While many people are familiar with the landlord special, often from first-hand experience, this TikToker is showing viewers her tenant special.
For those unfamiliar, the landlord special is a term used to describe the barebone effort or DIYs some landlords do when preparing a property for a new tenant. Landlords have been known to give a living space’s interior a fresh coat of cheap white paint that conceals defects and sometimes cements in grime.
“You’ve heard of the landlord special, but have you heard of the tenant special?” the text overlay on the TikTok reads.
In the viral video, the tenant (@wetsadnoodle) painstakingly tries to cover up bare patches left in her carpet by her cat. She explains in the caption that her cat has separation anxiety and seemingly tears up the carpet to cope.
Throughout the video, viewers see the whole process of how the tenant made carpet patches out of ripped-up pieces of carpet fuzz from all around her home.
At the start of the clip, the tenant is seen tearing off pieces of the carpet by hand and with a pair of pink tweezers. Once she collects enough carpet material, the tenant hot glues the brownish-gray carpet tendrils to a dryer sheet that acts as the base of her carpet patches. She seems to have made at least five of these handmade patches.
The patches are then hot glued onto the bare spots on the carpet and blend in at quick glance. In the caption, the tenant shared that her “hack” took two hours of carpet plucking and three hours of gluing.
“Heres to hoping they don’t find out until after the move!” the tenant said in the caption.
@wetsadnoodle Brought to you by a cat with separation anxiety, 2 hrs of plucking out random steans of carpet, and 3 hrs of glueing them individually onto dryer sheets to create little carpet patches, heres to hoping they dont find out until after the move! #landlordspecial #landlordsfromhell #landlordsareleeches #tenantspecial ♬ Makeba – Jain
The video has a whopping 707,000 views in less than 24 hours. It has also garnered more than 830 comments.
“I’ve always wondered how many ‘landlord specials’ are actually tenant specials from the last guy,” one person said.
Other commenters suggested a few other solutions for how to blend the carpet so the tenant’s landlord wouldn’t notice their attempts at a repair.
“I get free carpet samples from lowe’s!!!” a viewer wrote.
“Take a pet brush and gently brush the edges of your work and the edges of the carpet to blend them,” another commented.
The Daily Dot reached out to @wetsadnoodle via TikTok comment.