Renting out your house for the holidays, have you ever thought about it? Every summer we move to rent out our house to holidaymakers, and we spend the summer in a mobile home. It’s work, but we understood a long time ago that it was a good way to increase our travel budget! We have a well-oiled organization, which has been set up over the years I answer here the many questions received on Instagram, to help you take the plunge if you want to rent out your house for the holidays.
Why rent your home for the holidays, and where to go during this time?
You can rent your house for a long period as part of a long trip (which allows you to increase your world tour budget, for example), or you can rent your house by the week to vacationers who will take the opportunity to discover your city / your region (in this case, you obed a minimum of points of interest around the house, so that people want to come on vacation, otherwise it’s not necessarily a given). While our house is rented, we can go on holiday at the same time (and the money raised will be used to pay for our holiday). Or we can move next door, and live in a mobile home in the meantime, or a caravan, or whatever we want. This is our way of working as seasonal workers: summer is a time when we work a lot, so we stay on-site Several years ago, we bought a mobile home, located 10 kilometers from the house, which allows us to be even closer to our surf school located in Porge Ocean, in Gironde .
What to do with your personal belongings when you rent your house by the week?
When you rent your house you have to accept that people sleep in your bed, in your children’s beds, sit on your sofa, use your bathroom… personally, it’s something we’re used to and it doesn’t affect me at all to see a family arrive and take over the place (the hardest part is the first time, but gradually you get used to it). However, you still have to be a little materially detached, and not worry too much about your belongings (even if the idea is not to find everything trashed). The idea is to condemn a room, where we can store the things we don’t want to leave in the house. In our case,e it is my office, which is not intended to be rented and can therefore be locked. This is the place where our important papers are stored, but also personal stuff like photo albums for example, so nothing to move at that level.
Furniture that locks or turns
PWedon doesn’t haveany lockable storage, but we use the technique of turning the furniture around to leave things hidden away. This is the case with our bathroom cabinet, which we turn halfway to block the door, or the storage units for our children’s games, which turn into a headboard (these are pieces of furniture that James built, but the concept would have to be invented to sell them in stores!). This allows you to put all the toys in without necessarily putting them away too much, turn the cabinet, and presto! No one will see, that the mess has disappeared Our children sleep on Ikea stackable single beds (basically two single beds stacked on top of each other, the height is that of a regular bed); this makes it easy to store the 2 extra beds we use when we rent the house (by transforming the playroom into a bedroom for two people) all year round.
Symbolically condemned furniture
We completely free one of our two dressing rooms so that vacationers can set up their things, and we group our things in the other dressing room. Before I used to put a piece of tape to symbolically block the door, now I don’t put anything, I just explain to people when they arrive that it’s our things in this dressing room. If we didn’t trust each other we could empty both closets and put all our stuff in my office, but honestly, I’m lazy, and I tend to trust people; so far everything has always gone very well that way.
Big boxes
If you only have one dressing room and not necessarily an extra room to store your things (which was the case before), you can free up half of the dressing room and gather your things in large storage boxes, which will be stored in the other half of the dressing room; this way the clothes are not visible.