The secrets to happy house swapping

On another swap, I learned I had to be better about trusting my intuition. In the afterglow of my Paris vacation, my boyfriend and I arranged to swap homes with a couple from Los Angeles for five days over Christmas. I noticed something strange about the pestering nature of the wife's e-mails from the start. "I take pride in keeping my home neat and hope you do the same," she wrote. It will be fine, I assured her. "Do you have a washing machine?" she asked. In Manhattan? Hardly. "A dishwasher?" Nope. After the fourth or fifth e-mail, I was starting to have second thoughts about the swap, but I went ahead with it anyway, figuring that everything would turn out alright.

When we arrived at the couple's bungalow two months later, my concerns had abated. But then I discovered a typed list of instructions on how to keep the house spick-and-span—down to the correct way to wipe the fridge. As the week went on, I felt as if I was in "The Odd Couple": I was messy Oscar Madison, and the woman who owned the apartment was fastidious Felix Unger. Every time a crumb fell, my heart skipped a beat. A friend gave us toffee for Christmas, and I promptly banned it from the house. "Look at those nuts!" I gasped, imagining them scattering on the floor. The wife seemed to be keeping a close eye on us, too. She phoned twice from New York to make sure we were taking care of her house, and twice to complain about my place—she couldn't turn the key in the lock, and the radiator was rattling too much.

In the end, the stay was worth the trouble. By laughing at the situation, Alex and I were able to enjoy the California sunshine without worrying about our over-attentive host. Not to mention that her idiosyncrasies made for great breakfast conversation.

Of course, apartment swaps raise logical concerns about safety and privacy. When I tell friends about my trades, the first question they inevitably ask is: "You let strangers stay in your house?" That's usually followed by: "Do you hide your computer?" Allowing people into your inner sanctum is rattling, to say the least. At first, I couldn't picture strangers sleeping in my bed or drying themselves off with my towels. But I've found that I can usually get a good sense of people through their e-mails—friendly and enthusiastic people who open up about their lives naturally put me more at ease than those who come off as guarded. Plus, once we become chummy over e-mail, I don't feel as uncomfortable about having them in my home. In fact, I begin to look forward to their stay, as if they were friends, not strangers. Alex and I don't take too many pains to safeguard our house; we don't lock up our valuables or laptop in a closet, and we don't even have renter's insurance. Yet the only thing that's ever disappeared was a small part of our coffeemaker. (If you're reading this, Olivier, where is that missing piece?!) I've also never returned to a messy house—our guests always make the bed and put the dishes away before they leave.

The other concern I had about opening my home to strangers was that my life would be on display. Alex and I were in a tizzy preparing the apartment before Olivier and his girlfriend came to stay. "Do you think they'll like us?" I asked as I fluffed the duvet. "Will they think our place is too small?"

"They'll think we're obsessed with World War II," Alex quipped, looking at our shelf filled with history books. "Is that odd?" I replied, suddenly panicked. "Should I hide a few?"

Partly because I was curious and partly because I have a masochistic streak, I recently e-mailed the people we had swapped with to ask what they thought of our place. Olivier was the first to respond. "We were happy for your West Village neighborhood," he wrote in his broken English. "Yours was the first American place we had seen with interesting books." I gave myself a pat on the back—we are fabulously literary, c'est vrai. But I wasn't prepared for his next observation: "I wondered if you were single, as your bed was small and not very, let's say, adapted for two." A very French thing to say. And a bit rich coming from a guy who sleeps on a mattress on the floor.

Next, an e-mail arrived from the Los Angeles couple. The wife started out nicely enough. "Your many books made you seem like the intellectual type," she wrote. But then she moved in for the kill. "The shower was grimy, and there were dust bunnies on the floor," she wrote. Her husband chimed in next: "And the bedroom smelled like old saddles from the shoes." Ouch! I felt as if I had been socked below the belt. It's one thing to slam a girl's shower, but it's quite another to disparage her shoes.

The critique of my lifestyle notwithstanding, my house-swapping experiences have been extremely positive. I've saved thousands of dollars and gotten remarkable insight into the lives and habits of San Franciscans, Los Angelenos, and Parisians, among others. I've also learned that no matter where you go, you can always find people who share your values and mind-set—my swaps worked out well because I found a community that was as curious, trusting, and adventurous as I am.

I'm currently house hunting for my next vacation, in Tokyo. So if you see me on Craigslist, hit me up for a swap. I promise to move my shoes out of the bedroom.

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