Question about pet sitters!
Hi everyone. We are finally getting to take a vacation from the farm. We have only been gone overnight once in the last 6 years. We are going for 5 days because I finally found someone who will take care of everything and live in my house for the time we are gone. She is wonderful, knows my dogs well. She has met my cats, horses and goats and is comfortable with all of them. The problem is she will not tell me what she thinks this is worth. She is a young woman who is basically an artist and supports herself with smaller jobs, works hard but is quiet and unassuming.
I will have food for her to eat. She has the run of 53 acres. We have it set up so she will only need to do actual farm/critter work for about 3-4 hours and maybe less if she is relatively fast about it. The rest of the time is still work since she will not be home, but not the feeding etc.
We have not done this in a long long time. Does $100.00/day seem too much or too little? We want her to be happy and feel it was well worth it because I really really need to get away from here for a bit and would like to do it again 
I find a service like this invaluable, you never know when something happens and we really have nobody who could just jump in a help us.
I would certainly appreciate any response, either from those who have done this or those who would do it.
= new reply since forum marked as read
all for the advice.
This is a service we are willing to pay some excess for. We are out a ways from the city, the farm is not totally isolated but this is something we really need to get set up. Our kids are gone so our animals are now our kids, they are important to us so we need a good person and this is a very good person.
We are up to $120.00/day and fine with that. Looking at pet sitter websites it looks like that is maybe even a little less than it should be given we are adding horses and goats to the dog and cat mix. Everything is set up easy for her, nothing dangerous and at only 5 days there should be no mucking etc because all the animals have misters and fans and cool places to go so the barns can stay shut.
Thank you all. I really appreciate this.
doing something like dog sitting while he lived there as a musician. He moved away from there, loved it but did not like living there.
I LOVE NYC!
Yes, it is a bit different here.
Our daughter is getting married here in our town, and I would like a young lady we know to stay at our house to watch our dogs and some family dogs as well while we're at the wedding and reception. Her hours would be from about 2 p.m. to 9 or 10 p.m.
We have two small dogs, my younger brother has three shih tzus (and the five of them get along very, very well). Older brother has two - beagle mix, and small golden retriever mix who is vision impaired and scared of everything. She's not aggressive, but won't be too happy here. My sister-in-law may have her dog here, too. So, in all there may be 8 dogs. There won't be any aggression or problems, they've been together before, except for sister-in-law's dog, and he can be crated, or we can use gates to separate some from others.
What do you think a fair rate would be? I was thinking $100 - $150 for the night. She'd probably need to take them out and feed them, although the dogs really could wait if necessary. I could crate mine if need be as well, as could my older brother.
Thanks for your advice