having someone housesit while you are in Europe

We haven't felt any great need for a house sitter. We have reduced the live plants, inside and out, that we are responsible for watering. The pets are gone. We live in a pretty secure area with great neighbors. And have a cousin who swings by one or twice a week to check on things. We do the same for her when they travel. We have a fairly upscale townhome and my wife would be very nervous to have a stranger in the house while we are gone. Others do it but it just doesn't work for us. The longest we have every been gone is about six weeks. We recently installed a smart door bell and thermostat so we have a little better control over what is happening.

Your house and your pets are probably invaluable to you. I'd recommend establishing a relationship with a local pet/house sitter, and don't worry about the price. Having the same person over the years has been a great treasure to us. She is licensed and insured, [and very busy, so we book 9-12 months on advance.] Call your veterinarian or local animal shelter for recommendations. I volunteer at a local shelter, and many volunteers, who are well-trained, have house/pet sitting businesses. Many vet technicians also do pet sitting on the side. I wouldn't recommend using random people who are low cost- you usually get what you pay for.
Good luck!

Yeah. I’d be careful with who you select. Also depends on how high maintenance your pets are. We have two Golden Retrievers. A couple years ago we went to Italy for about three weeks and our pet sitter was less than careful with them and they escaped. We ended up having to call neighbors to help find them. She also managed to cause some plumbing problems, which added stress and a fair chunk of money to our trip - on top of what we were already paying her. Additionally, she posted pictures of herself and some random guy in our house on Facebook, which we weren’t super thrilled with. On our last trip, we put the dogs in a kennel. Not as ideal as having them at home but more peace of mind.

Dana's story is practically my worst nightmare. Our veterinary clinic offers boarding, with runs that can accommodate two dogs. It is expensive, but we can enjoy our vacations without worrying about the dogs getting out.

We use TrustedHousesitters every year, sometimes more than once a year, and for periods from 5 nights to 8 weeks. We have not only found every single sitter or couple to be responsible, we have made new friends from many countries as a result. THS facilitates background checks and reviews that are spot on and they provide tools from a template for a manual (very useful) to contract boilerplate. I always do a video interview as well.

Most situations are without problem but I will highlight two occasions where having a house sitter was extraordinarily fortuitous.

One long-planned trip came as one of our cats was having health issues. Frankly, we had a feeling she might not last the three weeks we would be gone. We lived in Italy at the time and we were meeting family members in Scotland and did not feel we could or should cancel our trip. Luckily our house sitters were on repeat so they knew the cats, us, and the situation well. They were willing to take on the challenge and long story short, they had to oversee the euthanasia . It was great comfort to us to have such wonderful people there in our stead.

A couple of years ago, 2 weeks into an 8 week trip, our sitter sent us a picture of carpenter ants swarming in a bedroom! They came from nowhere! The sitters oversaw an exterminator’s visit and managed the situation for us. All I had to do was call in a credit card payment. The sitters were calm and in charge, again, relieving us of worry. Imagine if we had simply locked the house and gone away for 8 weeks and the infestation we would have returned to!

We will always get sitters, whether we have pets or not, for trips of a week or longer. Well worth the annual fee. We pay nothing to the sitters, simply maintain utilities during our absence, which we’d do anyway.

I haven't had housesitters, but my brother and his wife have used trusted housesitters for several years and always had positive experiences. They always meet the sitters before they leave and give a "house-pet" orientation.

My catsitter also clears the mailbox,and picks up circulars and other material left at the door, so the place looks occupied. I have plenty of lights on timers. She also keeps an eye on the house mechanicals. All of this, except for the cat, could be a factor in your house insurance.

With 4 horses, 50 chickens, a mildly
neurotic golden retriever, and a cranky old cat, our pet care needs are high priority when we travel. I have often scheduled our vacations after I figure out when the house sitter is available.

