I recently stayed at the home of a friend up in Vancouver. She had some electrical wiring problems, and since I know wiring, I helped her with them as well as some computer networking issues. Very kindly she said that made me a houseguest from heaven (as opposed to the houseguests from hell we have all heard about.) I was able to leave her place better than I found it. Well, mostly.

This immediately triggered a business idea in my mind which seems like it would be cool but is, alas, probably illegal. The idea would be a service where people with guestrooms, or even temporarily vacant homes, would provide free room (and board) to qualified tradespeople who want to have a cheap vacation. Electricians, handypeople, plumbers, computer wizards, housepainters, au pairs, gardeners and even housecleaners and organizers, would stay in your house, and leave it having done some reapirs or cleanup. In some cases, like cleanup, pool maintenance and yard sweeping, the people need not be skilled professionals, they could be just about anybody.

Obviously there would need to be a lot of logistics to work out. A reliable reputation system would be needed if you're going to trust your house to such strangers, particularly if trusting the watching of your children. You would need to know both that they are able to do the work and not about to rob you. You would want to know if they will keep the relationship a business one or expect a more friendly experience, like couch surfing.

In addition, the homeowners would need reputations of their own. Because, for a skilled tradesperson, a night of room and board is only worth a modest amount of work. You can't give somebody a room and expect them to work the whole day on your project -- or even much more than an hour. Perhaps if a whole house is given over, with rooms for the person and a whole family, more work could be expected. The homeowner may not be good at estimating the amount of work needed, and come away disappointed when told that the guest spent 2 hours on the problem and decided it was a much bigger problem.

Trading lodging for services is an ancient tradition, particularly on farms. In childcare, the "au pair" concept has institutionalized it and made it legal.

But alas, legality is the rub. The tax man will insist that both parties are making income and want to tax it, as barter is taxable. The local contractor licencing agency will insist that work be done only by locally licenced contractors, to local codes, possibly with permits and inspections. And immigration officials will insist that foreign tourists are illegally working. And there would be the odd civil disputes. An unions might tell members not to take work even from remote members of cousin unions.

The civil disputes could be kept to a minimum by making the jobs short and a good deal for the guests, since for the homeowners, the guest room was typically doing nothing anyway -- thus the success of couch surfing -- and making slightly more food is no big deal. But the other legal risks would probably make it illegal for a company to get in the middle of all this. At least in the company's home country. A company based in some small nation might not be subject to remote laws. OK, so what about the old fashioned system of just charging money for rooms and for services? Well, today it's clear that most people are not that interested in taking in temporary random boarders for money. A system like this might change that because I think the incentive to get the house fixed is strong. The empty guest rooms just stay vacant today, their value lost each day, because people don't want the hassle and privacy invasion and legal issues. When people are paying you money, you have to treat them like customers. And of course tourists don't want to run around making service calls for money either, and not just for the legal issues. There is also the travel time.

For me, I could imagine staying in people's guestrooms and spending a bit of time fixing their computers for them. First of all, I would get to know them first. I would not need to travel to find them. I would not need to market my services as is the case in the real world of money transactions. I would almost surely be using their computer network myself. As people advertised tasks they needed doing, I would be picking the task as one that was easy for me, as well as a house in a location I wanted. So many aspects of the cost of the transaction would be much lower.