Winter House Sitting: Why the Cold Months Are Worth It

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Quick Facts

This is our own experience from sits, not a maintenance or safety guide. We are sitters, not plumbers or vets. How a house copes with winter depends on the house, and the owner always knows it better than you do. If something looks wrong, ask them rather than guessing.

Winter house sitting gets written about as a survival exercise: lag the pipes, buy the salt, watch for mice. That is the house's side of it, and it is genuinely worth knowing. But it is not what a winter sit is actually like. What it is actually like is a fire already laid when you come in from the cold, frost on the grass at seven in the morning, a dog trotting ahead of you through hills you have never seen before, and a snow line creeping down the mountain while you watch. We would take a winter sit over a summer one.

Our winter sits so far have been in Italy and Switzerland, and neither was brutal. Around zero Celsius at the worst of it. In Switzerland we watched snow come down onto the mountain ranges across the valley, and you could see the line of it dropping lower through the day, hour by hour, until the whole range had gone white. I have rarely enjoyed a view more.

That is the thing about winter that a maintenance guide cannot tell you. The cold is not the enemy of a good sit. It is most of the reason for one.

The practical side still matters, and our guide to winter house sitting covers pipes, heating, snow clearance and rodents properly. This page is the other half: what the season is like to actually live through, and what to look for when you pick one.

If you are interested in getting into house sitting, our book Travel More for Less puts the whole process in one place: clear, step by step guidance from your first questions to your first confirmed sit, and the reviews that open the door to the next one.

What a Winter Sit Actually Feels Like

The best part is the fireplace, and I did not expect that to be the answer. Both of our cold sits had one, and there is a particular pleasure in going out into genuinely cold air and coming back to a fire that is already catching, a hot drink and food that warms the room as much as it warms you. It turns an ordinary evening into the best part of the day.

The mornings are the other half of it. Taking a dog out first thing when there is frost across the grass, and the cold nips at your face before you have properly woken up, is one of those things that sounds unpleasant written down and is lovely in practice. The air is sharp and clean and the whole day feels like it has started properly.

Most of the rest of the day is spent indoors, and that is not a complaint. We do not tend to spend much time outside the house on any sit. We go out to see the towns and the countryside nearby, then come back. In Italy we spent the days driving to the villages around the house and the evenings at home with the dogs. Cosmopolitan it is not. Cosy it very much is.

What to Look For: Views, Fireplace, and Not Too Many Pets

Anywhere that gets properly cold will have indoor heating and will explain how everything works, including access if it snows. So I do not spend much time worrying about the practical setup. What I look for is the atmosphere, and for me that means the views first.

The asking-before-you-improvise habit is the same one that covers everything else on a sit, and the pre-sit question list is where it starts.

Mountains under snow are the thing I will go out of my way for. A listing with a photograph of a snow-covered range outside the window does more for me than anything else in the description, and it is worth checking whether that view is actually from the house or borrowed from the region.

After the view, a fireplace. After the fireplace, the pets, and here I am deliberately picky in winter in a way I am not in summer. One or two is what I want. In summer a houseful of animals is good fun because you are outside with them. In winter you are indoors with them, in a smaller space, and a large pack in a closed-up house on a dark afternoon is a different job entirely.

So the winter shortlist is simple: a view, a fire, and one or two animals to keep you company in front of it.

The Houses Are Built For It

The thing that surprised me most about winter sitting is how little goes wrong. I had expected frozen pipes and power cuts and the drama you read about in winter guides. It has simply never happened.

The reason is obvious once you have done a few. These are lived-in houses in places that have had winters for centuries, and the people who own them have already dealt with everything the season can throw at a house. The pipes are insulated, the heating works, the boiler is serviced, because a homeowner who lives somewhere cold cannot afford for those things to fail in January.

There is a broader point in that, which took us a while to properly trust. The houses we sit in are maintained, because somebody lives in them. We are not inheriting a neglected property and holding it together through a crisis. We are looking after a functioning home for a few weeks, and the baseline is that nothing happens. It is worth remembering if you are nervous about a first winter sit.

If anything, I have found the opposite problem in Europe. Plenty of homes have no air conditioning, and a Portuguese summer in a house without it is far more uncomfortable than a European winter in a house with heating. Europe is much better prepared for the cold than for the heat.

The Mornings, and Why They Are the Best Part

In Cortona the dogs were awake and ready at seven every morning because they wanted their walk, and there was no negotiating with that. Caro and I took turns, and it became the part of the day I looked forward to most.

You are walking through Italian countryside with the hills all around you, past fields, with the light coming up and nobody else out. It is the kind of thing people pay a great deal of money to do for a week, and we were doing it because dogs wanted to go out.

Why Winter, and Why Not

We do not choose sits by season. We want to see one home after another, and whether that lands in July or January genuinely does not matter to us. Summer is fantastic, and winter is fantastic, and it comes down to what you personally like.

What makes the season worth choosing on purpose is the arithmetic. House sitting is cheap enough that you can take trips right through the year without the hotel bill, which means a winter week away is something you can actually do rather than something you save up for. You get somewhere new, you get a fire, and you do not come home with the financial weight of a holiday.

So the question is not really whether winter is a good time to sit. It is why you would not treat yourself to a winter one, and a spring one, and an autumn one. The listings are all sitting there. Everything is available to you.

Conclusion

Winter house sitting has a reputation for being the hard season, and that reputation comes entirely from the maintenance list. Lag the pipes, clear the drive, watch for mice. Do those things and the season stops being a trial and becomes the reason you wanted the sit.

What you get for it is a fire, a frosty walk with a dog at seven in the morning, and a view that changes every hour as the snow comes further down the mountain. We would choose it again.

Caro and I have completed 20 house sits across 12 countries, driven 19,000km across Europe in our 1998 VW T4, and saved over $26,500 in accommodation costs over three years of house sitting.

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Frequently Asked Questions

• Is winter a good time to go house sitting?

  It is, and it is underrated. The practical jobs are real but the houses are built for the cold, and what you get in exchange is a fireplace, quiet mornings and snow views. We choose sits by home rather than season, and winter ones have been some of the best.

• What should I look for in a winter house sit?

  Views first, then a fireplace, then a small number of pets. One or two animals in a closed-up house over winter is company. Five is a different job. Check whether the view in the listing is actually from the house.

• Do pipes freeze on a winter house sit?

  It has never happened to us. The homes are lived in and maintained, so pipes are insulated and heating is serviced before the owner leaves. It is worth knowing what to do if it happens, but the baseline is that it does not.

• What is the hardest part of a winter house sit?

  The dark, and the fact that a dog still needs walking twice a day in it. The upside is that those walks are the best part of the sit, because you are out in countryside at an hour when nobody else is. Take turns if there are two of you.

• Is it too cold to walk a dog in winter?

  The dog decides that, not the thermometer. Ours have all wanted to go out in frost and been perfectly happy. Watch for shivering or a dog asking to turn back, and check the paws after a walk if there has been salt on the roads.

• Should I worry about heating costs on a winter sit?

  It has never come up for us. A functioning heating system is part of looking after the property, not a luxury, and running it properly is what stops a cold house causing damage. If an owner has a strong view about the thermostat, they will usually say so before they leave.

• Do you need a car for a winter house sit?

  It helps. Winter sits are often rural, and the whole pleasure of them is the landscape around the house. Without a car you are dependent on the owner's nearest town, which in January can be a long way away.

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