I am (so far, knock on wood) very lucky to have great animal care connections through my kids’ 4-H involvement. My older daughter’s friends are now early 20’s age, in college or grad school with a long history of 4-H education and activities, and now at perfect age for housesitting. My younger daughter is now 16, so I have a fresh crop of responsible teens coming up through the ranks. I mention this because community connections can be invaluable; it is wonderful knowing who you will get.

And I (happily) pay through the nose for housesitting. It is a big chunk of change, but totally worth it for peace of mind. I can’t tell you how many times over the years the sitters have done vet trips for the dog, headed off weird stuff for the horses, and buried dead chickens. The good ones will call when there’s a real problem and they will just handle stuff on their own if they can.

So, to answer your question, I do not have any experience with any agencies, but I have been very satisfied with finding responsible young adults through connections with my kids’ community activities and paying those folks well for their services. Perhaps consider reaching out to your local 4-H coordinator for a reference if you don’t know any individuals yourself.

I would not let someone I didn't know come into my house while I'm gone.
I agree with Pat and Dana.
Dana's story would be my worst nightmare; pets escaping because the sitter was not careful, didn't latch the door securely, etc. Remember that not everyone who loses a pet gets them back.
My suggestion is that you ask around your veterinarian's office to see if any of the vet technicians do this for extra money.
Likewise, if there is a trusted pet sitter in your area who has many good recommendations and has been a pet sitter for many years, do contact them. As someone said, pay whatever person a good and fair fee for doing the pet sitting.

You said,
"I'm intrigued about trying one of the online sites to find prospective sitters. According to some sites there is little or no payment expected to the sitters. Not sure if this is realistic or not."
I would not want to go this route. Personal opinion.

I have wonderful neighbors. I take my house plants to one so she can babysit them; her thumb is much greener than mine. She picks up our mail if we don’t have it stopped and periodically checks that everything is good inside. Her husband checks the outside as do three other neighbors. We have desert landscaping so no yard work.
I trust my horse trainer completely with my horse. He (the horse) lives at home but she (the trainer) always makes room for him whatever the reason. He is special needs so has a very strict diet which she accommodates. Both she and my vet have a written horse health directive if he had unresolvable problems.
So to answer your question, on the rare occasion we are both away from home together, everything is taken care of. My husband refuses to travel beyond the occasional road trip to the NW.

I have also wondered how to care for my home post retirement. As it would be over winter, insurance requires 'regular' checks because of potential pipe freezes and internal leaks.
I have no plants and no pets, but hesitate to oblige a neighbour and don't think I would trust young people for as long as 3 months. There are experiences of more mature home owners that would be benificial.
I have looked at Trusted House Sitters for years, as both a sitter and a homeowner...though I do have some privacy issues to get around in my head. Many sitters see it as a way to travel for free, have usually owned or had personal households for years, have set up references and been vetted by the company. They also support both the sitter and homeowner as well as offer insurance. If it wasn't a good option, it wouldn't be the extensive, growing 10 year old business it is.
I wouldn't write it off as a total 'no'.
Here a blog from a sitter who use it to travel the world. Maybe reading it will give you the perspective from her side,and help you make up your mind.
http://bigtravelnut.com/become-a-house-sitter-get-free-accommodation/
I wanted to give another link, but she has made it private.
Also, you can sign up for the Trusted House Sitters info emails. Free and no commitment.

We wouldn’t want someone in our home while we are gone except a relative or trusted neighbor. Our daughter takes our dog if we are both traveling. We have several security cameras and lights that we can monitor ourselves.

We had a responsible college student offer to house sit (paid) five years ago, so we let her do it. She was very careful with our home. Unfortunately, she cleaned some of our appliances with some type of cleaner that slightly marred the surface. After that, I decided it was best to just not have any anyone in when we want to focus on a vacation.

Finding a pet/house sitter we can trust while on vacation has been a huge issue for us over the years. We're not particularly worried about the house- possessions can be replaced, but our pets are another story. We consider our pets to be truly family and it's hard enough to leave them, let alone put their care in someone else's hands. Our first naïve attempt years ago ended tragically. We thought she was a good sitter. Vacations thereafter were met with considerable concern leading up to each trip.

