Digital Nomadz

housesitting

In the winter of 2011, we sold all our belongings and ended the contract for the rent of our apartment in the citycentre of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. Since that day, we are officially ‘homeless‘ in the sense that we do not have a place to live of our own in The Netherlands anymore. We left the country to start traveling and have been on the road until this very day, more than four years later.

Our travels were an experiment: let’s travel for a year and see if we can sustain a living while we are abroad in that period. We did not really think about what we would do, where we would live and work if we would stop traveling. After a year of roaming the Central American continent, we had fallen in love with the journey, with being on the road living in freedom. We could go wherever we wanted, park the van wherever it is pretty and meet so many inspiring people along the way. We got the hang of exchanging our skills for accommodation: for a period of five months we stayed at a lovely campground in San Cristobal de las Casas in the southern mountains of Mexico, in exchange for a website and online booking engine. It is just one of the many ways we started to exchange. Since then and after being away for several years, we now have found a nice balance between travel and family life. Each year we travel to Holland to stay for several months.

In 2015 we started a new experiment: sit houses in The Netherlands. We do not have our own space in Holland and staying over at friends’ and family’s place is fun for just a few weeks, not months. So, our first house sit was an apartment in The Hague, close to the Scheveningen beach. Steven’s aunt invited us to sit her house for a month and we loved it! Taking walks on the beach, go running or take the bike to the city center. After a month in The Hague, we moved on to the next house sit in Rotterdam. A great apartment close to the park of a friend of us who had to travel to Singapore for two months to work. In 2016 our stay in Holland extends from January to July, this time it is not just us but also little baby Isa who joined the Digital Nomadz team in november 2015. We stay until mid march at both our parents’ places off and on, traveling between their places until we can move into our house sit at another aunt of Steven, who offered us a housesit in Glanerbrug, a village close to Enschede.

Next year, in the summer of 2017, we are starting a new housesit experiment: we offer an exchange. Between may and september 2017, our Volkswagen van Nina is available for an adventurous roadtrip in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. In exchange for a brick house, a campervan or a tiny house somewhere in the Netherlands. We have experience taking care of horses and dogs. We don’t mind working on the land or in the garden ;-). It would be great if there are bikes available or even a car for us to use every now and then. Nina the Volkswagen van is fully equipped: chairs, table, stove, pots, pans and a bed. She is ready to take you on an adventurous travel for a few months. It comes with a drive away tent and can host a total of 4 people.

Are you looking for the adventure of a lifetime in a vintage Volkswagen van in the summer of 2017? Can you offer us a house, apartment, campervan in exchange that is situated in the Netherlands? Contact us so we can get introduced!