Fiona Cormican jokes that she could write a book about her rental experiences over the past decade and a half. If she did, it would span several genres - a tragi-comedy/horror epic with Dickensian parallels.

But even Scrooge might take issue with the landlord who advertised his bedsit in Portobello as "en suite". When Cormican went to see it, she discovered a bed, toilet and cooker lined up along one wall.

"It was great, you could have sat on the toilet, stirred your dinner with one hand and made your bed with the other," she laughs. "He thoughtfully offered to stick a bit of a curtain around the toilet to spare my blushes."

That was during her student days and, desperate though she was to find a place, she declined the offer. She went on to endure a series of rental nightmares. In her 15-year rental history, she has moved 14 times, although that period includes one happy five-year stay in a house in Kilmainham and some time out travelling.

With the hindsight and wisdom of someone who has reached the end of her renting days and is soon to move into her own house, she's able to laugh raucously about it all now. And it's just as well because a lesser mortal may have not have emerged so unscathed.

She agrees that some of her experiences are so bizarre, they enter the realm of the surreal.

"I've seen it all - including waking up in the middle of the night and finding my landlord standing at the foot of the bed.

"When I asked him what he was doing there, he claimed he had come to read the ESB meter and I was not to worry but go back to sleep. When I pointed out that it was 3 o'clock in the morning and that the meter was in the kitchen he said he liked to check on his girls now and then. I moved out the following week."

During her poverty-stricken time as a student in the early 1990s, she found herself in "an appalling situation" when the landlord of a house in Phibsboro let each of the rooms separately to individual tenants.

"The house wasn't divided into self-contained units so you had this weird scenario where you had to share a kitchen and bathroom with complete strangers. You wouldn't have a clue who was staying there at any one time and he was forever moving people in without consulting anyone in the house."

Student accommodation was then, as now, difficult to find.

"You'd get the Evening Herald, and go to the phone box with your load of 10 pence pieces. You'd queue up for hours only to find a flat was gone and then rush off with the Herald under your arm in the pouring rain to the next one."

One flat she went to view was so filthy, there were used condoms and sanitary towels under the bed. "The woman showing me the place said that the last tenants left it that way and it was their responsibility to clean the place after them."

After her student days, she spent time travelling and returned in 1998 to a shared house in Santry.

"Three of us moved in together and when one moved out, the landlord wanted to choose her replacement. We insisted that we wanted to interview the person but in the end he moved in a complete stranger. There was murder in the house. The new tenant was an obnoxious male who was filthy."

Another dodgy housemate was the girl who regularly brought men home for one-night stands.

"One night she had a row with a guy and threw him, not out of the house as you might expect, but out of her bedroom. He arrived in to my room, informing me that he'd been thrown out. I had my duvet pulled up around my ears and screamed at him to get out. He replied that there was no need to be like that and then started calling me a 'frigid bitch'. Eventually I leapt out of the bed and grabbed my portable easel. One of the girls in the house heard the commotion and we chased him out of the house together."

A more recent episode was the stand-off she and her two girlfriends had with a landlord in Chapelizod. They moved their belongings into the house and paid their deposit and everything seemed to be going to plan.

"One girl had a baby, I had a cat and we had two motorbikes between us. The landlord seemed to have no problems. He met us, the baby, the cat and the motorbikes and said we could move in.

"When we arrived at the house with the key, the locks had been changed." When we rang the landlord, he said he had changed his mind. One of the girls had an audition in RT╔ and her puppets were in the house and a lot of the baby's gear was in there. He told us to call back on Monday and he would sort something out. We rang the local Garda Station and they said they wouldn't get involved because it was a civil case. We threatened to break the locks and eventually a Garda detective, who was terrific, took pity on us.

"Luckily, when the detective called to the house the landlord was there. We got our stuff out and our deposit back." When asked why he changed his mind, the landlord told them that one of the girls had moved a double bed into the house and he "wasn't having that kind of carry-on in the house".

Curiously, one of Fiona's fondest memories is of the quirky lop-sided flat in the city, which stood alone above a pub in an area where all the other buildings had either been demolished or condemned.

"The building was slanting, and every evening I would come home and my furniture would have slid down the room and I'd have to rearrange it.

"The pub had a Dalmatian and they let it roam free. One morning I had to go to college for an exam and I opened the door and the dog started snarling at me. I slammed the shut door and realised I was effectively trapped in the flat. There was no-one on the street, no-one living in the other buildings, so nobody could hear me if I shouted for help. In the end, I had to throw him bits of ham so I could get out of the flat."

It appears that at last she has been granted leave of rental purgatory. She has no gruesome stories to impart about her current abode. There are no mad landlords, snarling dogs or unsavoury room mates - just Nirvana in Ashbourne.

emorgan@irish-times.ie

Tips For Tenants

Arrange it so that you pay your rent into the landlord's bank account or by direct debit. If they insist on collecting rent in person every week, it could well be a sign that you will have no privacy.

Get a receipt for the deposit and take photos of the place when you are leaving. That way, if the landlord tries to withold the deposit you have evidence for the Small Claims Court.

You are not responsible for cleaning up previous tenants' mess when you move in - it is a bad sign if a landlord expects you to.

Read the lease very carefully and never sign a lease with a ridiculous clause, no matter how desperate you are to find a place.

Do not allow the landlord to drop in unannounced. They have to give notice.