We obviously put a LOT of work into research prospective sitters after that. We found a local pet sitting company with great reviews, met with them prior, and did a small trip to try them out. Perfection; multiple visits during the day, text updates each visit, with pictures, and overnight stays at our house, so that our pets feel safe and at home. It's still tough to leave them, given our history, but it gets easier once we get into the routine of receiving updates and settle into what we're doing during our vacation. It's not cheap, but ensuring good care and safety of our pets is without a doubt worth every penny.

Rob, I read your post as saying the pets belong to your son and will be (eventually) living with him so you only need house care. We are hoping to ask our prior dogsitter to drop in weekly to check out the house if/when we have a prolonged trip -- maybe at her per-visit rate for playing with a chihuahua.
Any contacts at the housing office of nearby colleges ? I got several live-in babysitters / au pairs through UC Berkeley for services in exchange for room.

We were considering renting out our house in the country while we were going to be away for four months, but then I asked a neighbor who is a college professor how her sublet worked out when her family went to Cuba for a semester.

Their renters managed to break the refrigerator, washing machine and septic system during their stay. I believe the repairs cost more than what they took in from the renters.

You might be thinking that this wouldn't happen with vetted people from those housesitting websites, but I don't agree. Maybe you live in a totally standard kind of residence with nothing tricky about it, but from what I know, if you have any rules like "Don't toss anything except toilet paper into the toilet and don't let any food go down the kitchen drain" (to protect the septic system), people who have never owned a house in the country will not follow such ridiculous (in their minds) rules.

Rob, if your pets are your son’s pets and not your fur sons then you have it much easier. We usually travel for a month or more at a time.

In our new home we hire a neighbor’s high school aged son to pick up our mail from our locked mailbox a couple of times per week, take it to his house and put it in a box I’ve supplied. There is a long story behind why we don’t have the USPS hold it for their 30 day limit but it wasn’t fun to come home one summer and find that they’d lost a month’s worth of our hold mail. We also have him walk by our porch to make sure flyers haven’t been left on our door.

We tried different things with plants over the years including special plant watering stakes and putting all of the plants in a room with a bit of sunlight coming in. My school plants used to survive (barely) over a 2 month summer break. Eventually we made the decision to not have indoor plants.

We also made the difficult decision when our last dog was gone to not have a pet again. During the last years of his life we often traveled for 4 months at a time and arranging pet care for that amount of time was challenging. Now we have granddogs who come to visit us or be cared for by us while our children up here travel.

We have lights on timers and a new Ring doorbell which help our security peace of mind. We notify 2-3 neighbors that we’ll be gone so if anything looks amiss they can notify us. We enjoy bringing back a special thank you for them and we do the same for them when they are gone for extended periods.

We’ve only hired a house sitter once. It was the first trip we took from this house and we didn’t trust the new outdoor watering system with our new lawn, trees and garden. Essentially we hired someone to see that nothing outdoors turned brown while we were gone. Since that time, we trust our watering system so much, even in 100° heat, that we never hired a house sitter again.

We turn our heat or AC to a vacation level (or off altogether for most of the year), hire one reliable teen from our block, notify a couple of our immediate neighbors and are gone. With a new house we don’t worry so much about leaks but a lot of people on the forum have turned water off to their house, I believe.

Look around in these next months as you plan your longer trips and see if you can manage an empty house or have someone check on it periodically. Perhaps if one of your kids ends up living nearby they can do that job for you.

You know that we have had people stay (exchange) in our homes without incident for years so hiring someone to housesit in our home wouldn’t be an issue for us. We just think we’ve prepared our house and outdoor spaces so they can function while we are gone.

