An exhaustive guide to swapping houses

Based on one case study

My friend Sara is an ambitious planner and host. For instance, her 2011 wedding ceremony was a surprise. As in, all the guests thought they were coming to her birthday party when it was actually her and her now-husband’s wedding (can you imagine going through wedding stress with only your stupid fiancé to talk to about it??) She also hosts annual field day picnics for her Seattle-area neighborhood where families get together and kids compete in various games for prizes. I personally have very modest-to-no ambitions myself lately when it comes to planning and hosting but when she suggested we swap houses this summer for a week, I was like, let’s do this. Sounds crazy like Sara and I want in. 

It’s fun to tell other people you’re swapping houses although like with swapping partners, it’s a thing that sounds carefree but involves a lot more logistics than just the kooky notion. You need to pick dates and figure out how each of you will get into the house if you’re not home to let the other in. You need to make your house guest-ready while living in the house and packing your family up. And you need to ensure your house is compatible with the other family’s. We had visited Sara’s family several years earlier so we knew in advance that it’s a house where we would be comfortable and the boys could run around. Sara’s family used to live in Chicago so I didn’t feel compelled to play tour guide with her, although I put together a multi-page document explaining some of our favorite easy family activities and wacky aspects of the house (like how we intended to have the sod replaced before they got here but it didn’t get done in time so her kids had to stay FULLY OFF THE BABY GRASS). 

When we finally arrived in Seattle, it did feel funny at first to enter our friends’ house without them there. Although they were there, with their stuff and their various house scents and little notes welcoming us or warning us to not touch various Legos (those were not written by Sara.) Part of me was a little relieved because the last time we visited them I remember how hard I struggled to switch gears from exhausted traveling-with-a-toddler-hot-off-a-four-hour-early-flight mom to social visit chill mom. Sara had put out a beautiful charcuterie plate and a delicate rosé and I wanted so badly to pour both things completely down my throat. This time Sara had phoned her niece when we landed to run over and put together a cheese plate for us before we let ourselves in. Without anyone around I could stand at the counter and shove as many pieces of brie and salami into my mouth as I wanted to without self consciousness or threat of breezy conversation.

After our trip I caught up with Sara to hear more about where she got the idea and her side of the trip--unlike us, who came straight from Chicago, they stayed in our house the last week of a 3 week trip that started in Canada, Vermont and New York City before she, her husband and their three little boys took the train into Chicago. I told you, she makes big plans.

Where did you first come up with the swap idea?

We have friends who live in Maine and we had wanted to move from Chicago to there, but we didn’t. When we saw their posts on Instagram my husband would say, “We should see if we can do a house swap and see what our life could be like there.” And then you guys, we love each other, but also it’s okay to miss each other if you feel comfortable and you have a space that is already set up for little boys. It was heaven—a space that’s already done up for rambunctious boys, Legos in the house. One time we stayed at a rental on vacation and we found a service that dropped off cribs, bags of toys and baby books. That was what made the trip to us.

You did the house swap at the tail end of a mega long trip. If you were to do it all over again would you put the swap at a different leg of the trip?

It was almost three weeks. My husband doesn’t take time off work very easily but there will be lulls and it’s very boring during that time. He’s the one who always wants to stretch these trips. I’m like, “We’ll kill each other the second week,” but he said, “It's easier for me to turn off an entire week at a time.” 

I’d wanted to go to Europe, but what if COVID flared up again this time? We decided to start with Montreal. I would have put the swap in the middle. Just to have access to laundry or a fridge so you could have yogurt in the morning. We were so sick of eating out. 

And you took the train from New York to Chicago. How did that go with the kids? 

That was for the novelty. My youngest turned four and he’s a little train boy. We never told the boys ‘til we got to the station and surprised them. It was intimate as fuck. It was not the Agatha Christie movie in my head. There were no gowns to be had. I did not have a martini.

What were the stress points of such a long trip?

I had a full on meltdown in Montreal. The kids were being rude and we weren’t getting into the groove of vacation yet. It takes quite a few days to get in vacation mode, I think, and this was day 2 or 3. I over-index on polite if we’re out somewhere and they were not and it was humiliating and I was the only one communicating since I’m the only one who speaks French. That was a hard one. I went outside and cried on the ground. A Canadian policeman came up and was like “Can I take you in? Are you OK?” I wanted to say, “If you can go in and lecture my kids that would be great.”

I would hold it over them for life. “Remember when you were so bad the police had to come?” What advice would you give to other people about who you’d swap with?

I would not do this with everyone. I feel very comfortable with you guys. We haven’t had a long term relationship with you in person but you guys are chill, no nonsense, similar parenting style. I never thought to myself, “What should I hide?” There was a cleaning freakout, but in the end I didn’t care that much. You’re doing the house swap because you want it to be comfortable although there is a sense of anonymity that you expect when you get into a rental. 

What did you enjoy about doing it? What was fun/easy about staying in someone’s house vs an AirBnb or hotel?

