Like my uncle who had an oceanfront mansion for decades without setting foot on the beach more than 5 times.:smack::smack::smack: It was really bizarre.
I agree with you for the most part. The trick is to have a vacation property within 3 hours of your home; within 90 minutes is even better. The further away the less likely you are to get to it.
When we bought our house 7 years ago. it had avocado shag carpeting covering the oak floors. The upstairs hall and stairs still have it; we kept it to help keep our then-young children from slipping down the stairs. Of course, now that they’re 9 and almost 7, maybe we should get around to removing it. Maybe before we try to sell it.
We bought ours 7 years ago. We’ve replaced all the windows, the gutters, the roof, the old oil tank (we switched to gas), put in insulation (yes, our house didn’t have any). In two weeks, the basement is getting waterproofed (mold!). The only improvements we actually made that were decorative were to replace the old iron banister with a wooden one, and add a deck. Someday we, too, would like to refinish the floors. My son’s best friend’s family just had their’s done–they had to move all their furniture to their garage, and their neighbors’ garages, and live in a hotel for three days. I am so not ready for that. But I wants it.
airborn salt water corrodes metal, damages paper and wood. When I lived in Va Beach on the oceanfront you could tell who lived there longest by the corrosion on their cars.
Oh I know. I have only met one family in my life that gets full value out a vacation home. That is my ex-inlaws and they are multimillionaires. They have a 300 acre working farm in New Hampshire that they go to every single Friday night and come back Sunday night and work their butts off while they are there. They also have full-time staff to work there 24/7/365. It isn’t cost effective but it is beautiful and you can’t rent the experience of owning a working farm. I never wanted to be locked into that high maintenance lifestyle but it works for them and that is very unusual.
For everyone else, that is money losing proposition overall and not a good choice in terms of flexibility. My mother and stepfather bought a 3 week a year time-share in Los Cabos, Mexico a few years ago. When I stopped laughing enough to ask them why, my business professor stepfather explained that it is a beautiful place and they liked it so much that they wanted to go there regularly. I asked him how he ever got invited to this mythical place if they only allow people that own timeshares there to go in the first place. He didn’t have a good answer for that.
Now they desperately try to round up as many family members as they can to go with them so that they can use up their generous time allotment because they have to go or lose it. My stepfather says that isn’t true because they can negotiate trades for many places around the world especially if they plan in advance and shoot for the off-season. That’s weird, I can go anywhere I want at any time and hotels don’t even check my contracts before they give me a room.
Jim and I have thought about saving up for a vacation place, and we came to the same conclusion; for three or four weeks of the year, we’ll just rent, and we’ll get all of the good and none of the bad. If we want to go to the same place every year, we can, but we don’t have to.
I’m with you on the camping. Maybe you can go for a good, long camping holiday with the in-laws’ trailer and your husband will get it out of his system.
