A weekly visitor is a different challenge from a one-off guest. This person will arrive on a rhythm, move through the whole home, open cupboards, run noisy equipment, and become part of your dog's map of normal life. Introducing her properly means designing the first visit, agreeing the rules she follows around the dog, and writing them down where she will actually read them.
Decide before she starts where the dog will be during visits. Some dogs settle best in one closed, comfortable room with water and a chew while work happens around them; others relax more when they can watch from a distance. Either choice works, provided it stays the same each week, because predictability is what converts a stranger into furniture.
The First-Visit Protocol
Keep the first visit short and deliberately uneventful, ideally when no actual cleaning needs to happen. Meet in a room with space to retreat, keeping her on a lead, and have the visitor settle into a chair, ignore the dog completely, and chat with you while you feed the dog small rewards for calm watching. Ignoring is a skill to request plainly: no reaching out, no sustained eye contact, and no calling her over.
Let any closer approach be the dog's idea. If she walks over to sniff, the visitor stays still, lets the sniff finish, and drops a treat beside her own foot without leaning over the dog. If the dog keeps her distance, that is a perfectly good first visit, and distance shrinks naturally across the following weeks as the visitor's smell, voice, and routine become familiar. Walk the visitor through the house afterwards with the dog settled elsewhere, so the tour itself does not become a following game.
Rooms, Order, and Rules the Carer Follows
Agree which rooms she works in and in what order, and keep that order steady, because a dog can learn that the bathroom comes after the kitchen and settle around the pattern. Talk through the practical hazards together: outside doors and gates closed before the front door opens, cleaning products never left within reach or on low surfaces, and bins with food waste kept shut. If a vacuum or mop terrifies your dog, schedule those rooms for when she is settled elsewhere or out on a walk.
Write the household rules that involve the dog in plain terms: her cue words for moving aside or settling, whether she is allowed on furniture while work happens, no feeding her anything beyond the treats you provide, and what to do with found hazards such as dropped medication or chocolate. Rules stated once verbally get reinterpreted; rules written down get followed.
Retreat Space and Briefing Notes That Get Read
Protect one retreat space, her bed in a quiet corner or a specific room, where the visitor never reaches in, moves her from, or cleans around her while she is resting there. If that room needs cleaning, you move the dog out beforehand yourself and resettle her, rather than the visitor disturbing her mid-rest.
Keep briefing notes short enough to be read in two minutes at the start of a visit: the greeting routine, the room order, the retreat rule, what unsettled behaviour looks like in this particular dog, and what to do if it appears, which is usually to pause, give space, and phone you. Update the notes after the first few visits with what you have learned. Holding those notes in KinsLe, where Family Sharing lets the cleaner or carer and family members read the same version, prevents the slow drift where each person quietly invents their own routine.