Combining long-term traveling with house sitting is a perfect concept for us. As described in the previous introduction post about us, we have been living nomadic life for a long time already. That means that we have no home base, but instead we are slowly traveling the world while working online through our company. Traveling full time is not all about exploring new destinations, even though digital nomads being on a never-ending vacation seems to be a quite common misbelief. In reality, we often work long days in front of our laptops, and can stay for several weeks in same location.
Where do we stay then? There are several reasons why we don’t want to stay in hotels or hostels, but prefer house sitting or renting Airbnb apartments instead. First of all, it would be ridiculously expensive to stay in hotels all the time. But as importantly, hotel life is not meaningful for longer stays. This is our everyday life, so instead of eating out in restaurants we cook ourselves, and instead of being out on the beach or exploring sights most of the day, we stay a lot indoors, working. That is why we want to live in an apartment with a kitchen and proper conditions for working. As we also love pets, what would be a better accommodation option, than to live in a real house and to take care of the home-owners’ pets while they are away!
House sitting is a wonderful win-win concept that often doesn’t involve any money. This means that whereas we don’t need to pay for the accommodation while house sitting, also the home owners don’t need to spend money on pet care facilities or for hiring someone to come and take care of the garden. Money aside, house sitters bring safety – home owners can go on holiday without leaving their house empty and vulnerable – and the house sitters will keep good company for the pets while the owners are away.
For us house sitting has been a wonderful choice and way of living. We have made friends with hosts and have gotten a lot of adorable furry friends! We have been able to go back to do new house sits in the same places, which is great for everyone, including the pets of course. Applying for new house sits has brought us to destinations we wouldn’t have visited otherwise, and we have enjoyed being part of the life of small rural villages as well as being able to live in huge cities like locals for a short time. We have a car in use when we are in Europe, which is a great advantage for a house sitter – it’s easy to reach even remote corners, and with own wheels we have more freedom to explore the surroundings too.
