My Year of House Sitting

On the 30th November 2023, I put almost everything I own into storage and moved out of my overpriced studio apartment to try living rent free in exchange for looking after other people's animals. On the 30th November 2024, I took everything I own back out of storage to put into the home that I'd saved up to buy for myself.

Contents

• Background
• Discovery
• Committing To The Plan
• A Rocky Start
• The Beaches
• Joint Effort
• Getaway
• Winding Down
• The End
• Timeline

Background

Back in September 2022, I ended a long term relationship. The break up hurt a lot. Almost as brutal was me getting to experience renting solo in Toronto for the first time. My ex had managed to get a great COVID deal on an amazing apartment in the heart of downtown Toronto, with us splitting $1600 bills included 50/50 between us.

After the breakup, I was now paying $2100 + bills all by myself for a studio roughly half the size of what I had before. What sucked even more was when I wanted to go back to the UK for 6 weeks, knowing that I would be paying over $3000 for the luxury of an apartment that I wouldn't even be using. I investigated subletting it for that period, but couldn't end up finding anyone, and so in the end just gave it to a friend of mine who had been wanting to move downtown for a while in exchange for watering a few plants. She took amazing care of it, though this is what I returned to...

What sucked EVEN MORE than that though, was that in September 2023 I got notice that my rent was going to go up another $150 per month, because Doug Ford has kindly removed rent control for all buildings first occupied after 2019. While I could still afford the rent increase, I felt offended by it. I was living in a tiny unit, feeling like I was barely saving anything, in a building full of loud parties that go on way into the night, in a unit that quite simply refused to cool down even in the middle of winter. I did not feel like I was getting my money's worth.

Discovery

I started looking around at other rental options, but really wasn't finding much. I could save a few hundred a month if I moved out of downtown, but then I'd be away from all my friends and spend loads of time commuting each time I wanted to go do anything. Alternatively, I could find a rent share with some random person, but then that comes with its own long list of potential problems, and for how much you actually save, it again didn't seem worth it.

So I felt pretty defeated, that was until I was listening to an episode of the podcast Frugal Friends. It's one that I would play from time to time to see if they had any good money-saving ideas. And one of the hosts on there mentioned that she'd spent some time housesitting for a family while they were away for a number of months. This was like the flash of inspiration that I needed, I'd just had my friend do this for me, but not even considered that it could be a full lifestyle choice. I suddenly needed to know more!

I found that there are numerous house-sitting websites out there, though the 2 that seemed most interesting for me were House Sitters Canada and Trusted House Sitters. Trusted House Sitters is like the Rolls Royce of house sitting websites, it's very popular, membership comes with loads of perks including liability insurance should anything happen during a stay, but as a result, is relatively expensive. House Sitters Canada is more basic with less members, but for me simply wanting to conduct an experiment whether this would be a viable approach for me to take, it was perfect. I ended up having memberships with both sites to maximize my odds and definitely had much better luck with the cheaper House Sitters Canada.

Once I'd decided to commit to a membership with House Sitters Canada, I spent a while just going through the profiles on there. I wanted to understand the kinds of people looking for house sitters, as well as the kinds of people doing house sits. What I found was that most house sitters were your world traveller types, which to be honest is not me. I like Toronto, I've built up my life here, and for the time being, would very much like to stay here. So I got a friend to help me write up my profile, and together we agreed that I'm the Toronto-based House Sitter.

I would later learn that this was actually really working in my favour. Within a week I had my first message requesting that I do a 2-month house sit for a guy who escapes the Canadian winter each year to go down to Mexico. He'd had bad experiences with some of the people he'd dealt with in the past who's plans were regularly changing and couldn't even commit to what country they'd be in a few months ahead.

So, we arranged to meet up and confirm that neither one of us is a deranged maniac. I had my initial reservations about the guy, he seemed far more interested in talking at me than listening to me, but I was nervously excited to give this a go and 2 months is a hell of a lot of rent to avoid paying. Overall though, he seemed like a fairly upfront guy and so I brushed whatever concerns I had aside and decided to take the plunge.

Committing To The Plan

Once the house sit was confirmed, it was time for me to give notice to my building that I'd be moving out. This was pretty scary, as up to that point all my planning had been purely theoretical, but this was me signing a document actually stating that in a few weeks, I would no longer have a place to call my own.

Terry had asked that prior to the housesit starting I come take his dog Mickey for some walks with the intention being that the 2 of us get better acquainted. We ended up settling on once every 2-3 weeks. I noticed however that on more than one occasion of me coming round, he'd admit in a jovial tone that the last time Mickey got a proper walk was the previous time that I'd been over. I was starting to get a little worried that I was being taken advantage of by this guy as a free dogwalking service. Again though, I was keen to make this work, so I brushed my concerns aside and was definitely too polite to mention anything for fear of souring the relationship.

