We’ve housesat before, but this was the first sit on a proper site. The hosts were incredibly welcoming and kind. Our dinner when they came back felt a little cold, but they were tired after a long journey.
So many things went wrong on the sit - their bathroom radiator leaked from the floor above, into their study below and a whole patch of ceiling fell through! This took up a whole morning of us calling an emergency plumber, ringing round to a lovely neighbour who came to help, and clearing the mess which kept crumbling for the next few weeks. Their wifi went down when we were remote working, their kitchen lights had an issue we spent hours fixing, and their poor chicken was being pecked at until it bled, so we spent a good day sorting out a change of living for the chicken (with the owners permission). We gave the chicken so much love and re-fed her back up to a decent weight. We tended to the garden, potting on and trimming big tomatoes, and reseeded new lettuces. We watered a huge piece of land, and picked lily bugs off their flowers. When they came back we picked them a punnet of raspberries from their garden and made a small bottle of elderflower champagne from their honey. We felt we stayed in touch quite consistently, and sent them some pics of their animals. So I do honestly think we did a decent job!
However we’ve recieved a one star review, and no feedback or comment on why. Its devastating - we expect we’ll not get another sit now, as its our first one. We have two more sits coming up and lord knows what these hosts will be thinking when they see our first and only review. Its a very mysterious sounding review - just that ‘after much thought, they feel they cannot leave us one’. It sounds like we’ve stolen or broken something…
We’ve been going through everything we might have done and thinking there were other things maybe they were annoyed at and didn’t talk about to us in person.
My mum stayed with us for two nights, not one night (as it was too long a drive for her to go back straight away in the end). We took their dog for a walk in the non-designated car perhaps (our own car)? One of us broke a garden fork (replaced straight away with same brand). When the sit was done, I left something behind and took something with me when we left (posted back immediately). We forgot to close a specific door in the house a few times. We asked quite a lot of questions which could have interrupted their holiday (so maybe we weren’t self-sufficient enough?). We think any of these things above could have been stressful for them, but we didn’t think our '‘animal & pet care’ rating should have been marked so low. We loved and doted on the animals - I miss them!
We probably deserved a 3 star for disorganised or something.. but one star, without any comment, just feels so shocking.
We will no doubt have been filmed on illegally undeclared indoor cameras but we have no way of proving this. Is there anything TrustedHousesitters can do? Should we reach out to our upcoming hosts to offer another chat perhaps, to see if they’d still like to go ahead? Or would this draw too much attention to the one star and make us seem more suspicious. I’m just feeling so paranoid now - and so so sad at this ending to what we thought was a lovely, if slightly eventful sit.
