is it possible to have a live-out au pair?

[serenequeen]

just wondering as i am back to work soon and we don't have a spare room... would need to work a split day say 8.00 - 10.00 and 4.00 - 7.00 - standard au pair duties. obviously would need to pay more than usual if live out. do you think it would be possible to find someone?

tia for your help

I would think so. Especially if you could find someone who is say a stdent and could arrange her class schedule around her work schedule. Maybe you could post an add in a local university paper? Or maybe someone with kids of her own would be willing if she could bring her kid(s) with her. Or... maybe someone who has a live in au-pair could share with you (Assuming aupair lives with other family)

Hope some of this helps. It's probably worth having a look. Where are you? If you are in or around London, I would think there would be a lot of options.

Good luck.

Our DS (5) is picked up from school 3 times a week by an au pair who lives with another family. She stays with him for 2 hours on those days, feeds him, plays etc. We pay her at nanny rate for those 6 hours a week and ocassionally get her to do an extra hour or two a week cleaning DS's bedroom. However, not all families who have au pairs are flexible about them working for other families, even when it is in their own spare time. I don't know why and I don't know how common it is. You also have to be very flexible in case the first family changes their schedule, as they come first. It's not ideal but it can work. Good luck.

Could you employ an au pair and rent her a room locally? SQ I thought you had just moved in to a mansion - what has happened?!

thanks for these suggestions

yes we are in london, so i think renting her a room somewhere else would be prohibitively expensive. i know there are a lot of au pairs/nannies in the neighbourhood, so finding a flexible arrangement with another family could well be the way to go.

it's just this split day thing - that's really what we need but it's hard to see how that would work for someone having to come to us twice a day - bit of a drag for them i'd have thought!

cd - mansion, er... well we do have a lot of space on the gf and everyone always assumes because of that we have umpteen bedrooms - but we have "only" four, which are all being used at the moment - one for dh & i, two for the kids, one for dh's study.

there's potential to convert a currently unused bathroom or the loft to create a spare room - but after taking into account the cost, lead time and inconvenience of the building work, together with the fact that neither of us are that keen on having someone else living with us - i thought i'd think about whether a live out au pair would be a possibility. in terms of the help we need, it is the standard au pair duties (or at least what i think they are based on what people on MN say) down to a t.

thanks again, keep them coming

SQ - you could hire two, one for the morning and one for the afternoon. Otherwise it wouldn't leave an au-pair the 5 hours a day to work for her other family. How old is your child? Could s/he get used to two different persons every day?

This would be the bathroom without the bath?

What do you actually need one to do? If it is just breakfast and getting kids to nursery in am, would it be possible to get one or two of the nursery nurses to do it before their shift starts (nurseries will often have staff starting on a late shift) You could then have somwbosy elses au-pair just for the evening shift.

sq could you go to a local college and see if any nneb students want a part time job? Oh just read Uwila's post and see she's said that.

Message withdrawn

these are all great ideas, thank you

would love to hear more views

don't know if this helps but I was an au pair in the year before I started A levels. I lived in Paris and didn't live in the family home. They had an apartment which was quite big but they rented a seperate one for me in a different building. It as tiny, just a room with an ensuite bathroom really but it had a little kitchenette and the family used to buy all my food and I was at theirs most of the time. I loved it as I had my own space, and hey, I was in Paris aged 16 with no parents!

bump!

Do you have a bedroom that would be big enough to double up as a study? We have a similar config to you, 4 bedrooms, one used as a study, and I always thought if I had another baby and wanted an au pair I could move the desk into our huge bedroom and buy a funky screen to make it a separate area. Then the au pair could move into the study.

Just a thought

Or could the kids share?

SQ?

hi cd, yes actually we do! the bedroom is l-shaped and i have been trying to persuade dh to move his study into the "l". he has dug in his heels and says there is not enough room (he's an academic and has thousands of books, metres of shelves, filing cabinets etc) - and on reflection, i think he's right. plus i would have to live with his utterly appalling untidiness! so no go, but great minds

thank you everyone. there are some great ideas here which have given me confidence it could work! i will be following up on a number of options.

thanks again

I have absolutely nothing useful to contribute to this thread but keep misreading the title as "is it possible to out-live an au pair?" and keep PMSL!

My "office" (a huge messy desk with clunky large old PC) is currently in my br. it's awful, very unrestful and inconvenient-bedrooms should be preserved if poss as a precious private place FOR ME to take a break I now realise-or even sleep sometimes! We both can't resist using it as a dumping ground. I don't want to hear DH clacking away or vice versa, when the other is trying to rest or read, and I can't log on when I have insomnia like I used to or it wakes him up. It sits there glowing and humming now I am poorly, reminding me how far behind I am, and that I need a new AP ASAP and haven't found one for sure yet; it's here to make room for my au pair arrangement since last August. Which has itself been pants right from the beginning. Live-out is a great idea if possible, live-in is a large additional stress, which you must factor in, having a stranger here 24/7.

no you won't out-live them that's for sure.

Some au pairs like to live out - especially those who have been in the country for a while.

You can split the hours as you wish. We use our au pair for similar hours as you and then for 2 nights baby sitting.

Have you tried www.aupaircompany.com

It's great...

was just searching the archives to find out if anyone has asked about live-out au pairs before and the answer was - yes, me!

(used to be serenequeen for a while)

anyhow, two and half years down the line we are looking at this again and i wondered if there are any fresh perspectives?

tia

We live near Southfields SW18. There is a convent that has Catholic girls coming to visit England. THey live at the convent and can au pair or study or whatever. Our neighbours got a constant supply of au pairs over the years from there.

I advertised on gumtree for a live out person who did those kind of hours. I got a foreign student who is studying at the local university. It was fine, but I did have to pay her £7 an hour (no tax though), which isn't much cheaper than a nanny (although you wouldn't get a nanny for just those hours).

I'm a uni student and nanny for those kind of hours. I was a nanny so finding a part-time job that fitted around my studies was a masterstroke for me! And it means that I can force myself to go to the library during the day - if I was left to myself I'd probably sleep til lunchtime!

Are you near any unis?

If you are in a big city, you might be able to find a student who will be a live-out au pair.

You see quite a lot of ads on Gumtree for live-out positions.