My house sit didn't start until early January, but I was moving out end of November, so I needed to find myself a place for that month gap. I booked myself an Airbnb, which would allow me time to get acquainted with this new way of living. I also booked myself a storage locker to put all the stuff in that I wouldn't be taking with me. While most storage lockers are in the industrial outskirts of cities, I deliberately chose a slightly more expensive one not far from downtown, so that I could easily access my things as needed.

Come the day of the move, I'd got most of my boxes packed, with the final day being a bit of a mad rush to get the last few things boxed up which I had needed up until the last moment, taking apart furniture and loading it into the rental van I'd booked. Stress level at this point was medium, but still manageable. I'd got a friend helping me which made things so much quicker. Once we got to the storage locker, the stress really started to get the better of me. It turned out that when planning out how much space I'd need, I'd taken measurement of my bed frame, but somehow completely forgot to consider how much space the mattress would take up....which is a pretty damn large part of the bed, so suddenly I was working with significantly less space than I'd budgeted for. The van was half unloaded and the locker already felt full. I was getting freaked out, feeling stressed because we were running well over on the time I had for my van rental, and feeling like my plans were falling apart at the first hurdle. Luckily my friend managed to stay far calmer than I did, and together we managed to fit everything in, though with far less space than I'd originally planned, meaning any time I needed something I now needed to pull out half my locker to get to it.

In the weeks after the move, I came to realise just how fortunate I was in both choosing my local storage locker, and in getting myself an Airbnb for a month before my proper house sitting duties began. In just the first month, I think I became one of the storage unit facility's most frequent visitors. There were so many things that I'd taken with me which I realised could have been in storage, or had put in storage that I realised I needed with me.

A Rocky Start

Out of all the housesits that I did, the first one easily stands as my least favourite. On the final day of my Airbnb, I went off to work from a friend's for the day, then in the evening made my way over to Terry's at the agreed upon time. Terry would be leaving early the following morning and was clearly still mid-way through packing when I arrived. In the weeks leading up to the housesit he'd been complaining about a stiff hip and so I did what I could to help him as he was getting things packed into suitcases, took Mickey out for a walk around around the block, and did what I could to get myself settled in for the next couple of months. The following morning I was awake at 4am helping Terry get his suitcases out the door and running around finding the taxi to make sure they could find the correct house. Once all was done, I could retire back inside, I was home....for now at least.

Day-to-day life at Terry's was pretty straightforward. He'd been very clear about my responsibilities (I must have been shown at least 3 times before starting how to clear the lint trap on a dryer). Mickey's an old dog and was very easy to care for. The morning would start by letting him out for a quick pee. On my lunch break I'd take him down to the local dog park and give him his various foods, meds and treats for the day. Then in the evening he'd again go out for a quick pee. Mickey also had a daily 4-part dental care routine which I think would probably actually put mine to shame. Each day I'd have him in a pincer grip between my legs while he let me brush his teeth and massage his gums....definitely something that was very new for me in doggy care. The rest of the day all Mickey really wanted was just to be near me, mostly sprawled across my lap or on the chair next to me while I worked.

Nighttimes proved to be somewhat more problematic at first. Terry had warned me that Mickey would want to sleep on the guest bed with me, what he didn't mention was that this dog's favourite spot is being pressed firmly into your lower back, and if you pushed him away, he'd get real arsey about it. So the first few sleeps involved me waking up throughout the night, having subconsciously shifted all the way over to the edge of the bed, with Mickey still pressed into the small of my back. In the end I developed a nighttime routine of building a literal wall of pillows across the bed, with me on one side and Mickey on the other. It felt a little mean, but it was the only way I could get some actual decent night's sleep.

One early mistake that I made during this stay was agreeing to do a housesit for a friend which would overlap just a little at the very end of the housesit with Terry. I'd warned this friend of this, which she was fine with, and she has a cat who requires far less attention than a dog. She didn't live too far away from Terry's, so the plan was that for the first few days she was gone I'd pop round once every day or 2 to make sure that the cat was fed and loved. As the start of this housesit loomed though, both of us started feeling increasingly uncomfortable about this arrangement.

In a weird twist of fate, this situation with the double booking ended up sorting itself out quite nicely (for me at least). Me and Terry would text back and forth every few days just to let each other know how things were going, nothing more than formalities. One day though, Terry asked if I'd potentially consider caring for him, this felt weird, jarring, and I honestly didn't really know how to respond. My first housesit and someone was trying to coax me into being an in-home care worker for them. A few days later, Terry phoned me to say that unfortunately he's going to need to end the housesit early, his hip has continued getting worse and he's going to need surgery on it.

