What happens when a house sit goes wrong…
When I sat down with my husband, Tony and discussed the possibility of housesitting globally, we knew we’d have both amazing and not-so-amazing experiences. We were both well-traveled with our share of dubious and dramatic stories under our belt. Being chased down the road by men throwing rocks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia? Check. Having my drink spiked in a nightclub in Phuket? Yep. Arriving at an AirBnb in Scotland to find that it could have been from the set of Deliverance, complete with a fish-cleanin’, gun totin’ Scottish red-neck in cammo gear glaring at us from the porch next-door? That was a thing…
So needless to say, we thought we were relatively bullet proof for being shocked. We also knew that we’d have to take a couple of house sits that weren’t top-notch to get good reviews and build our profile on the various sites we were using when we first started.
Luckily, the first few sits we ended up getting where amazing. We bagged a gorgeous hobby farm in Hahndorf, Australia, a sprawling art deco mansion in Surrey England and a dream home in Zurich, Switzerland. All the critters we cared for were adorable. Unfortunately, in Switzerland I jinxed us. Standing in a beautiful wildflower garden, sipping a coffee as two tubby cats lounged in the grass nearby, I looked out over the valley nearby and actually said with my very own mouth: “There has to be a catch, right? They can’t all be this perfect.” (Insert retrospective forehead slap here.)
Enter the house-sit from hell. It went down like this:
The Giant Red Flags We Should Have Seen
We booked this thirty-day sit before we picked up all the others. It was in a small village in rural France, near an old medieval city. The pictures of the area were lush, green and all very French. The picture of the outside of the house showed an old — apparently restored — French “grande maison”, probably the house that formerly belonged to some big-shot, pre-revolution minor aristocrat who got the chop, because — as we soon learned — it hadn’t had a lot done to it since then.
The pictures of the inside of the house? There was only one. I could see see a bit of clutter on the kitchen bench tops and the tables, but I let myself get distracted by the really cool steam-punk style lights and the adorable ultra-tubby cats. Plus it was France! We’d always wanted to stay in France! We were going to France! What did a bit of bench top clutter matter?
As we found out, a lot!
The next giant waving red flag was a Skype call with our future host a few weeks before we arrived. She started the call by abruptly telling us that her mother had Alzheimer’s and that she wouldn’t be able to meet us when we arrived. Instead she’d be in the UK settling her mother into a home.
Given the fact that the sit would be over the time she’d be on her honeymoon, I gave her a whole lot of leeway. No one wants to be settling their mother into a home right before their wedding. It was only when we were half-an-hour into the call that I realised she hadn’t said hi to us, or asked us a single question about ourselves.
After the long description of her mother’s condition, she announced that her fiance would meet us instead, and take us to a nice dinner before he left to meet her for their wedding. That relaxed us enough for her next statement to almost slip under the radar.
“I should let you know the cats pee in the house. Not often, but you should know.”
Tony asked how much was “not much.”
The answer was a wry smile. “More than I’d like.”
She then proceeded to tell that there were a lot of outbuildings that were under renovation — but that no work would be happening while we were there, and that she she hoped her fiance would have the house clean before we arrived. Before we could think to ask what she meant about that, she ended the call.
Picture a sea of red flags flapping in the air. And we ignored every one of them. After all, we reasoned, she probably was just a bit frazzled with the whole sick mother and wedding thing, probably just exaggerating about the cat pee. She had four cats, but two of them were girls. How bad could it be?
The House Of Doom
The front of the home itself wasn’t so bad when we arrived. It was an old house with pretty pot plants out the front, surrounded by a number of ancient outbuildings that looked like they were falling down, but we’d been told about them. The fields surrounding the house were alive with wildflowers and placidly grazing cows. The village nearby had been a postcard to drive through and although the house didn’t look as renovated as we’d been told, in the evening light, it looked more dishevelled than a dump.
When we walked through the open front door, our host’s fiance was half-way through sweeping up a massive pile of dust on the bare concrete floor in the hall. Before we could focus on that, he barraged us with how frazzled he was about getting ready for his flight. He had yet to pack or even wash his wedding clothes and he was leaving at six am the next morning!
We immediately worked out that no dinner was coming when he asked us what we were going to do about food, so we had to do a mad-dash to a supermarket a half-hour away to get something to eat. By the time we got back it was very late. Weirdly enough, even though it was early spring and very cold, he still had all the doors and windows open. On a quick investigation, the kitchen looked a bit of a mess with stuff everywhere, but we assumed that was because he was in a flap. We should have looked closer, but he was so anxious, we spent most of our time keeping him company in the living room next door, shivering with cold from the open windows. Normally we would have had a shower and settled in, leaving the guy to pack for his wedding, but every time we made to leave the room, he started talking again.
We shared a couple of glasses of wine, introduced ourselves to the four cats, and fell into bed after he finally showed us upstairs to our very dimly lit bedroom. Before we said goodnight, he told us that he and his future wife wouldn’t be contactable for the duration of their honeymoon.
The next morning we woke up, looked at the ceiling and freaked out. How had we missed all that black mold? We’d thought it was just a weird paint-job the night before in the dim lighting and we both had the tail-end of a cold, so we obviously hadn’t been able to smell it. But in the plain light of day, there was so much of it! It looked like the roof was rotting.
Panicking, we headed downstairs and recoiled at the smell of so much ammonia that our noses immediately un-blocked. The house had been shut up overnight and and cat pee fumes had built up a critical mass downstairs. Looking around, it was everywhere. I spotted over thirty dried puddles in the living room alone. The kitchen benches, chair cushions, sofa, fireplace, everything was covered in cat pee.
