Why You Should Never Arrange Housing on the Internet

This is the tale of our horrible first temporary house in Oxford.  A cautionary tale, indeed.
We are living in college housing, which is very nice, and in a prime location.  We knew all along that this was where we wanted to live.  When Jones was in England in October 2009, he looked around at the different colleges and thought this housing looked the nicest.  So, he applied to Green Templeton College and was accepted.  He immediately put our names on the housing list for a 3 bedroom on Observatory Street.  (Now, in case you are confused, in Oxford, you join a college, which is like a fraternity or like being in Griffendoor or Slytherin, or Hufflepuff or what's that fourth one called?.)  Anyway, Green Templeton said that housing would not be available until September 29.  But, we needed to arrive earlier because I got EC into primary school which started September 6.  So, where to live for most of September??
I got busy on the internet and looked for a short let for the month of September.  Things were not looking promising.  Most people wanted to rent out their place for the whole year.  Some property companies were offering short lets for crazy amounts of money.  Living in a hotel room for a month with 2 kids just didn't seem wise.  So, I put out an ad for a short let for the month of September.  A seemingly nice woman answered my ad and said that she had a place just north of town for the month that she could rent us for a reasonable amount of money.  We were thrilled to have a place!  So, we signed her contract and made arrangements to have a check ready to hand over to get the keys on the day we arrived in Oxford.
Enough with the background information.  When we arrived in Oxford, we got in the taxis with all our stuff and told them to go to Lady Margaret Hall (where our landlady is a professor of Psychology) to pick up the keys and drop off the check.  Then, we drove up to Cutteslowe to the house.  It was a 10 minute walk from a bus stop and in a middle class residential area north of Oxford.  Nothing special, nothing too nice.  You had to take a bus to get anywhere.  But, all we needed at that point was a place to crash, because we were exhausted!
We walk into the house  and see dirty floors, hairs everywhere, and bad decor!  It was so dirty, we didn't even want to let Archer out of his stroller.  We immediately found a vacuum and started using it, but it was completely clogged with dirt and hairs, like the owner had never emptied it.  So, we emptied it, and the hairs and dirt just kept coming.  Jones ended up taking it apart and cleaning it and putting it back together, but then it didn't work.  So, we had nasty floors and no way to clean them.
Well, we figured we would just go to bed.  The landlady had said she would have sheets and towels for us.  I guess we assumed they would be clean.  The sheets and towels were covered in little curly hairs.  Nasty!  The bathroom was a mess, so I had to clean the tub so we could give the kids a bath, since it had been a day and a half since any of us had bathed.  We got the kids to sleep, and we showered and slept in the dirty bed, feeling disgusted and depressed to have to live in this dump for a month.
We woke up the next morning, after a fitful night of hours of lying in bed looking at the ceiling, to the sounds of EC throwing up.  She threw up all over her bed, her blankets, the couch.  So, we had to call the doctor and send Jones out for pedialyte and washing detergent so we could wash all the bedding and couch cushion covers.  The doctor was so kind, and even called us on our American cel phone.  We took EC in to the Doctor, having to navigate the bus system with a sick 4 year old and a baby.  We had only one stroller, so EC rode in the stroller, while Jones carried A on his back in the baby backpack.  We were so glad we thought to bring that.   The doctor couldn't find anything wrong with EC and said that she was probably just reacting to the jet lag.  We were happy to hear that, as we thought she had contracted some stomach bug that we would all shortly fall ill with.  So, we went back into town and bought new sheets and towels and groceries.
When we told the land-lady about our concerns over the state of the house, she just shrugged as if to say that different people have different levels of cleanliness.  We found out on Monday that our Observatory Street house was actually ready for us to move into.  Oh, if we had only known that before we paid for the entire month at that dump!  So, we decided we would just throw away $1600 and move in anyway.  We were so depressed in the other place that we would leave in the morning and not come home until bedtime.  We asked our landlady for some portion of our rent back, but she would not give us anything.  So, we kept the keys so she can't rent it out again this month and double her money.
As everyone always says, you should never sign a contract on a place you've never seen.  In this instance, we didn't know what other options we had.  So, we trusted our landlady, who is a professor at Oxford, to be an upstanding person.  We lost out, but we are wiser and happier in our new place!