We have used several different approaches and I can highly recommend Trusted Housesitters. We took a lot of care to select a wonderful couple who cared for our dog as lovingly as we would. The house was spotless on our return and they had even made several meals for us to help us with our ‘re-entry’ and jet lag. They had a long list of references and have been doing house/pet sitting for many years so they really knew how to help us make sure they had all the information they needed. I think the trick to get a good ‘match’ on Trusted Housesitters is to review a lot of applicants and then interview the short list via Skype/FaceTime. They had many repeat engagements and lots of experience with high-needs animals so we were extremely comfortable selecting them.
One year we used a dear friend’s 30 year old niece and while she was delightful young woman, our dog was a wreck when we got home - she over walked him and the house was just barely clean. So challenges can be encountered with people who are ‘known’.
As we are usually away for 4 - 6 weeks, we make sure our daughter who lives locally is able to step in if there were to be any medical situations/decisions to be made and of course communication is easy even from 9 time zones should it be necessary. The sitters from THS sent us frequent pictures of our dog and I heard from the neighbors that they saw them out in the neighborhood with him all the time.
I have recommended Trusted Housesitters to a number of friends and 5 of them have used the service and all rave about their experiences. One couple we know have signed up as house sitters and have had a lot of great experiences as a result.
The only reason we haven’t used THS recently is because a dear friend who lives in S. California comes and stays with our dog as he wants to escape the heat of the desert summer. If you asked him, we don’t travel enough and he is always eager to look after our home and dog. If he weren’t able to, I’d use THS again in a nanosecond.

We have gone on overseas trip lasting from 3-7 weeks and used teenagers in the neighborhood to feed our multiple cats.

We now have three cats and our feline caretaker is a Junior in HS and excellent. Prior to her, caring for our cats, her brother did that and prior to that, another teenager that left for college. We pay our caregiver (not home sitter) $20 per day to come in, feed the cats some wet cat food, make sure their water and dry cat food is ample as well as scooping the litter boxes.

I would not want to invite a house sitter in to our home unless we knew them well enough in advance.

I second what Pat said up thread. Get to know a local dog-sitter who you can test out before needing the full house-sitting shebang.

We have a regular dog walker who offers house-sitting services for her longer-term clients. She’s insured, posts her rates on her business website, and already knows the house/routine.

Her rates are $45/night and in our area, that is vastly cheaper than boarding our two dogs and cat. The pets are happy staying at home and we have peace of mind.

I am a big fan of Trusted Housesitters. We live for most of the year in Hawaii, and usually spend three to four months on the mainland and traveling abroad. While we are gone, we have to have someone to care for our dog, our house, and our yard. We have used Trusted Housesitters for about six years and have been totally pleased with each experience. All of the sitters we've found have been very experienced with taking care of all kinds of animals and are quite capable of caring for our house. And they all love spending time working in the yard because it is so lovely here. The sitters keep in touch with us on a weekly basis and many send pictures showing how happy our dog is playing with them.

The sitters pay their way here. We don't pay them anything for staying here and they don't pay us. We cover all the utilities and even let them use our car. Everything has been in tip top shape when we return.

We put our greyhound in a nice, expensive kennel. No more. The dogs in there bark all night and she was exhausted when we picked her up a week later. Like anything you need to do your research as far as house sitters go.

I'm entertaining the thought of us house sitting. I don't know.

We never used a house sitter. We placed the dog in a kennel for the period we were gone. Our daughter who lives nearby watered the plants. If a house sitter was needed it would be someone we know well, such as a long-time coworker. My wife has a couple single friends who would be more than will to house sit if needed.

Our adult kids will take turns and house/dog sit for us. It works out great for our son as our home is closer to his office than his own place is. Our daughter works from home permanently now, and her dog is best buddies with ours, so that works too.

The problem is when we all go together, which we still do even though they are adults. Last summer we had a kennel booked for all 3 dogs (daughters plus ours). I have not found a kennel here around Seattle that I trust like the one we used in OR, so we were booked down there. Even after we moved away from OR, we still would take our dog down to that kennel as it was the best hands down. So the trip is rescheduled for this summer, fingers crossed, and yes we will be driving 3 big dogs down to OR to board them for a few weeks.

