The kids having a snack at their art table.
This fall, my family and I did something that felt a little bit out of our comfort zone.
We have been so thankful to buy a home and grow our family in the last few years, but it also means that money has been a bit tight. So when we were invited to three(!) big family events within a few months of each other, we knew we had some difficult decisions to make to fit them into our budget.
I had been toying with the idea of a house swap on and off since we bought our home, but there weren’t really many trips we were planning as we prepared to welcome our son, then care for him as a newborn. By the fall, he was one and we were eager to get back into traveling to explore new places and see friends and family. I also knew from a work trip over the summer that apartments and home rentals work much better for our family at this stage than hotels. So when my cousin announced her wedding in the neighborhood we lived in when E was born, I realized it might be a great opportunity to try house-swapping out for size.
If the term isn’t familiar to you, a home swap is essentially two households swapping homes for an agreed on length of time. It could be extended family, or someone found through a website or agency. According to this BBC article it’s been a rising trend since the 2000s, getting a boost from the film ‘The Holiday’ (and probably also helped along by the economic crisis of the late 2000s.) My parents actually house swapped once with cousins when we were kids, and Peter and I had relatives from Greece stay in our tiny New York apartment while we were traveling one holiday. It had gone pretty smoothly and we were happy to help another couple make their trip more affordable. What’s more, house swapping is considered more eco-friendly than other forms of travel, as it reduces carbon footprint, waste and resource consumption. Realizing that I knew the neighborhood we’d be interested in pretty well (and after lots of talking and thinking about it,) we decided to try to find a family to home swap with us for a week in October.
Here’s the nuts and bolts of how we did it, how it went, and what we learned and might do differently moving forward.
This room looks a bit different now, but the view from the living room window is still one of my favorite spots in the house.
Finding a family to swap with.
For me, this was the most nerve-wracking part of the whole experience. How do you know you’re exchanging your home with someone trustworthy? We could have used a service -Home Exchange has great reviews and has been around awhile, but the annual fee was a bit of a deterrent, since we didn’t know if we’d use the service again if it didn’t work out.
Instead, we opted for a bit of an unorthodox choice- Facebook groups.
I have to say, under normal circumstances, I couldn’t recommend this. Even typing it out sounds like the start of a scene from The Vacation From Hell. We opted for Facebook *only* because I was a regular user of the Mom groups for this neighborhood when E was born, and knew they were exceptionally strictly monitored. I had used the same groups dozens of times to buy, sell, gift and exchange baby items, so this felt like a slight level up from what I had already been using them for, and had positive experiences with.
I posted a brief description of my idea, our home, the dates we were interested in swapping, and what we needed in a home, and immediately got quite a few responses! We ultimately decided to swap with another family of four who lived just one street over from our old home. It had enough space for us and was a short walk from the local transit station. I was excited to revisit our old playgrounds, libraries and restaurants with our kids now that E was older.
Preparing to swap.
Since this was our first time having someone stay in our home while we weren’t there, it took a fair bit of work to make everything go smoothly. We spent many Saturdays decluttering, reorganizing and making our guest room and office into less of an afterthought and more liveable, comfortable spaces. We organized the garage so the family could easily find our beach gear. A week before the swap we paid to have our home deep cleaned by professionals. We borrowed an extra twin mattress and bought separate towels and sheets for our guests. I also spent a lot of time making and editing a document on accessing and running the house and wifi, as well as a few rules and requests for the end of the stay.
The other slight difference to other forms of travel was timing- while I usually search for the cheapest flight itinerary, but having to coordinate with another family meant we had to make sure we were out of the house and back at roughly the right times, and as a courtesy I checked with the family in Boston to make sure our travel times worked for them. A very manageable problem, but worth pointing out.
The home exchange.
The exchange itself was surprisingly smooth! The apartment we stayed in had two bedrooms and an open work space off of the living room/play area, so it worked well for our needs (mostly vacation time with a little remote work for Peter.) Their kids were older than ours, and although they did hide as many small toys as they could, we did have to watch our son pretty closely during the week we were there. They also had two very sweet cats who occasionally showed their faces for cuddles before disappearing to hide from our noisy kids.
