House sit advice
We would love to spend September/October touring in Southern Germany. Slight difficulty is the suburban house (near Tunbridge Wells) and the cat that need looking after. 2 months is a bit long for our lovely, helpful neighbours, and also, I suspect, for the insurance company. I wonder what other intrepid roamers do please? Professional agencies? We don’t have a drive, so nowhere for another motorhomer to park - it would be a ‘live-in holiday’. Any experiences (good or bad) would be gratefully received.
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You are making it sound hard.
if your house insurance is limited to 30 days unoccupied then extend it or change it to 60 days.Despite living in a vulnerable, isolated old farmhouse we never even thought of employing live in professional house sitters. We paid a lady who is a friend to look in every few days to see that all was well, water greenhouse, put tomatoes into freezer and message us that all was well. Her son got pocket money for cutting the orchard at the same . Nz, Oz, India, Thailand, Bali, Sri Lanka, as well as Europe - we did it 25 times. It didn’t seem a problem.
If you are just going to Europe can you take the cat with you? People do.
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One of my sons pays a cat sitter to look after his cats when they are away. She calls morning and late afternoon to feed the cats and to tidy up the litter tray. Could be an expensive option for 8 weeks? Have you thought about taking the cat with you? A previous regular poster on here used to take their cat with them when they travel. The cat seem well adapted to the idea.
David
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We have friends who house sit for people, they look after animals (usually horses etc) but it's not a cheap option. We board our cat, which costs £10 a day. If going abroad with a cat, paperwork etc would be costly. As a family we've had the sad experience of losing a cat on holiday. If you want to leave the cat maybe offering friends a free holiday might be an idea.
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We've sometimes used something called Trusted Housesitters - you pay a fee to register on their website but that's the only cost, it's a way of finding a sitter who comes and stays in your house while you are away and looks after your pet(s) and the house, there's no payment. You put details of your pet and the dates you need onto the website, we found it very easy and it all worked very well, the sitter we found was great, our dog was happy, the house was perfect when we came back.
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Totally unknown strangers living in my house with all my personal possessions for two months while I am away? No way at all. And certainly not just to keep a cat happy.. Madness !
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Thanks @eurotraveller good point about altering the insurance. We’ve met people travelling cats, but we feel their territorial instinct would make our cat too stressed to be enjoyable for either him or us. Crossing to Europe, and more infuriatingly, back to newly separated UK is a paperwork nightmare (we’ve tried it with another cat). We’re looking for suggestions from discussion and happily receiving them, thanks
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As I said our family had a sad experience losing a cat (on a camping trip) so I'd never recommend it, very upsetting. Regarding Euror's "horror" about strangers in the house we had many years of successful house exchange holidays. In fact I'm still in touch with our French exchange years later and we've met up since then. So there are various ways round these things, good luck with your plans!
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