My favorite bits were having kid rooms set up and having toys in the house. I don’t know why that’s so insanely valuable. They must have spent 5 hours with a little bag of Lego guys you left out. I was like, “I’m going to leave $400 on the table and just take the bag.” My son was like “That’s not nearly enough money.” The little kid bedrooms. How intimate and adorable after we’ve come from two and a half weeks of anonymous hotel rooms. “Oh my god, there’s adorable posters and little kids’ clothing in here.” It felt homey. Them lounging on the couch watching a TV. That felt very comfortable. 

There were two things I would advise other people on before going ahead: checking on potential pet allergy issues and also coffee stuff. I feel bad I didn’t leave you instant coffee. It’s so important to be able to start your day with the coffee you need.

I never admitted this. I found the last Starbucks Via in your house and we have this instant water thing attached to our sink at our house and I was like “They don’t have this thing.” In my childlike amoebic brain, I thought, “They don’t have hot water.” I pulled out a pot and boiled some. And then of course you can’t pour a pot of boiling water into a mug. It was ridiculous. 

I feel terrible: I would have let you know I just microwave a mug of water or where we keep our electric tea kettle. I also feel bad that we were the ones who discovered that the power in your garage had gone out long before we got there, which included the freezer in the garage. 

I almost died. Our garbage wasn’t picked up by by the time we got home, so it was super full, and then on top us trying to clean out the freezer, which I think is beyond repair, I was like, “I need to write an apology to the garbage people.”

Is there anything else you’d do differently with the swap?

I forgot you have 2 boys and we have 3 boys and the bedtime dance with our youngest could be difficult. Maybe working out bed situation beforehand. 

And I had thought about doing that but my husband told me I was going over the top. What advice would you give other people about how to do it? 

I think you should have a full disclosure talk at the end of the trip like we are, where you can ask all the questions you have about other people’s houses. Like, why do you have so many copies of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?

That’s a question for my husband. I think he thought they’d be a good investment someday? I don’t know. I tried to get rid of the dupes once and he wouldn’t let me.

And why do you keep lotion in the shower?

I keep it in there so I can put it on after I dry off but before I leave the shower. I want to ask you why your kids had candy in the little pockets next to their beds. Was that for our kids or do your kids have special bedtime candy? 

Oh yeah, that’s weird. My kids aren’t allowed to eat all their Christmas or Halloween or whatever candy so I tell them they can put it next to their beds and they can dream about it. 

Amazing. Witch.

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Me again: My favorite little perfect topper to the experience was when we both got back to our home airport hubs. I proposed that we drive our own cars and leave them at the airport (our car can start with an app; they had us leave their keys in the middle console). We texted each other photos of where our cars were parked before we departed. Pulling this off and driving ourselves home in this manner was unbelievably satisfying for some reason, like fitting a piece perfectly in Tetris. Plus it was fun to check out what music they’d been listening to and their last destinations in the car’s GPS. 

Here are a few other things I’d recommend if you’re going to swap houses with someone:

• Swap with someone who has about the same size family as you and kids the same age/interests as yours. Your goal is for your kids to feel comfortable playing with/exploring the other family’s house and for that house to be ready for kids about your kids’ age. Maybe don’t swap if you have an active toddler and your friend has a tween who is very sensitive about his delicate glass figurine collection.
  

• Give yourself plenty of time to make a to-do list and get to it at a manageable tempo if you have aspects about your place you want to update or fix before you swap. For us this included things like cleaning the fridge, fixing some torn window screens, refreshing the bedding and cleaning out my bedside drawer. Doing this stuff in a rush will crush your soul and your vacation spirit. We have a housecleaning service that comes every other week and I asked if I could pay more for a deeper clean before we left and that was money well spent.
  

• Stock up on batteries. We didn’t do this and it wasn’t an issue but I kept thinking, “Watch our smoke detectors start chirping at 3 AM once they’re here.”
  

• Make sure you and your fellow swapper keep your phones nearby as much as possible when you travel. You don’t want to come home from a five hour dead zone only to get a bunch of texts like “The alarm is going off???” (This did not happen to us but there were some dead/funky appliances issues) 
  

• Lock away or give a family member/neighbor anything too valuable/personal to have around. My husband runs a production company so he locked up his cameras etc and we just said “The garage is off limits up while you’re here.” My sons also had some very precious Lego structures they’d inherited from some big boy neighbors so those got locked away too.
  

• Tell your neighbors, if you have a friendly relationship with them, about the swap so they will not be weirded out when a whole new family begins entering and exiting your home.
  

• Don’t try to deal with travel plans at your destination while you’re also preparing for the swap. It’s too tiring to mind the enter/exit logistics AND figure out museum entry times. Either be easy and make your plans when you arrive at your friends’ home or assign someone else in your family the role of scoping out what you want to do when you get to where you are.
  

• Get stoned (or not) and get into the weird mind game of imagining your friends in your home for the first time. After COVID lockdown, when I got extremely sick of my house, it was fun to picture our pals in our house with fresh eyes, the things they’d look at that we don’t even notice anymore.
  

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