I wondered out loud how the hell we’d missed it the night before and Tony pointed out it had been a combination of the lights being so dim, the windows being open, our blocked noses and the fact that our host had been determined to clean the chip pan on the stove in the kitchen, which meant he’d been heating stale grease on high for the entire evening, masking the smell.
In the clear light of day — with our host’s fiance long gone — we recoiled, realising the night before had been one big distraction exercise so we wouldn’t see the filth. There was a coat rack of very dusty, but expensive coats in the hall and as I watched in horror, one of the female cats backed up and sprayed them with a generous amount of pee. From the stains on the coat’s hems, I realised they’d probably been doing that for ages. I’d never known before that female cats could spray too, but the evidence was right there in front of me.
Tony went outside to investigate and within minutes returned grim-faced. All the out buildings were full-to-the-brim of garbage and building rubble, there was broken asbestos everywhere in the wood shed — meaning we wouldn’t be using the wood there for heating any time soon. There were also giant nails sticking out of blocks of wood hidden in the high grass that surrounded the clothes line, and a swamp nearby that looked like it’d burst into life with mosquitos the minute the weather got warmer… Ugh.
Further investigation revealed that the depth of the filth was worse than we’d first thought. The fridge was evolving foreign lifeforms with at least two inches of sludge in the crisper drawer. The stove was coated in a grime that could be used as a biological weapon. There were boxes of wine and half-drunk bottles of booze everywhere. Building crap and grease littered every surface apart from the main kitchen island that the guy had insisted we prepare our food at the night before, right under the sole dim steampunk-style lights in the room that he bragged he’d picked up at a deceased estate auction. There was at least a half-centimetre of dust on every surface, except for the kitchen island, stove and the living room coffee table that we’d set our drinks on the night before.
Worst of all was the basement, where the washing machine was housed in a far-off corner. To get to it, we had to cross a mud-floored pit covered in rubbish, building rubble and more half-empty boxes of booze. It could have doubled as a murder dungeon. It smelled like mold, cats’ pee, rubbish and decay. In the middle of this hell-space, we looked in amazement at a piece of rebar that had been propped on top of a car jack, which in turn was sitting on some random blocks of wood. It was the sole support for the living room floor.
There was more awfulness — piles of clothing left in heaps, covered in grey-green mold, yet more cat pee, yet more grime and dust and gunk. And don’t even start me on the state of the shower cubicle in the bathroom.
What we did
We stayed. Yes! I know, that sounds absolutely insane, but there were four very sweet (if not pee-crazy) cats at the property and if we’d left, there’d have been no one to feed them. Our French was high-school level and we had no idea how to go about reporting this kind of thing, or even if we could. After all, the house was a dumpster fire, but the cats were all healthy and aside from being pee sprinklers, seemed pretty happy.
We’d been given one contact number for our host’s friend, but when I called it no one answered. If we left, we’d be neglecting our duty of care to the critters. The humans might be bottom feeders, but it wasn’t the cats’ fault.
Realising we were stuck, at least until we could sort something out for the cats, we decided that we weren’t going to martyr ourselves to the situation. There was no way we could live in filth, so we’d just have to clean the place — or at least enough of the place to have a space that was fit to work and live in. Worst-case-scenario, if we were going to be stuck there the entire 30 days, we had to have a healthy space to occupy.
It took four days. Four days of fifteen-plus hours a day of cleaning. And that only meant that two rooms were okay to live in. After some investigation, we realised the only safe, black-mold-free bedroom to sleep in was our host’s, so we relocated all of their dust-and-cat-pee soaked furniture to the spare room, lifting each piece without touching or looking at any of their stuff littering the surfaces as much as possible. Luckily there wasn’t a lot, just a couple of dust-caked side-tables and a chest of drawers. That left a bed with a bare mattress and a rug on the floor covered with scattered cat litter (Why cat litter in the bedroom? We have no idea). We cleaned the hell out of the rug and disinfected the floor, washed some sheets and blankets — not trusting the last time anything in the house had been cleaned — and made the bed. Luckily, we’d brought our own travel pillows.
By three weeks in, we thought we’d gotten a handle on the house. It was clean enough to live in. In fact, other than the murder dungeon basement and the bedroom we’d stored our host’s furniture in, it was damn spotless. We were sleeping okay in the one bare, disinfected room that we’d cat-proofed, and the cats were keeping their peeing to just one spot by the front door. Our host’s friend finally made an appearance and turned out to be a really nice person. It took only a couple of minute’s conversation to grasp that our hosts were notorious in their friend group for leaving a filthy house and the cats for their friends to look after. The reason they’d gotten house sitters this time had been because they’d exhausted all their friends’ good will!
Realising that the entire situation had been pre-meditated rather than someone having low cleanliness standards due to stress over their elderly mother, or their wedding, or just not realising that filth was an acceptable state to live in, I felt my temper come to the bubble. However, we only had five more days to go and to leave then would have meant arranging alternative accommodation . We figured we’d sit it out and learn from the experience.
The second from last day, I walked into the kitchen and came to a dead stop on seeing that one of the cats had managed to climb up onto the 9ft high shelf where we’d been storing our food. (We’d figured it was the only safe spot for anything that didn’t belong in the fridge.) As I watched, she made eye contact with me, straddled the baguette I’d purchased the night before and peed on it. If it were possible to hear a person’s brain break, it should have happened then.
What we learned
We learned so many things. Thanks to that one nightmare sit, we’ve never been caught out with a situation like it again. We now have an extensive list of questions we ask before accepting house sits, and if we spot even one red flag waving, we don’t take the sit.
As for our slovenly hosts, I received an email only a week ago asking if I’d like to come and take care of their house for two months near the end of this year. I think that’s one email in my inbox that won’t be answered any time soon.
