It crosses everyone's mind when they put the key in the door for the first time in weeks after being away on holiday: "what am I coming home to?"
There's an ominous fleeting moment when you expect the worst as you walk through the door and for one Australian couple it could have been a lot worse, had their intruder not turned out to be a koala.
In the time Michele Goodman and her partner Viki Haines had been gone the curious marsupial had made his digs and looked very settled in just chilling out on the couch.
"We walked in and saw this lovely, beautiful, fluffy koala sitting in the lounge. It looked exactly like he was watching TV," Goodman told radio station KOFM. "He was facing the TV, sitting in front of the heater."
And, according to The Dodo, the little fella didn't scramble for the door when the original dwellers came back to reclaim their abode, in fact he didn't budge.
So the couple did what anyone else would: "We tried to get photos of ourselves with him, but we were a bit scared to get close," Haines said.
"Michele got this photo of herself as we were standing outside and keeping our distance. He's sitting on the lounge and we're out in the wind and the cold trying to get a selfie through the window."
That's definitely better than arriving home to an empty house.