I thought I would document our journey as fulltime house sitters so that other sitters might benefit from knowing how it’s worked for us. When we first decided to leave our home in Queensland and house sit full time, I was a bit scared, as you can imagine. I had no idea how things would work out. We obtained some short sits so we could get some reviews up on the Aussie House Sitter website. Then, a long sit (7 weeks) became available in country South Aus. It happened to be in Clare, South Aus where my Mum was living and close to where our eldest daughter lived. We had stayed in Clare numerous times over 20 years and I think the owners considered us because of our familiarity with the area. Because we were still in Queensland when the opportunity was advertised, we did a video call with the owners so we could all start getting to know each other. The decision for us to look after their house, garden and pets was almost made on the video call, but we also agreed that John and I would visit them next time we visited the area. After visiting the property in September, we all confirmed the sit and organised that we would arrive the day before the owners were to leave for their overseas trip.
However, the Clare sit didn’t begin until May, so we had a lot of dates to fill in beforehand. We found a 4 week house sit in June, in the Adelaide suburbs and also accepted 10 days over Easter at the same house. The 10 days over Easter period made things really tricky because then we had to work out other dates around Easter. It worked out okay, but we moved house a LOT over 2 months, which was time consuming and a bit confusing sometimes.
I think it’s best to try and book the sits consecutively, but it’s quite difficult to do that, especially when you’re just starting out. I found the hardest part is trusting that something will come up on the dates we require. So far, we’ve been able to do that, except for 1 or 2 days here and there, where we book into an AirBNB.
Getting back to our first month long sit when we arrived in South Australia. I was wondering whether we would stay in QLD or S.A. in February when suddenly an advert appeared looking for someone to house, garden and pet sit in the Barossa Valley throughout the whole of February. I applied immediately and the next day, the homeowner called me to discuss it. We were very lucky to be accepted, so then I could breathe a sigh of relief because I could start organising our big move interstate, knowing what dates we needed to leave. It also made things easier when applying for sits in S.A. because I could tell prospective owners we would be able to visit them in February or March.