Hosting on Airbnb

I should've titled this post How to Live For Free While Traveling the World, but that's a little misleading. While that is the end result, the process was a little more complex than that.

While living in Arkansas, we decided to rent out our CO home so that it would generate us some income instead of sitting there unused. There were several options for this, but we chose Airbnb because the website is easier for customers to use. Preparing the house for "vacation rental" seemed like it would be easy.

Not so.

Many people rent out a room in their home while they're still living there and have a lot of success. A woman down the street from us did that, but the room was accessible from its own door so it was pretty private.

To ensure the possessions we cared about were protected, we moved all of our personal items (clothes & other important things) to either the shed in the backyard or the crawlspace, which we locked. It doesn't sound like a lot of prep work but it definitely was. We went through the entire home item by item. If we would be upset if it was ruined, it went into storage for protection.

• Things you might not think about initially, like my nice Boos block cutting board, went into storage.
• All of the furniture stayed out and all of the pictures stayed up on the walls.
• We added smoke alarms to every room and fixed up some things that we didn't care about but would make a less than stellar impression on guests, such as a leaky hose spigot and a slow water dispenser on the fridge. 
• We put away our Keurig because a) we didn't want anyone messing it up and b) we didn't want to have to provide K-cups for people. So we bought a cheap drip coffeemaker and stocked the pantry with a couple big tubs of Folgers.
• I wrote a House Guide -- a 7-page document that included instructions for all the appliances and house rules, such as taking shoes off at the front door and stripping the sheets after the stay, as well as a section on the neighborhood and things to do.

Packing up my closet was a huge task in itself. I weeded out a ton of stuff, but that still left 6 totes (!!!), not including my shoes. Then there was the guest room closet, in which I stored my overflow things, like Halloween costumes and maternity clothes. This brought me to the grim realization that I own too much stuff.

Colorado is a vacation destination, which we remembered when we received a huge surge of interest in renting our home. But I chose to rent to one family who was interested in a longer-term stay.

The Result (so far)

We've had two families stay in our home using Airbnb so far. After so much prep work, we were nervous about it being a disaster, but it's gone great. Our first guests stayed for 9 days and were respectful and even washed some of the sheets to make it easier on our cleaning person.

The next guests are renting longer term. We have good communication with them and they seem like good people. They're booked for 3 months with the expectation to stay through the end of the year.

We're hopeful it'll be a good source of income while we're not living in the house. If all goes according to plan, it should pay for the mortgage and utilities there, and the mortgage on the house we're living in now.

It's tough to do while we're out of state, but we have a friend mowing the grass and checking in, which puts my mind at ease to know we have someone we trust keeping an eye on things.

Update: The family living in the house (The Stays) are amazing. They're thoughtful and helpful and super chill. Even though we could be making a lot more money with more, shorter stays, and there's a lot more wear and tear on our house this way, I'm glad to have someone we know we can trust in the house. We know they'll take care of things, whereas a bunch of random strangers might be fine, but they also might not be.