During our two years of travels, we completed five different housesits. For each one, in return for caring for peoples’ homes, we had to care for at least one dog. I’m allergic to cats, otherwise we could have looked after them too.
If it wasn’t for housesitting, we wouldn’t be living in Amsterdam right now. We fell in love with the city during one of our assignments and haven’t looked back since.
However, housesitting has become much more popular in the time since we joined our first housesitting website and I now see people regularly tout it as a “cheap way to travel the world”. As an apartment and dog owner, I have several problems with this.
Firstly, the reason that housesitting jobs exist in the first place is that someone needs you to care for their home for a specific reason. Most often than not, that is because they have a pet that needs taking care of while they are gone. In rare cases, it might be that the people do not trust leaving their house empty for a set period of time and would rather have someone inhabiting it rather than risk leaving it empty.
In either of these cases, you need to be PRESENT in the house, either to provide the security that the owner requires, or to look after their pets. The house isn’t just a base for you to dump your stuff and spend hours exploring the city. You’re there to do something in return for the accommodation.
Secondly, we had a couple of assignments where the dogs we looked after had behavioural problems. As they couldn’t be left in a kennel or other similar situation, the owners needed dog lovers to come and live with the animals in the comfort of their own home and keep them company.
In both of these cases, the dogs could not be left on their own for long periods of time. Luckily our jobs mean that we can be in the house for most of the day. If it hadn’t been for that reason, we wouldn’t have been accepted by the owners. We needed to spend time with the dogs, give them affection and exercise and keep them in their usual routine.
In all cases, housesitting is very restricting if what you really desire is to explore a new city or destination.
The reason we wanted to housesit was because, for short periods of time, we wanted a sense of normalcy. We wanted to have our own kitchen. We wanted to watch TV. We wanted to have a dog again. It was not a time to travel and sightsee, it was a time to relax and pretend to be homeowners again.
As we now have our own apartment and our dog back in our own care, we are faced with perhaps needing housesitters in the future. And yet I’m apprehensive about bringing someone into our home who 1) may not be a huge dog lover or 2) may want to be out of the house all day and not provide the level of attention we’d require.
I’m such an animal lover that I showered all of the dogs we looked after with affection, attention, time and love (ok, and treats, too). I never once considered leaving the animals for long periods of time. It was not a method of simply saving money for us. It was a way of having a slice of the life we’d left behind while traveling. And I know that the owners appreciated the attention and love we gave their pets.
So I urge anyone who’s considering housesitting to think it through thoroughly before accepting an assignment. Things can and do go wrong when you are looking after someone else’s property and pets and you have to be able to shoulder that responsibility. You also have to be willing to do what the owner asks when it comes to the care of their property and pets. In the case of some of the dogs we looked after, that was imperative for both their safety and ours.
Housesitting isn’t just a way to travel the world. It’s a way to meet people, make furry friends and live like a local, even if for a short time, in a new destination. But it isn’t to be treated lightly and it certainly isn’t a replacement for a cheap hotel.
I never really thought about it before, that when you are housesitting a pet…you can’t just take off all day every day and explore! You would have to not mind being around the house all day. I would have a hard time trusting a stranger with my cat, I have to admit!
I know! We all just love our pets so much that sometimes it can be hard to trust them with other people. But I guess sometimes that’s the only way we get to travel!
This is such a great point of view and something I bet a lot of people who consider house sitting don’t even think about. Now that we are home and have our dogs under our command (ha! if only!) again, I have struggled with how we can go out and socialize without neglecting them—they are older and pretty laid back, but if we are out for anything approaching 8 hours, I feel really guilty that they’ve been home alone without being able to go out for a walk or have someone to play or cuddle with. Although they don’t need to be supervised, if we had a housesitter, I would want to know that they were being walked frequently and had someone to keep them company, which definitely means less time gallavanting around the city on your own. We would actually really like to get into housesitting, but as we’ll be traveling with our dogs, I wonder how much that will limit us. Then again, I figure the fact that we are obviously dog lovers and understand what it means to really care for an animal might work in our favor—clearly we are committed to caring for our own pets and I hope other pet owners would realize we would offer their dogs the same attention and love.
We have thought about trying to housesit with our own dog, too, but from a couple of responses we got from previous housesitters and people we’ve talked to in the past, we’re not sure how many people would be responsive to it. And I totally understand that. You’d assume that the housesitter would just give their own dogs all the attention and your dog would get left out, even though that wouldn’t be the case. And of course some dogs just don’t get on with others. But I hope at some point down the road we could find some people who’d be okay with us and our Basset 🙂
Great article! We started having the adult daughter of friends of ours housesit for us a few years ago due to having an elderly dog that was blind. We didn’t want to move her out of her environment. It has worked great ever since! Our senior dog passed away but she still housesit and takes care of our other dogs. She works full time but is here both before and after work and stays the night. It gives her a break from still living with her parents and siblings, gives us peace of mind that our dogs are at home and comfortable and security for the house.