We did it for months in Portugal before we found out it had a name.
For the whole of covid, we lived on an estate in Portugal.
We've told that story before, in the letter about house sitting. We've house-sat several times, and that was simply the longest one.
It turns out we filed it in the wrong place.
The owner wasn't away on holiday. She lived in England, and the estate carried on without her, with us in it. Nobody was coming home in a fortnight. There was a place, and it needed people.
That has a name. It's called caretaking.
We found out while writing this letter.
There's even a newsletter that has been printing caretaking jobs since 1983, and we'd done one for months without knowing the word. So this is the letter we'd have liked to read before Portugal, rather than after.
If you've house-sat, you're most of the way there already. The difference is that this house doesn't need you for a fortnight. It needs you for a season.
It's house sitting grown up. Same idea, bigger job, and much more time.
Why would anyone hand over the keys? Because empty buildings go wrong quietly. A pipe bursts in January and nobody finds it until May. A person living there notices on the first morning, and the owner sleeps better a thousand miles away.
The Caretaker Gazette, the oldest board for this, lists estates, ranches, farms, retreat centres, summer camps, hunting and fishing lodges, holiday homes and the occasional private island. Most of the listings are in North America. The rest are spread across dozens of other countries.
Places that close for a season. Lodges, camps and retreats that shut for winter, or for summer, and need someone to keep the lights, the heating and the insurance company happy until the doors open again.
Places whose owners live elsewhere. A second home on a coast, an estate kept by a family that visits twice a year, a vineyard owned by someone in a city.
Places with guests in them. Plenty of caretaking posts come with people. A guesthouse, a handful of holiday lets, a few rooms on a booking site — someone has to hand over the keys, put out breakfast, and turn the rooms round between arrivals. More work than an empty lodge, and a good deal more life.
Places at the end of a road. Ranches and island properties where the nearest neighbour is a boat ride away and the owners want someone they can call.
And places at the top of a mountain. New Zealand's conservation department takes volunteer hut wardens for its backcountry huts. You stay two weeks to a month, greet the trampers, read out the weather forecast and keep the hut clean. It's around four hours of work a day, and the view is included whether you want it or not.
A place to yourselves. Not a spare room in someone's life, but the whole property, often with the owners a continent away.
A season. Long enough to see a place change. The first snow, the thaw, the week the lake goes from grey to blue, the day the swallows come back. You don't get that on a fortnight.
Your costs cut to almost nothing. Housing, and often heating and electricity, come with the job. Sometimes a vehicle does too, because nobody runs an estate without one.
Sometimes a wage. On the bigger properties caretaking is a job like any other, with pay, and occasionally with benefits.
Time. A few hours of work on a quiet day leaves a lot of day. People write the book here. Or learn the language. Or finally get round to doing nothing, properly.
Less than you'd think, and in some cases nothing.
What remains is getting there, and getting home at the end of the season.
Write down everything you can fix. Plumbing, carpentry, a chainsaw, a tractor, a pool, a boat engine, horses. Caretaking owners care less about who you are at breakfast and more about whether you'll know what to do when the pump stops.
Use your house-sitting reviews. A string of happy owners is the best reference you'll ever have. If you haven't got any yet, a few short sits first is the fastest way to get some.
Apply together, if you're two. Say who does what. "She does the house, he does the grounds" is a sentence owners like to read.
Answer quickly. The good posts don't stay open long. Keep a letter and a list of references ready to send.
Ask what the week looks like. How many hours, which days off, what's expected when the owners visit. Good owners like the question.
Try a short one first. A fortnight as a hut warden, or a month on a quiet property, tells you whether you're a season person before you commit to a year.
Because a season changes what a place is to you.
On a holiday a place is a view. After three months it's the shop that shuts on Wednesdays, the neighbour who brings eggs, the path you walk without thinking, and the sound the house makes when the wind comes from the north.
You don't visit somewhere like that. You belong to it for a while, and it lets you.
And when the owners come back in spring and ask whether you'd like to do it again next year, you'll already know the answer.
This one rewards time more than money. Between jobs, between countries, or after the last working day — if you have a run of months nobody else has a claim on, there's a place out there that would like to meet you.
Caretaking
Long house sits, which is where many caretakers start
And the ordinary job sites
None of this is a reason not to go. It's the list we'd want handed to us.
Read five listings. The Caretaker Gazette has posts for one person as well as for two, and if you're two, a job site search for caretaker couple turns up more.
Then pick the one you'd write back to. You'll learn more about yourself from that choice than from any list of pros and cons.
Some links here earn us a small commission. It never changes what we include — and when something is here for another reason, we say so.
If you book one of these, or try one, or talk yourself out of one — we would like to hear about it. Drop us a line.
— Birgitta & Anders
One new way to travel. Every Thursday.
Not deals or destinations — methods. House sitting, night trains, repositioning cruises, and what each one really costs.
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