Dana and DebVT--We have Goldens as well, two of them. The third one is a golden/bernese. I laughed so hard at the neurotic golden comment as our 8 yr old one is like that. Thankfully the kennel in OR the owner loves our dog and vice versa, so it is a good fit. Small kennel, owner is a vet herself, and I trust them completely!

We found a wonderful family to dogsit our dog on Rover --- they love her "big personality" (translation: "not the easiest dog in the world") and she loves their 4 kids and their fenced back yard and their pampering, and is just beside herself with joy when we leave her with them for 5 weeks to go to Italy. It would be difficult to leave her otherwise.

I’m a qualified Trusted Housesitter, and here’s a bit of what I’ve experienced. We’ve always had 2 cats, and my Mother-in-Law would often stop by frequently and feed and water them, clean cat boxes, and love on them. She died in 2012, sadly, and we had a big trip scheduled the end of that year. We lodged our cats at the time at a local pet care facility. Not cheap, but they attended to their medical needs, as well as feeding and comfort. We knew they were in good hands, although they weren’t at their home.

In the past few years, I’ve taken care of cats and/or dogs of several friends and neighbors, for a few days or a couple weeks. They’ve reciprocated. If you have reliable friends or family, you and your critters could be all set.

One of those friends, who really cares for her cat Belle, is a Trusted Housesitter herself, and told me about how she’s cared for pets while on trips to Norway. It sounded intriguing. So I applied, providing my identification and background information, and paid $119. That doesn’t guarantee I’m not an axe-murderer (although I’m not) or that I will be the best pet sitter you’ll ever find (although I love all non-reptilian animals and honor my commitments), but they make a sincere effort to ensure owners and pets get a very good sitter.

I had to provide 3 references prior to being confirmed, and did 2 trial petsits with favorable reviews. Sitters are rated on a scale of 5 afterwards, and sitters also rate the sitting experience. A sitter with a consistent low score can be vetted accordingly in your consideration.

On the surface, a sitter stays in your home, in exchange for taking good care of your pet(s). However, it’s not about somebody getting a free vacation, a free bed and kitchen, avoiding hotel costs, while putting a little food in a bowl and maybe walking a dog a bit. Even if you live in a major tourist destination, the commitment to care for the animals is the priority. Walking dogs means the sitter can’t spend the day in museums, attractions, shopping, etc. Cats could take a little less time, but a sitter still can’t be a careless tourist, so you’ll get a dedicated caretaker for your place and pets.

So in 2019, with qualifying sits in Colorado completed, I looked for sits in Europe in the fall. I got one in Switzerland, then spent a week on my own in France, then headed to England for three sits. Some were a cat only, some were one or more dogs, or a combination. One dog required daily physical therapy, and I assisted while the visiting therapist conducted the exercises. I wasn’t paid a cent, although most owners left coffee, and some snacks. The woman in Switzerland actually left some cash, but I didn’t spend it - that wasn’t part of the arrangement. Maybe you’d leave your sitter a “tip,” I don’t know, but basically a Trusted Housesitter is a volunteer, who’s staying at your place while you’re gone, looking after your pet(s). The 2 qualifying sits in Colorado each had me strip the bed when I was done; one also had me wash the sheets and put them in the dryer, plus vacuum. One English owner had a cat, but walked the elderly neighbor’s dogs, so that was part of my sit obligation. Most of these were in small towns, although 2 in England were within an hour’s train ride to London. Taking care of dogs meant not being gone very long, so going to London was never a possibility.

Having a chance to briefly live in a different environment, and to meet nice people and their wonderful cats and dogs, made for a worthwhile experience. Not that I’d make this a permanent lifestyle. A trip planned for this past summer, canceled due to the pandemic, was going to include Denmark and Norway, with a Scotland petsit at the beginning. It was going to be in a very rural location, caring for cats and dogs, plus a donkey and a horse, for about a week. Again, no big tourist opportunities, but a chance to be a temporary local, no tourist pressures, and some animals. I’d do it again.