furnished room in the UK have better luck. Supply and demand is certainly rising. Leading flatshare site SpareRoom reports a whopping 89 per cent increase in those taking in lodgers from 2021 to 2024 (especially among the over-65s), no doubt enticed by the £7,500 you can earn tax-free under the Government’s Rent-a-Room scheme.

Rather sadly, another SpareRoom survey found that searches for house-shares among people aged 55 to 64 increased by 239 per cent between 2011 and 2022, while those aged 45 to 54 saw a 114 per cent increase.

My grey divorcee certainly wasn’t the only one out there.

In a way, I found it easier leasing to younger people in their 20s, who spent most of the weekend out. Yes, they tended to be far messier, eating food and leaving plates in their rooms, and often inviting random friends back, or playing dreadful music that I could hear drilling into my head from my bedroom. But at least they didn’t want to talk to me.

I hadn’t factored in all the ­compromises I would have to make. Or new rules I’d have to come up with. I hadn’t expected to have to tell grown-ups to clean the bath after each use, for ­example, but I did. Repeatedly.

Problems arose that I hadn’t anticipated. I didn’t know what to do when one girl moved in and her boyfriend started staying over every night. I felt outnumbered in my own house.

Sometimes I sat in my bed with my headphones on just in case I accidentally heard late-night noises coming through the walls from the other bedroom. It made me uncomfortable in my own home – and I have never felt more single. Nor had I considered the new culture of working from home, which meant most of my lodgers were around all day. Not only did I never get the place – my place – to myself, but they also wanted the heating on from 9am to 9pm.

In fact, I had to have a lot of uncomfortable conversations about money. At first, it had seemed sensible to advertise the room as inclusive of bills. But when winter set in and energy costs started climbing, I realised I’d made a serious mistake.

The average rent for a room in London is £993 per month, while in the rest of the UK it’s £670. I’d looked at what others were charging in my Wiltshire town and priced mine at £600. A good deal, I’d thought naively. Though the truth was, without bills on top, it was an excellent one.

I started to live in a state of ­permanent anxiety over people leaving the lights on or using the washing machine and dryer every day. I lost count of the number of times in that first year I made an awkward little comment about not turning the thermostat up, or trying to keep the heating off until the evening.

Indeed, I found it frustrating that a lot of my lodgers didn’t care for my home the way I did.

After all the work and money I’d spent on buying a house I was proud of and the love I’d put into decorating it, I was hurt when people treated it poorly.

When one tenant moved out, for example, I discovered a terrible mould problem around the ­windows in their room. It must have been going on for months, yet they had never bothered to speak to me about it. (Although landlords have a right to enter their lodger’s room, I didn’t like to without permission.)

I remember flushing pink when asking one of the younger lodgers who hoarded plates and cups in his bedroom whether he was ventilating the place sufficiently.

And those ‘money conversations’ didn’t always end with polite agreement, but with raised voices instead.

Falling asleep in the same house as someone who has made it plain they dislike you is like being in any bad relationship. A couple of times, I found myself hiding in the bathroom to have whispered phone conversations with friends.

It goes without saying that sharing had a disastrous effect on my love life. Bedroom action was very far from my mind when I first started leasing a room. But after a year or so of singledom, I thought I might date again.

That went one of two ways with my lodgers, depending on their personalities. Either they were enormously interested in who I was seeing, where I was going and what I was wearing, which was sweet but intrusive.

Or they rolled their eyes and told me how terrible modern ­dating was and how I’d never meet anyone nice, which was ­incredibly disheartening.

I never invited dates to sleep over. I just found it too embarrassing. When I did start seeing someone, we stayed at his place or went to a hotel.

Despite all this, the money was hugely helpful. Once the bill issue had been sorted out, in my ­second year of leasing the room, I could afford to keep the house toasty because other people were sharing the load.

I made about £7,200 a year – deliberately within the Rent-A-Room band because it made the tax less complicated.

When I went away on holidays, it was also reassuring to know someone was in the house.

As time went on, I learnt to be pickier. I did a stricter job of checking references – from workplaces and former landlords. I set ground rules and wrote lodgers’ agreements. We got a cleaner and I took fair deposits.

Ultimately, and to my surprise, I become friends with a lot of the people I lived with. A couple of them lived with me for more than a year. We sat around in the evening chatting, and went to the pub together, and I found I enjoyed the company of the little family in my house.

Right now, I have a lodger living with me who I really get on with. When I come home, we sit in the kitchen comparing our days, she looks after my cat when I go away, and I really appreciate how tidy she is.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel a little kick of happiness when she gave her notice in last month. My place will be my own again!

For a little while, that is – I’ll have no choice but to find another lodger soon. Divorcees welcome, but no vegan fusspots.

Naomi Crawford is a pseudonym. All names and identifying details have been changed.