Terry arrived back on the Wednesday, with me actually going out to the airport to help pick him up. I ended up staying there until the Friday, worked during the day, and helped with some odd jobs around the place in the evening. Life for those couple of days was pretty miserable though. I realised in that time just how hard a person he is to live with. Terry was full of demands, I don't think I once heard him actually say "please" or "thank you" though. On Thursday evening, he talked at me for 4 straight hours. I feel like I know more about Terry's life than I do some of my closest friends. The highlight of the conversation was me trying to relate something, anything from his talking to my own life, at which point he asked if I could "kindly let him continue his story now". As you can imagine, I really couldn't get out of that house fast enough. I'd reached out to a couple of friends and was going to be sleeping in their guest room for the long weekend until my next housesit started.

I feel like I really learned some valuable lessons from this first housesit...

1. Even though you'll mainly be looking after the animal, it's so important to make sure you get only the best of vibes from the owner too. I looked past that with this one and it really did lead to a pretty unpleasant experience.
2. Never ever ever double book! Even if you think it's going to be the easiest pair of housesits ever, it's just not worth it. I got extremely lucky here.
3. Speak up for yourself. I didn't and honestly really regret it. By nature I'm a very agreeable, conflict-avoidant person, and as a result of that I do feel like I was taken advantage of and not treated fairly.
4. Friends are important...even more so when you're housesitting. My sudden unexpected departure from Terry's would have been so much more stressful had I not had friends that I could rely on. I did everything I could to show how much I appreciated the gesture from them while I was there.

The Beaches

Luckily for my sanity, my following housesit was probably my favourite of all of them. Paloma is a good friend that I've had for several years, who, like Mika, once she heard of my plans instantly asked if I could help her out because she was going away for a month. She has a cute little cat called Sushi who is possibly the shyest thing you've ever seen (I barely even saw him the first couple of days), and who's so absolutely food obsessed that Paloma had needed to install various security measures around her cat feeder to stop him from breaking in to it. She also has the most lovely, spaceous studio out in the Beaches area of the city.

My preference with sleeping arrangements while housesitting was always that I'll take a guest bed wherever I can. A hotel bed has hundreds, if not thousands, of different people sleeping on it over the course of its life. But one person sleeping on the same bed night after night....after a while that bed feels like it becomes theirs and not really meant for others to use. I actually helped Paloma move into her place a year prior, and one of the first things we noticed as we were unpacking was that this place also came with the most enormous, electric Murphy bed that folded up into a desk. Between working at that desk, and sleeping on that bed, I basically lived within the 5' x 5' area of that bed for the duration of my stay.

I think one of the things that made this housesit so great for me was that I was just looking after a cat. As a child, I had 2 cats and a dog. The cats for the most part just wanted to be left alone, the dog though, really did become my best friend. He was so full of life and just wanted to do whatever you're doing, which as a kid, is mostly fun things. I think in my adult years though, where much of my life is spent at a desk writing code, cats just fit that lifestyle so much better. They will happily curl up near/on you, have a nice relaxing nap, and when you do get some time happily run around after toys until at the drop of a hat they get bored of you. For Sushi that was me running around the apartment dragging feathers behind me, and playing a cat version of fetch where I'd launch his treats across the apartment floor and he'd scutter after them at top speed, returning back as soon as he sees the next one ready in my hand.

Joint Effort

When starting my housesitting journey, I'd kind of accepted that this probably wasn't going to be a great year for my romantic life. After all, how many woman are looking for a guy who's currently between homes? I was still on one of the dating apps, but conveniently didn't mention the living situation on my profile. My friends back in the UK definitely didn't help with these insecurities..."so you left here to go be homeless in Canada?"

However, before my first housesit had even started, when I was still living in the Airbnb, I met someone who seemed really nice...Leigh. I was pretty nervous to tell her about my housesitting, but when I did, and asked if she was ok with that, to my surprise her response was "I don't care about that, it's not like it changes anything."

Just after my Paloma housesit started, I found Rita who was looking for 2 people to housesit for her 2 dogs since one of them could be a little boisterous. One of my friends, Hiral, had expressed some interest in housesitting herself, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity for her to have a try at it. It's only once we went to go meet Rita that I realised just how close we were going to be to Leigh for this housesit. I felt a little embarrassed to tell her, like this guy she'd not even been dating 3 months was suddenly moving in practically next door.

