In our wilder moments Mrs. Lagomorph and I sometimes fantasize about buying some kind of vacation home. Maybe a ski house or condo in New Hampshire. I am not much of a beach person but I know the Mrs. would love to have something near the water, too. My brother in law bought a summer house on an island off the coast of Maine a couple of years back.
Given our financial realities this is probably going to have to wait for at least a few years. Even then we might have to get the kind of place we could rent out to others most of the time just so we could use it ourselves for a few weeks here and there.
Does anyone out there own a second home? I am thinking more along the lines of a vacation home that you use yourselves at least part of the time, not so much a investment property that you rent out for the income.
For the purposes of this question I would even consider a trailer/recreational vehicle or a large boat to be a second home.
We have a second home 2 hours or so from our place in the city.
We found the property through a yahoo search, called the guy up and took a tour. We liked it but there was a big old barn and the whole deal was a little too expensive. A theater guy bought the barn so the guy still had the property and we bought it.
We paid the land off over the course of 3 years and in the meantime worked with a salesman at a log home company to put together a package we could afford. I had a little CAD program that I use to create floor plans, I’d submit the floor plan to the salesman and he would send me a package price. We went through 3 or 4 iterations of our ever-shrinking house and got bids from contractors before settling on a package we could afford. It’s a small 2 bed 2 bath log home with a full basement on 4 acres of land with a creek forming one of the borders, and state forest land is across the creek. We go up there most weekends all year round. Sometimes I’ll just go up there for the day.
We thought about getting a trailer or a yurt or some sort of temporary-ish shelter but that would have cut into our downpayment money, so we just waited.
If you have any specific questions I’ll try to answer them as bet I can.
No, no specific questions. I just hoped to live vicariously through someone else’s experiences.
Thanks for sharing your story, the property sounds truly lovely. I had never really considered the possibility of building a place rather than buying an existing dwelling. Did this route turn out to be more or less expensive than buying an existing cabin would have been? (OK, maybe I do have specific questions after all).
My parents and one of my brothers and one sister live about 2 hours north of New York City, in Ulster County.
We have a 50 acre vacation property a couple hours north of us. It came with a house and two guest cabins. It’s just a nice piece of land, not on water but very, very private with lots of trails and crown land adjoining.
Being a non-waterfront property made it much more affordable. There are plenty of lakes nearby with public access for swimming or fishing, and we know enough people with private access to water in the area that we don’t feel deprived. We paid it off in under two years and it carries very cheaply, just taxes and upkeep, basically. It’s buggy during this time of year but still gorgeous. My husband hunts the property & adjoining crown land in November.
One of the bonuses of having a larger property is the money to be made from timbering here and there. Logging helps the place pay for itself for some of the bigger expenses like new roofs & windows for all the buildings, land survey, grading, well drilling and that type of thing. It helped us pay the place off about a year ahead of schedule too.
It was a matter of choosing a location first and building on that, instead of buying an existing and maybe even bigger cabin for less money, but maybe the location wouldn’t have been as good. It’s a tough call.