Dear reader,
You are going away for a few days. Someone kind has agreed to look after the house, and maybe the dog, and maybe the plants you have kept alive through two summers. You are grateful. You are also already composing the texts in your head.
This letter is about the one page that stops most of those texts before they start.
If the week before a trip always feels heavier than it should, our free guide The 5 Things Secretly Stealing Your Time is a short, calm place to start.
Why one page, and not a long note
Most of us leave instructions the way we think about the house: in the order things occur to us. The back door, then the cat, then the recycling, then something about the thermostat, then the cat again. It makes sense to you because you live there. To someone standing in your kitchen at 7 am, it reads like a puzzle.
A house sitter does not need everything you know. They need the few things they will actually reach for, in the place they will look first. When that page exists, the rest of your notes can be as long as you like, because the important part is already handled.
What goes on the page
The dates and how to reach you. When you leave, when you are back, roughly where you will be, and whether a call or a text is better. Then one more person they can call if you do not answer. That second name matters more than people expect.
Getting in. Where the key is, the door code, the alarm code, the Wi-Fi network and its password. Write them out in full. “Same as always” means nothing to someone who has never been there.
The five things that matter most. This is the heart of it. Ask yourself what you would actually call home about. The dog’s evening pill. The gate that has to be latched twice. The fridge door that does not close unless you lean on it. Five lines, written short. If something is not worth a phone call, it probably does not belong here.
The please-do-not list. A few plain lines about what to leave alone. Do not open the gate for anyone. Do not let the dog out the front. Do not touch the thermostat. It feels awkward to write, but it saves a kind person from guessing, and it saves you from coming home to a surprise.
The address, near the top. In a real emergency your sitter calls 911 first and you second, and the dispatcher will ask for the address. Someone who has been there twice may not remember the house number under pressure. Put it where they will see it.
Be specific, be short
“The back door sticks, lift the handle” does more than a paragraph about the back door. “Half a scoop, morning and evening, food is in the pantry bin” does more than “feed the dog twice a day.” The aim is a page someone can read standing up, with a leash in one hand.
Blank lines are fine. If you have no animals, skip that part. If the plants can take care of themselves for a week, say so and move on. A shorter page that is accurate is worth more than a full one that is padded.
Where to leave it
Put it where they will find it in the first minute: the kitchen counter, the entry table, the front of the fridge. Then take a photo of it and text it to them before you go. If they have the page on their phone, they have it when they are at the store, or standing at the end of the driveway wondering about bin day.
We wrote about the same idea from the family side in Where’s the Wi-Fi Password?. It is the same small habit: write the house answers down once, and stop carrying them in your head.
The part that is easy to skip
Writing this page takes about twenty minutes at the kitchen table. That is the honest cost. It is also the twenty minutes most of us put off until the night before, when we are packing and tired and the page turns into three hurried lines.
So do it a few days early, while you can still think about the house calmly. Write the five things. Read the page once as if you had never been inside your own home. Fix whatever confuses you. Then let it go, and let the person you trusted do the job you asked them to do.
If you would rather fill in a page than build one, The House Sitter Binder has a Start Here page laid out exactly this way, with the daily rhythm, the animals, the outside and a checkout list behind it.
And if you want a little more room in the week before you leave, the free guide The 5 Things Secretly Stealing Your Time is here whenever you are ready.
♡
Life Systems Co