The biggest hitches were pretty minor- on the night our babysitter drove in for the wedding, she parked incorrectly and I missed a call from our hosts at the wedding reception for her to move the vehicle. We apologized and the family was very understanding. We also had one mishap where one of the cats bolted, and I’ve never been so thankful to have married a cat person- Peter very quickly bounded down the steps and grabbed him just as he was making his way down the sidewalk. Apart from a noisy night or two when the unit above had a party, we were very comfortable the whole time and things went pretty smoothly!
The return home and some afterthoughts.
Heading back home went pretty well, but it did take more work than leaving a hotel room with linens and messes to be dealt with by someone else. We wanted to leave the apartment as nicely as we found it, which wasn’t easy considering we had to leave to catch a flight early in the morning. We spent the night before departure tidying and replacing any food we had used up. I assembled a small bag of thank you gifts for our hosts and their kids. Early the morning of our flight we had to get the kids up to wash the sheets and towels and break down the travel crib we had borrowed. Once we triple-checked we had locked everything up properly, we were off.
We made it home that afternoon to a house in similar shape to when we left it and a TON of food and new pool/beach toys the family had ordered and left behind (Amy, if you’re reading this, THANK YOU!) A few things got misplaced but were found eventually. One pool float managed to break, but they were nice enough to replace it for us. I asked the mother who coordinated with me on our exchange what they might like to do differently next time, and she assured me everything was great on their end too, and offered to try this out again during the summer months, which I take to be a good sign!
It left us feeling ready to try a home swap again in the future- we are actually looking at another home exchange experience in the coming months when we visit family overseas. Here’s what I’m keeping in mind to make future swaps go as smoothly as possible.
Decide what you’re looking for.
Do you need one bedroom? Two? A dedicated workspace? Is some amount of pet or plant-sitting ok? Do you need to go and be back at a fixed time, or are your travel dates fluid? It helps here to be flexible, but if there are must-haves, be clear on needs before you start your search.
You also need to decide who you’re looking for, meaning who you are comfortable swapping homes with. The ideal situation is going with someone who is well-vetted- just like when you’re looking for an airbnb. Apps usually have systems to review guests and host homes, but knowing someone personally is another option. In our case, the who also mattered in that we were bringing young kids, and wanted to be in a place that was set up to host our children. So swapping with a family of children similar ages to ours worked out great.
A word of caution: none of these strategies for choosing the ‘right’ family are foolproof; they help, but cannot completely prevent problems from arising. There is always going to be an inherent risk when inviting someone to use your home. Bad exchanges, like ones involving ruined kitchen equipment and huge messes that required professional cleaners- are rare, but they do happen. To that end, think carefully about whether this kind of travel is right for you. Because my parents live close and kept an eye on things, and we don’t have nice furniture or many valuables (and the ones we did, we locked up carefully or removed from the home), we felt comfortable moving forward with a home exchange. But even for us, risks are always present.
Write up a house manual. You might know how to run your home as a well-oiled machine, but a total stranger is going to have no clue if the router needs to be rebooted every now and then or the sprinklers need adjusting. Start with the very basics- how to find and get into the house. Add photos if you can (visuals can be a huge help!) We also printed out step-by-step instructions for our coffee and tea machine.
If you’re swapping vehicles, be sure to add rules and recommendations on what to do if any problems arrive. As a bonus, we like to share a local guide to our area with the nearest grocery stores and our favorite restaurants, parks and attractions.
Set clear expectations at the get-go. If there are any big take-homes, this is it. Cleanliness and common courtesy can mean different things to different people. If you want folks to strip the beds and run a load of linens, or have the place cleaned professionally, tell them! If you don’t want any smoking on the premises or would like your food replaced (or left untouched,) be clear from the start. For us this meant delineating the house rules and expectations in a document. This helps avoid so much stress and unmet expectations.
Keep lines of communication open. We didn’t have a constant stream of consciousness text, but for little things (where’s the litter box, again? How do you access the basement?) you can and should keep in touch. We also enjoyed hearing from the exchange family about how much they enjoyed the pool, beach and our favorite local places.
Home exchanges probably aren’t for everyone, but when done right, they can be a fun, low waste and engaging way to see another part of the world or visit friends and family. We're excited to try and exchange our home again this summer!
What do you think? Is this a kind of travel you would try? Have you house swapped before? I’d love to hear your experiences!