I remember thinking that Rita was being overly cautious that 2 people would be required to take care of her 2 little dogs, but on reflection I'm so glad that I got the experience of the joint housesit. Looking after other people's animals always feels a little pressuring. That pressure is only amplified when the animals belong to people you don't really know. As such, it was such a nice change of pace getting to share the responsibilities. One person could go out while the other cared for the dogs. We'd keep each other company on the dog walks. On busy mornings one person would take the dogs out while the other prepared breakfast. The fact that Leigh was also just around the corner made the whole experience really great.

Pretty much no housesit is without its challenges though, and this one was no exception. The dogs we were looking after, Eliot and Leo, are father and son. Eliot was such an old looking dog, he just wanted to sleep his days away. On walks I think we were lucky if we could get him to average half a mile an hour. Meanwhile his son, Leo, was in the prime of his life. He was also a highly unpredictable dog. An absolute sweetheart that just wanted to give licks to the people he likes. If he saw a flat-faced dog though, he would bark, growl and claw his way along the ground trying to get at them. We had days where he'd approach a dog looking friendly, then at the last moment switch and try to go in for a bite. As such, we ended up being EXTREMELY careful on our walks of who we let him near. After we'd done a lap round the block with both dogs, I started a habit of taking Leo for an additional lap round the block, running not far off a sprint pace for me in an attempt to burn off some of his young, dumb guy energ.

Me and Hiral ended up doing 3 housesits for Rita. The final one was short and fairly uneventful. The 2nd one though was a little bit of an ordeal. At nights Eliot liked to sleep on a dog bed that was in my bedroom. A few nights in I was woken up in the middle of the night to lots of whining and scratching from him. He was old, short of sight, and practically non-existent of hearing....sometimes he got confused and in weird moods. I did what I could to try and calm him down, but he just kept going. The more I observed him, the more I realised, there was definitely something up with his ears that was bothering him. I took a video of his behaviour and sent it to Rita. She confirmed my fears....this guy had an ear infection, he'd apparently had several in the past.

Over the remainder of that 2nd stay, I think we took him to the vets a total of 4 times, 3 times a day rubbed medication into his ears, and 50 times a day pushed Leo away from licking his ears for fear of him just making things even worse. It was a truly stubborn infection that took in total just over 3 weeks to be fully treated. This didn't help Eliot's mood much, or his appetite.

Up until this point it had been something that neither me or Hiral had openly discussed, and even though we didn't doubt that Eliot was going to recover, we did have a conversation at one point of what would happen if this was Eliot's time. We both knew that Rita wouldn't blame us, as she knew we'd done everything we could to help this little guy, but we also knew it would be such a shitty feeling if it did that we couldn't not discuss it.

Getaway

Rita was certainly one hell of a traveller! She had a just a gap of 3 weeks between the first two housesits that me and Hiral did for her. I considered trying to find another housesit to fill this gap, but ultimately decided it probably wasn't worth it as I most likely wouldn't find anything that would line up well enough. Besides, I'd just done pretty much 3 straight months of housesits, I fancied a little bit of time not being responsible for any animals.

One of the aspects of housesitting that I'd been curious about was the freedom to move around. As such, I decided why don't I try getting away for a little bit. Admittedly, I didn't do the most exciting of getaways.....I went to Ottawa. I found that the locals seem to all be living with a huge complex that the city is boring, and as such would regularly apologising to me about how I must have nowhere near as much to do as if I was back in Toronto.

I had a great time though! I found an Airbnb which looked really nice (it wasn't, it even had a punch mark in the wall), on Boulevard Maisonneuve which sounded quite nice (it REALLY wasn't, I've never seen more 60s concrete architecture in my life). But despite that, I had different friends coming to visit each of the 3 weekends that I was there and we had a great time. We visited museums, did the gallery, went for walks around the city, got drunk, saw various groups of angry Trudeau protesters, it was great! I just learned a few lessons for the future, like do at least a little bit of googling of the place you'll be staying, and don't stay on the French side of the city.

Winding Down

Being English by birth, I do try to get home roughly once a year to see friends and family I have back there. Before I even started the house-sitting I knew that I was going to be spending basically all of June and half of July over there, and so would have a natural respite for those weeks.

What I didn't know however was that I would accidentally end up forgetting my Canadian PR card and getting stuck there for an extra week while Leigh drove out to my storage locker, found the card, and express delivered it through FedEx over to me. FedEx then proceeded to also forget about it, lose it, find it again, and then not even attempt to deliver it to the house I was staying at, resulting in me, my friend and his kids having to do a fun family trip out to them in order to get it in time for the flight which I'd just recently had to rebook for the 2nd time.

