House Wine

When someone else's house starts to feel like yours

The rain finally started so how could I help myself from opening the door to get that unobstructed sound. It’s one of my favorites and has been since I was a kid. We’ve got the luxury of a screened door to the backyard and not just a slider, which helps immensely. You only try dealing with the bug infestation once.

This place has more than enough luxuries to keep us truly spoiled for the month we’re here. A great bed, decked-out kitchen, generous bathroom, and more than enough space to set up desks to work peacefully. I think we’re going to find ourselves settling in quick and embracing that feeling of living here and not just being guests here.

And that’s a funny thing about housesitting — that progression from being a guest in someone’s house at first to feeling like it’s yours before the end of it. It usually takes a week or so to really settle in and start getting lax about chores like we did at our own places. The dishes pile up — the laundry sits half done on a bed or couch somewhere — the main bed rarely gets made complete. This time, with how great the place is and how easy the dogs are, I find myself settling faster than usual.

The other bit that helps is that we’ve done this so often now. With over 20 sits done we know the rhythm of arriving and getting used to the dogs and learning where everything is in the house and how the kitchen is laid out. I think by the third day we could find most of what we needed in less than two attempts. Now it’s even better — we get it in one.

Being comfortable living in someone else’s home isn’t something natural to most people — it’s a learned skill, one we picked up the more we’ve done this. You don’t naturally just show up to a stranger’s house, throw your stuff around, and call it home on the first try. You spend the first few getting mentally used to the idea that you’re temporarily taking up space in someone’s home and you’re leaving in a week.

With how many sits we’ve done now, things do start to blur together so we do have our own personal ranking of places we’ve been and where we’d go back to. It helps keep the details clear about each place and forces us to find something unique about each one for our list as its feature so we can talk shorthand about it easier. One of my favourites has to be The Mansion…