House Sitter Instructions Generator

A house sitter needs enough information to keep the home running for a few days — not a copy of everything your household keeps on file. This generator builds a role-scoped packet: your primary contact, the daily routine, and where to turn if something goes wrong.

What it generates

Enter a primary contact, your daily home and pet routine as a list, and any useful service contacts. The generator returns two sections: “House-sitter instructions,” which states your primary contact and then lists your routine exactly as you entered it — line by line, so “Morning: feed cat” and “Evening: bring in packages” show up as separate daily tasks — and “If something changes,” which lists your service contacts, a reminder to use official local emergency services first if something serious happens, and an explicit instruction not to share or photograph private household records.

Worked example

Primary contact set, routine entered as “Morning: feed cat” and “Evening: bring in packages,” and services listed as “Building manager, trusted neighbor” produces an instructions section naming the primary contact followed by both routine lines, and a second section listing the building manager and trusted neighbor as useful contacts, alongside the standard emergency-services reminder and the privacy note.

What deliberately isn’t in this packet

The generator only reproduces exactly what you type into the routine and contact fields — it has no separate field for access codes, passwords, or lock combinations, and typing them into a document meant to be printed or handed to someone outside the household is a real risk if that document is later lost or left somewhere visible. If a sitter genuinely needs access instructions, provide those separately and in person, not inside this printed packet.

Keeping it role-scoped

The point of a sitter-specific packet instead of your full household records is that a sitter doesn’t need — and shouldn’t have — access to your warranty documents, financial records, or anything unrelated to keeping the house and any pets or plants running while you’re away. Generate the packet, then read back through it and remove anything that isn’t actually necessary for the sitter’s job, even if it would have been convenient to include.

Before you hand it over

Note the date you generated the packet somewhere on it. A sitter working from a routine that’s a year out of date — a cat that’s since moved to a different food, a contact who’s since changed numbers — is worse off than one working from something they know is current, so treat this as a document you regenerate for each trip rather than one you reuse indefinitely.

A short walkthrough beats a packet alone

Even a well-written packet leaves gaps a five-minute conversation fills faster than another line of text could — where a specific light switch actually is, which door sticks, what a particular household sound means and doesn’t mean. Treat the printed instructions as the reference the sitter checks when they’ve forgotten something, and a short in-person or video walkthrough before you leave as the thing that actually prevents most questions from coming up in the first place.