You scoured Pinterest, devoured home design blogs, and borrowed from the homes of wealthy coworkers you dog sit for. In return, you were able to turn your dumpy one bedroom railroad apartment into a dumpy one-bedroom railroad apartment that French tourists adore on Airbnb. And why wouldn’t they! You’re a cool, single chick living in the greatest city in the world. Well, adjacent to the greatest city in the world. Don’t shatter the perfect illusion your soon to be tenants have of your life by leaving your self-help books lying around! Instead, keep them hidden away like the truth about your “Eames chair”. Here are a few hiding spaces places to try out:
1. Trader Joe’s Frozen Pizza Box
Your tasteful foreign visitors wouldn’t dare eat processed American crap like frozen pizza. They probably don’t even know what it looks like. So replace the freezer burned frozen pizza that’s been sitting in there for months with a few of your most depressing self-help titles. BONUS: If your freezer is still full of the clothes from your bedbug scare last fall, think about folding them up neatly, according to the guidelines in Escape the Crap! How to Declutter, Decompress, and Decrapify Your Life For Good, which you will also be hiding.
2. Under Your Mattress
On the off-chance your apartment isn’t getting rented out for a porn shoot (fingers crossed!), your self-help books should be safe laid out evenly in a thin layer between your mattress and box spring. No one will be able to tell that you only got halfway through Checked Off: How to Finish What You Started.
3. Floorboards
For the self-helpiest among us, you may want to go the most secure route and hide the unsolicited self-help books your friends gave you under loose floorboards. Your tenants will think they’re just standing on a vintage Turkish rug, but they’ll really be standing on Marriage, Again: Getting It Right the Second Time Around and It’s Not Your Fault: How to Let Go of Your Second Marriage.
4. Amongst Your Potted Plants
This is a particularly good hiding spot if your guest agreed to water your plants, because that means they have no intentions of going anywhere near them. Which is fine, because your plants are all pretty much dead anyway (which one of your self-help books has you really worried about, since it means you may lack the skills to keep a relationship alive). Stash your copy of Bent, Not Broken: How to Date Yourself When No One Else Will within the already-crisping branches of your ficus. No one will know!
5. Bookshelf
Sometimes hiding things in plain sight is your best option. Nobody would expect a girl with vaginal pH problems to actually keep a self-help book about vaginal pH and how it corresponds to her daddy issues right on her bookshelf next to the complete Harry Potter anthology. What kind of dummy would do that?
Next time you leave town and need to make that sweet, albeit frowned-upon-by-your-landlord Airbnb dough, feel good knowing your self-help secrets are safe from the prying eyes of the total strangers you let take up residence in your home. Good luck! And hey—go easy on yourself, okay?
