Retired Canadians with great references!

About this sitter

We are a retired Canadian couple in our mid-fifties with a lot of house-sitting experience and excellent references. We’ve been using house-sitting websites to travel for the past ten years. We don't smoke and we don't have kids or pets. We are reasonably fit and we love to bike and walk around to discover new places. We are quiet, tidy and respectful of other people's property.

Why they want to house sit

House-sitting is a great way to discover new, off-the-beaten path places. It gives us the opportunity to stretch our travel to a longer time period while enabling us to meet new people, make new friends and enjoy a little pet therapy. We love cats and house-sitting is a neat way to compensate for not having any of our own because we travel too much at this time.

Their experience

Since 2010, we have completed over 50 assignments in Canada, in the United States and in Europe. Over half of these assignments have involved the care of cats. Your house and pets would be in capable and caring hands, giving you the peace of mind that you need during your time away. We are quite versatile and we can adapt to both rural and urban settings.

Our very first house-sit assignment was in Vienna in Austria for three months in the Fall of 2010. This was a fantastic experience and it spurred a new life style for us -- working in Newfoundland during the summer and travelling the rest of the time. We sold our Newfoundland home in late 2014, relocated to Vancouver (BC) and plan to continue to travel on and off in the coming of years.

It’s been an incredible journey that has taken us down to the United States many times: Maine, Winston-Salem in NC, Rochester NY, Charlottesville, Stevensville, Washington DC, Portland Oregon, Seattle, Denver and San Francisco. This winter in February 2019, we broadened our experience and took care in Bellingham in Washington State of chickens for the first time -- they were gorgeous, pretty cool and the eggs were delicious!!

House-siting has also enabled us to explore our own country with assignments in Newfoundland (Corner Brook), in Nova Scotia (Lunenburg), in Ontario (Ottawa, Sarnia), in Alberta (Calgary) and in British Columbia (Vancouver, Gibsons, Coquitlam, White Rock, Sidney, North Vancouver).

Since our Austria trip in 2010, we've been back to Europe three more times: three months during the summer of 2015 (Netherlands, Brussels, London), six weeks in Amsterdam in June/July 2017 and another three weeks in Amsterdam in July 2018. House-sitting is a great way to travel, that’s for sure…

What can they bring to the assignment

We are a middle aged couple who has the maturity and experience needed to take care of most maintenance associated with house ownership. We have owned several homes over the past 25 years. We even ran a small tourist business for 6 years, renting our lovely seaside cottage to people who wanted to come to Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland to experience a very unique scenery in Canada. We are very tidy and clean and, we are good at communicating with our hosts so that they are kept informed during their travel. We are dependable and we try our best to follow instructions to the letter.

We enjoy the company of cats and it seems reciprocal. We are comfortable with giving medication and caring for elderly cats. House-sitting has provided us with regular and much appreciated doses of “pet therapy” over the years!