Once again, we put our home lives on autopilot. We just left home for a six-week road trip through the Western United States. In the process we relived the grueling but satisfying days leading up to our gap year in 2022.
I’m not sure what other traveling families do about their homes while away, but we put ours to work on Airbnb. It pays its own expenses. It foots the bill for its cleaning and maintenance. It even gives us a non-trivial source of income while away, though it is hardly what I would call “passive.” More on that later.
This post is a reflection on the benefits and challenges of turning your home into a vacation rental. It also offers a snapshot of our harried days just before striking out.
To Feed a Cat
For someone who aspires to wander the globe, owning animals is a major constraint.
We own two cats. More precisely, we feed two cats. Before we adopted them, they were rescued but never warmed up to humans. Over time they’ve allowed us to pet them. But they are strictly outside cats whose main purpose is to eliminate the parade of mice wandering from a nearby boarded up feedstore to our house.
Trapping several mice a week is not a good look for an Airbnb. But what to do with the cats when we leave? Six weeks is too short to migrate them to a neighbor’s house, as we did for our year abroad. But it’s too long to ask a friend or neighbor to come over twice a day to feed them. And certainly too long to not feed them at all.
Enter the PETLIBRO Automatic Cat Feeder ($39 on Amazon).
The Cat Food Bandit
Engineers and raccoons are persistent creatures. Some might even call us obsessive. It’s the secret to how we prevail against the wicked problems that stand between us and our livelihood.
Despite my assumption that racoons were geniuses, I found out the truth when I set up an AI motion detection camera trained on our cat feeder ($32 on Amazon). Intelligence is certainly a factor. But after reviewing a typical nightly queue of ten or more video captures—evidence of the repeated break-in attempts—I discovered its true super-power. Tenacity.
Before the camera, we were naive and left the feeder outside unguarded. Next morning, we found the lid pried off and the food gone.
We improvised. I put the feeder in a little insulated cat house that I originally built for them to stay warm in the winter. I blocked off the door so only the bowl stuck out and put hinges on the roof so we could refill the device. I also installed a latch. Next morning, the roof was unlatched and open. Cat feeder manhandled. Food gone.
I tried twisting thick electrical wire through the latch. That time, it didn’t get the food, but it reached in and pulled out the power cord, rendering it useless.
One night, just for giggles and a little revenge, the boys and I rigged a booby trap. We hung a blanket full of water balloons outside our upstairs bathroom window. The surveillance camera pinged my phone when the bandit arrived. At the opportune moment, we released thirty balloons onto the cathouse. It was a barrel of laughs, but the problem remained unsolved. It came back a half hour later and continued its relentless assault.
In the end, I engineered a Suessian contraption that conveyed food through PVC pipes from inside the garage to a platform with a fastened bowl on the outside. When we left, the cats were still not quite used to being served by a robot. I can relate.
The Magic Transformation: Family Home to Airbnb Digs
The cat feeder story might seem an unnecessary detour, but it has a point. It’s an object lesson in how a little detail can expand into a multi-day effort when trying to “automate”, or extract yourself from your home life. Don’t even get me started on forwarding the mail.
We’ve done the Airbnb home conversion a number of times before, so the effort and time involved was more predictable. But it was no less grueling.
Counteracting the forces of entropy requires strategy. And for those about to comment that entropy is technically not a “force,” come visit my house first and I’ll introduce you to three such forces.
The rules of the game are simple: stage it so the tasks you do early on aren’t likely to be undone before you roll out the driveway. Fleshing out the order of tasks is the challenge.
Here is what we came up with after multiple dinner table conferences:
Several Weeks Prior
Reactivate the Airbnb listing.
Work through the list of broken things around the house.
Do any repainting or touch up as needed.
The Weekend Before
Remove cobwebs.
Clean the most noticeably dirty windows.
Wage war against the weeds.
Grind down the grease rings on the glass cooktop and clean inside oven.
Two Days Before
Declutter. Remove personal pictures and tacky crap that only our family would enjoy.
Empty dressers and box up items.
Clean the grime and mildew from the tub and shower curtain.
Remove dirty fingerprints from walls with magic erasers.
The Day Before
Keep the kids out of the house as much as possible.
Make breakfast and lunch first thing in the morning. No more using the kitchen after that.
Traditional deep clean. Floors. Toilets. Counters. Etc.
Fresh sheets on beds (we never use our own sheets for guests).
Everyone gets one last shower.
Clean the bathroom.
Go out for dinner. We deserve it. (And anyways, no more kitchen!)
Family goes to bed in sleeping bags on the living room floor so as not to disturb the rest of the house.
The Day We Leave
Kids shooed out the door upon waking.
Vacuum up the little bits that inevitably trail our family like Pig Pen.
Wipe away fingerprints that reappeared.
Final walk through.
Lock up closets and rooms meant to be locked.
Roll out of the driveway with a sigh of relief and the nagging feeling that something was overlooked.
To Airbnb or not to Airbnb: that is the question.
I’ll be honest, when we’re in the thick of it, the “Why are we doing this?” question comes up repeatedly. For several days, we exert ourselves while covered in a film of dust-caked sweat. The dread that we missed a spot, earning a bad review from a guest, hangs over our heads. And, unfortunately, we end up grumpy toward the kids as the end nears and they show no awareness of the urgent need to not touch anything.
Yet, it’s the crucial element that allows us to travel for months at a time without worrying about an unsupervised home or a drained savings account.
Our stance towards the ordeal softens once we’re on the road and the deposits roll in.
Liuan and I also identified another benefit. We like a clean home. And it’s especially gratifying after a long stretch of travel to come home to perfection, however fleeting. So maybe being forced to do something we should do anyway — and getting paid for it — isn’t the worst thing.
If you want to read more about how to host guests for extra income while traveling, check out the guide I wrote on our blog.
I’m so glad we’re not the only ones who find this! We used Airbnb when did the Camino - it certainly helped financially but gosh it was stressful leaving the house!