Ylliks

I’ve just finished my second week of house sitting and things are going great. It’s a good place to hang out at and it has some obvious advantages such as being close to my job and being in the area I want to go and live myself. But during this week I started wondering if there was some sort of etiquette I had to adhere to when it comes to this sort of thing.

So what else to do than search the web and find sites like these. And what’s stated is that when it comes to house sitting you need to display the same kind of behavior you do when you visit people at their homes.

• Be respectful of other people’s belongings (do not try to find out how much strain the rocking chair can take)
• Get permission when you want to do something there (such as having friends over)
• Don’t rack up costs for the owner (think extreme use of electrics or long phone calls on the land line)
• If you break something, confess to it
• Clean up after yourself; you might go as far as leaving it cleaner than you found it

What I also do is send the owner a weekly update where I just give a sort of status update and ask question we haven’t discussed before (where can I find this or that, can I use this, where do you want your mail to be stored? etc etc). It’s not just to keep in touch, but also to take away any worries there might be with someone staying in their house while they’re away.

What it comes down to is this: treat the house you’re tending as well or better as your own and things will work out just fine.