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 Preparing for a home exchange – a cleansing experience!

Exactly one year ago, as school was coming to a close, I met a parent who told me she and her family were about to embark on a home exchange to Switzerland for 7 weeks!  Fast track to today and my family and I are now sitting at the airport waiting for our plane to take us to France for 7 weeks to take part in three home exchanges! Many people have asked me how we organized this trip, and as it ties in to the important topic of spending quality time as a family, I thought I’d share the logistics with you.

Homeexchange.com was the excellent website that we used.  I signed up for a year membership but there’s also a 3 month option.  The website is very easy to use (and that’s coming from a non-tech person!).  On your marketing page, it allows you to upload as many photos as you like.  This is a great opportunity to market your neighbourhood as well as special attractions, in our case whale watching at Tofino or Whistler mountain.  Include photographs of the rooms in your house and use lighting, flowers etc. to show it at its best.

Before becoming a member you can peruse the website and see all the homes of people wanting to come to Canada or people’s homes living in the country where you’d like to go.  Once you are a member, you can then e-mail people directly and see if they would be interested in an exchange with you.  (I e-mailed approximately 40 people and received four serious offers, of which we are now exchanging with three of the families.)  The opportunities are endless!  My daughter and I had a great time exploring many homes all around the world!  After we’d concluded our home exchange contracts, we received many more offers including ones from Brazil, Ireland and Switzerland even though our home page said we were wanting to go to France!

The website provides sample home and car exchange contracts in a variety of languages.  It also recommends that you build a relationship with the family – kind of like internet dating!!  Through e-mails and photographs that you send back and forth you get a sense of the people that you are dealing with.  They also recommend speaking on the phone once, which I did with each family, and indeed this did further the “relationship”.  (It was also exciting for my 8 year old daughter, who’s in French Immersion, to speak, in French, to the 8 year old daughter of our third French exchange family!  This began the beginning of an e-mail friendship between the girls.  We are also going to cross over for a couple of days which will be really exciting, especially for the girls.)  The contracts give one another a concrete set of expectations as to how each family will care for each others homes.

I informed my house and car insurance agent about the exchanges and for the house everything is covered except for theft.  For the car, one needs to write a letter of permission for the family to drive your car, to be left in the glove-box.  In addition, we’ve left each other a book of information about each others houses, cars, mechanics, places to visit etc.

Cleansing the Mind and Soul

Getting ready for the home exchange has been an excellent motivator for cleaning, de-cluttering, fixing and gardening! It’s like selling your house, only you get the benefits of returning to your new and improved home!  We worked hard for several weeks, and we were still cleaning the fish tank down to the last hour!  However, it was a very rewarding feeling to have everything in order – good for the mind and soul!  Two days ago, my daughter and I drove out to the airport and picked up our first family who have three lovely children ages 5,6, and 7.  It was so nice to meet them and now I only wish we could have spent more time with them!  We are really looking forward to staying in their home in a tiny country village in the Pays-Basque, with 12 chickens who will provide us with fresh eggs every day!

I plan to blog about our experiences and tie them into parenting topics.   I hope you’ll stay tuned and follow along with us on this adventure!

Happy beginning of Summer holidays!

Warmly,