anyone ever done a house swap/home exchange?

[Reader]

Seriously considering it for summer vacation. We live in a location that gets lots of tourists. I'm wondering about whether our homeowners' insurance will care, what level of preparation people do (clean out your drawers or do guests just live out of suitcase). Anyone done this?

[nfowife]

I don't have experience but my cousin and her family who live about 90 minutes north of Paris are interested in swapping with someone in the northeast. Let me know if you'd be interested! They are looking for a July or August swap. They have 3 little boys.

[sntm]

I'm on homeexchange.com - our first one is for spring break next week! My partner at works has done eight exchanges.

[american_mama]

We are renting our furnished house now for 3 months to someone from another country. We switched home insurance just before the rental began. The first insurance said a couple months was kind of the limit of what mattered to insurance (we were originally looking at a 6-8 month rental), but they would consider us to fall within that timeframe. The second insurance did not care, perhaps because it was only 3 months, perhaps because it was not a conversion of our home to a rental property. One less experienced person at the insurance did start to make some noise about that and the car, but a more experienced person quashed that.

Our renter is on our auto insurance, but did not raise our rates, perhaps because it was one person in her 50's. Her age was greatly to our benefit. They did require her to have an international driver's license issued by her home country (usually through an auto association). Had she been American, they would have run her driver's check, but they could not do that since she was foreign.

It took some talking myself into this to be willing to accept a renter. I ultimatelyl kept telling myself it's just stuff, it's just stuff. We needed a renter to be able to afford to live abroad. I kept reminding myself i didn't want my concern with the physical state of my home and belongings to stop me from having that experience.

If you swap for a week, I would buy a folding luggage rack, clear out half a closet and a part of a dresser and be done with it. On terms of prep, I cleaned out one dresser and one closet in our master bedroom, but did not clean out the other. I left enough dishes that she could use, but packed away a relatively new set that I like and did not want broken. Can't remember what I did with non-perishable food in the kitchen or staples like mayonnaise and mustard in the fridge; I actually ran out of time and my familiy handled must of that after we'd left. I left her one set of linens and a few towels, but packed the others away as I felt irrationally icky about all my items being exposed to another's person's body - crazy, but it was so easy to solve by packing them that I just did it.