Once I finally made it back onto Canadian soil, I had 2 housesits lined up. One for just a week for Rita, and then a 7 week one lined up starting September. Rather than find extra housesits to fill the gaps, things had been going really well with Leigh, and she asked if I'd like to stay with her for a bit. I guess you could say this is another way my house-sitting worked in my favour, we got to progress so naturally into that nice trial run of couples living together for the first time.

It was around this time that I think I'd kind of made up my mind that I was fairly done with house-sitting. Don't get me wrong, I really liked the animals that I'd been looking after, but the continuous responsibility for other people's homes and animals, the living out of a suitcase, the constantly shifting daily routine with each new place I went to, I just found that each time I didn't have to do it, life felt like such a holiday.

I think also, because me and Leigh's experiment of living together was going great, that was a good reason for why I didn't actually NEED house-sitting anymore. Nevertheless, I'd given my word to people that I would do sits for them, and I wasn't going to go back on that.

The End

With the housesit for Terry being cut short, my final housesit ended up also being my longest. I'd first messaged David back in May about a housesit that was starting September while him and his wife Lori went off on what sounded like the trip of a lifetime around the Balkans. We met up soon after to have a beer on the patio and just get to know each other a bit better. I could tell right from the start that they were both lovely people. Of their 2 dogs, Izzy just wanted to sniff every single thing outside, meanwhile Bentley parked his chin firmly on my knee while I gave him head scratches.

The house was just a 10 minute walk above High Park, and so each day before work I'd take the dogs out for a full hour long walk around there. As far as surroundings go, I really couldn't have asked for much better. Before the housesit began David and Lori had both warned me about these dogs around others. Their concern was that Izzy not be let near small dogs, but once I started actually taking them out, I found Bentley the far harder one to manage. Don't get me wrong, total sweetheart, but these were the biggest dogs that I'd looked after so far, and a little part of me was nervous that these 2 would work together and whip me off my feet. I think other people were nervous about that too.

The real focus for me of this housesit though was me putting into action getting out of housesitting permanently. Back when I started it, I had in mind how much money I wanted to save by the end of the year, and by mid-September I'd actually already hit that target. I'd never been committed that I was actually going to buy a place, but I wanted to at least know that I had the option when I was ready....a luxury I think many people my age would kill for. A friend had been pushing me though that if I was going to buy, this was going to be the time to do it.

Another friend from my old Toastmasters group, Stephen, knew about my housesitting plans and had given me his card before the group disbanded that if I ever needed help finding a place, he could offer his services as a retired realtor. I think without Stephen, this final period of me juggling my work, housesitting, and homebuying would've been just a little too overwhelming. We met up in a restaurant to talk through my plans, my finances etc. and Stephen immediately filled me with confidence that with the money I saved I should have no problem getting a place. He set me some homework of finding places that I was interested in and we set up a date that a week later me, him and Leigh would go househunting together.

I'd been quite adamant about how close to downtown I wanted to be, plus what I was looking for in a property, and Stephen took all of that into account, and came back with a property that was several stops outside my target zone. We did some more digging, lined up some more viewings and in the end, I came to the conclusion that, in actual fact, the very first property he showed me was the one I wanted to go for, and which I ended up getting. Once the place had been chosen there was the usual stresses of getting financing, surveys, etc. Once my housesit had finished, I ended up just staying at Leigh's unil things were finished.

I'll admit that I'm still figuring out how to end this story, because it currently feels somewhat anti-climactic. I don't want to go into too many details on the homebuying, because after all, this is the story of my housesitting adventure. If you wanted to read about some guy buying a home, then I'll probably judge your choice of reading materials. 2024 is a year that I look back on fondly, it was incredibly unique, and at times nervewracking not knowing where I was going to be staying. Though that was also part of the sense of adventure.

It's definitely not for everyone though. One of my friends ran into a difficult rental situation, and in her desperation turned to me to ask about housesitting as an alternative option. Given what I know about this friend and her somewhat rigid ways when it comes to her home, as hard as it was to say, I had to let her know that I didn't think it would be the best option for her. She's in a better position now and definitely happy that she didn't pursue housesitting out of fear.

If however, you don't mind moving around a bit, and being fairly flexible with your living situation then I personally think it's a great way to quickly save some money while giving a finger to the predatory rental market we find ourselves in. Hopefully you don't tire of it like I did. Just make sure you have some good friends you can rely on.

Timeline

Here is the full timeline of my year. As a rough visual key, I've marked my housesits in bold colours, and the non-housesit stays in more pastel colours. As you can see, despite me being a housesitter for the full year. Only about 6 months of that time was actually spent on housesits. Click on any coloured date to see more info about it.