Welcome Home! Welcome Home!; What's worse? Random renters or

Show me a person who has never rented a place to live, and I'll show you someone who hasn't had a life. Most of us have to rent at one point or the other. We go off to college, we move to take a new job - we move because of love or because of the end of love - at some point we pick up the paper and start apartment shopping.

The first place I rented was one room, in a three-bedroom apartment located under the roofs of an old apartment building in downtown Copenhagen, Denmark. Slanted walls, rooftop view, lovesick pigeons and bad insulation made it feel a tiny little bit like Paris.

The owner of the apartment supported himself by dating his wealthy physician girlfriend, who lived in the other end of the country, so I had the place to myself a lot.

Everything was fine, until he began renting out the bedroom next to mine to random people. Of course he didn't tell me. So I came home one dark January afternoon, total failure faced after spectacularly flunking a math test at the university.

I open the front door contemplating what it's going to be like living under a bridge for the rest of my life, un-educated, un- employed and un-washed.

That's when a man I've never seen before opens the other bedroom door, holding his pants together with one hand and stretching out the other to shake mine.

"Hey," he says, "I made a deal with Lasse (the landlord) that I could use this room once in a while."

I'm just staring, paralyzed. "Um," he says, looking down at his bare feet and cocking his head toward the bedroom, "I'm kind of having an affair. My wife and, um, her husband doesn't know. And we needed a place to, um, stay."

At that moment I realized that math is not my strongest subject and I have to move.

So, with a couple of friends, I rented an old house way out in farmland. Surrounded by wild roses, wheat fields and honking migrating geese, I was in my element. So was, unfortunately, the estimated 200 mice who also lived in the house and happily ate my sweaters one by one. Did I mention that the furnace ran on firewood? Yes, that's correct, wood chopping preceded any shower activity. Romantic? Not as much. But I'm still one heck of a wood chopper.

On pages 10-12 in today's edition of Home, we meet a couple of renters who've figured out how to do it with style, pizzazz and have lots of great ideas to share. On page 19 Shannon Amidon visits a pet art show at Spokane Art School; and on page 15 Pat Munts explains why tomato plants sometime turn yellow.

Next week we visit with a family who raises chickens just a few blocks off South Perry.

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