I used to leave a stack of handwritten notes on the kitchen counter every time we went out of town. Three pages of my terrible handwriting, half of it illegible, with arrows pointing to other arrows. My housesitter would inevitably text me at 9pm asking which knob controlled the hot water.
After a few trips where things went sideways (our dog didn't get his evening medication for two days because I forgot to write it down), I started thinking more carefully about what actually belongs in a housesitting guide. Not just what I remembered at the last minute while packing, but what someone genuinely needs to function in your house without calling you every four hours.
Here's what I've landed on after years of trial and error.
Start with the animals
This is the big one. If you have pets, their care is probably the main reason you have a housesitter in the first place.
Write down feeding times, amounts, and brands. Not just "feed the dog twice a day" but "one cup of the blue bag kibble at 7am and 5:30pm, mixed with a spoonful of the wet food from the fridge." Your housesitter has never met your dog's food before.
Medications matter more than anything else in this section. Dosage, timing, how you administer it, what happens if they miss a dose. If your cat gets a thyroid pill crushed into wet food every morning, say that. Say what happens if the cat spits it out. Say where the backup pills are.
Include behavioral stuff too. Does your dog lose it when the mailman comes? Does your cat hide under the bed when it storms? Does the rabbit need to come inside if it drops below 50 degrees? Your sitter doesn't know any of this, and they'll feel a lot more confident if they do.
House systems nobody thinks about
You know how to work your thermostat without thinking. Your housesitter doesn't.
Cover the basics: how to adjust the heat and AC, where the water shutoff is, how the garbage disposal works (and what not to put in it). If your furnace has a filter that needs checking, mention it. If your well pump makes a weird noise on Tuesdays, mention that too so they don't panic.
Hot water is a surprisingly common source of confusion. If you have a tankless heater that takes 30 seconds to warm up, or a solar system that works differently on cloudy days, write it down.
Same goes for the washer and dryer. Your stackable unit might have a lint trap in a weird spot. Your front-loader might need the door left open between loads. These aren't obvious.
Emergency contacts are not optional
I know this sounds like the boring part. It's actually the most important part.
Your housesitter needs to know who to call when something goes wrong, and something will eventually go wrong. Include your vet's name, address, and phone number. Include your plumber and electrician if you have ones you trust. Include a neighbor who has a spare key or knows the house.
Put your own contact info in here too, obviously, but also think about what happens if you're unreachable. If you're on a flight or camping without signal, who else can make decisions about your house? Give your sitter that name and number.
WiFi and access codes
Your guest is going to need the WiFi password within about ten minutes of arriving. Make it easy to find. Write out the network name and password clearly, because nobody wants to crawl behind the router to read tiny text on a sticker.
If you have a smart lock, include the code. Same for the garage door code, the alarm system code, and whatever PIN unlocks the gate. If the alarm has a delay when you open the front door, say how long and what to press. There's nothing worse than setting off a house alarm your first night in a strange place.
Daily routines keep things from falling apart
A general schedule helps more than you'd think. Not a minute-by-minute itinerary, but a rough sense of what happens when.
Something like: "In the morning, let the dogs out, feed everyone, water the garden if it hasn't rained. In the evening, bring the dogs in by 6, feed them at 5:30, lock the back gate."
If there are things that happen weekly, include those too. Trash goes to the curb on Wednesday night. The lawn service comes Thursday morning and needs the side gate unlocked. The pool pump should run for four hours on Saturday.
Local info that makes life easier
You don't need to write a travel guide. But a few pointers go a long way.
Where's the closest grocery store? What's the best pizza delivery? Is there a pharmacy nearby? If you're in a rural area, mention how far the nearest town is and what's available there.
If there are neighborhood quirks, share them. The street floods at the bottom of the hill during heavy rain, so park on the upper side. The neighbors' dog barks at everything but he's harmless. The ice cream truck comes at 4pm and your dog will howl.
Spare keys and where things live
Tell them where the spare key is. Tell them where the flashlights are. Tell them where the breaker box is and how to reset a tripped breaker.
Show them where cleaning supplies live, where the extra towels are, where the first aid kit is. Not because they'll need all of it, but because hunting through someone else's cabinets at midnight looking for a band-aid is genuinely miserable.
Putting it all together
The biggest mistake people make is trying to do this from memory while they're packing. You're stressed, you're rushed, and you forget half the stuff that matters.
Instead, walk through a typical day in your house. Wake up, what happens first? Work through the day until bedtime. That mental walkthrough catches things you'd otherwise miss.
If you want to skip the paper notes and scattered texts altogether, Home Handoff lets you organize all of this into one shareable link. Your sitter opens it on their phone and has everything: pet care, house systems, codes, contacts, daily checklists. It beats my old method of sticky notes by about a thousand percent.
Whatever format you use, the point is the same: give your housesitter enough information to feel confident, not enough to feel overwhelmed. They're doing you a favor. Make it easy for them.