What about Our House?

One of the other questions we’re frequently asked about our trip is, “What are you going to do with your house while you’re gone?”

For a while, we entertained the idea of renting it out as a vacation home for someone who wanted to come and ski during those weeks, etc. We thought about using services like vrbo.com or sublet.com to list our home.

But as the time of our trip drew closer, and we realized all that there was to prepare, we decided it would be too much of a stress for us to go this route. We currently have a little water leak in our basement, and everything downstairs is a mess right now because of it. We’re not sure we’d be able to get that cleaned up in time, and wouldn’t want to scare the visitors if they noticed a leak. (We’re hoping we can get it permanently fixed before we leave, but we’re still not sure what’s causing it. We’ve been thinking it was ground water, but recently noticed a consistency after doing several loads of laundry).

Our house is also full of personal items (clothes, etc.), the girls’ toys, and you never know how well a stranger is going to take care of your home. We’re not leaving anything very valuable in our house (except maybe our digital piano, but good luck carrying that!), so we weren’t too worried about theft (and we’d have their credit card number anyway, so could charge if there was damage, etc.) but we just didn’t want to deal with that at this point.

So, my sweet sister, Ashley is going to be taking care of our house while we’re gone (as well as some wonderful neighbors). For security, and because I’m such a gadget geek, for the times when no one is home, I bought some light timers that will turn lights on and off at random (or programmed) intervals, to give the appearance that we are home. I’ve also installed a wi-fi web-cam that will broadcast live video on the Internet, so we can see and hear what’s going on at our house while we’re on our trip. If it senses motion it will even e-mail us photos at that time, and let us watch the recorded video. Neat, huh?

We’ll also be locking up everything well on the outside. I’ve installed a biometric security panel on all the doors, programmed so they won’t open unless it determines through an advanced analytical algorithm, that your finger matches the DNA structure of someone in my family. Alright, I’m just kidding there. But that would be pretty amazing, wouldn’t it?