Part Time Mountain Living | Cabin Life & Style | Expanding Experiences

Mountain living is unique and anything but effortless.  Doing it part time without knowledge to easily navigate the local area & its resources can be time consuming & daunting.  With only about  20% of some communities having full time residents, a mismatch of supply & demand & likemindedness across residents (full vs part timers), creates challenges related to offerings & expectations.  Full time residents are either retirees or long time with varying skill sets, standards & expectations.

I plunged into the vacation property scene over a year ago.  It took almost a year and a half to find the idyllic property – a vacation getaway, a place to frequent for long weekends & holidays  – and I acquired a mountain home that has fulfilled a part of my dreams of owning a second property, specifically one in the Sierra.  To say that I dove in head first would be an understatement, though at the time I thought I was prepared, with my finances in order, funding lined up, and a strong desire to build endless memories with family & friends.  Though, unless you’ve had experience of rural, mountain towns, primarily with vacation homes & rentals, you’ll find there’s so many unexpected responsibilities & a big learning curve specific to the location that come with it.  

This is not my first experience with mountain living as I lived in a small mountain cabin over 25 years ago when I was finishing college.  My life was so different then.  But like then everything about living in the mountains is a bit more cumbersome .

What I have learned on my journey of buying, restoring, revitalizing, modernizing & maintaining a 40+ year old California mountain property:

• A year into it & I am still getting to know the property, its ins & outs, maintenance items & schedule & seasonal expectations
• Understanding & navigating the local market takes time & patience.  This can be very different from what was learned during the buying process.  Your local area may not provide all services & products so it becomes necessary to navigate multiple communities & towns to find what you need.
• Enjoying the property.  A second property, where you only spend holiday or less than full time basically doubles your homeownership responsibilities, or household management to do list at the least.  I’ve come to learn tips & tricks to make operating, maintaining & monitoring smooth. It’s largely about simplicity, minimalism, & modern, digital smart devices that employ conveniences not found in many cabins.

With my first mountain property, there were so many things that I had not anticipated.  The wildlife (esp. rodents), weather, isolation, time commitment, & managing basic & challenging property upgrades. For better or worse I got my vaction home in it’s original glory, as it has never gotten any major upgrades or renovations.  The property’s sellers had been the only owners, having loved it in its early years and many thereafter, but in the most recent decade as the seller began to age out, the cabin had experienced some neglect.

I went to work on restoring right away but I often struggle to know whether the order of which I’m making repairs or upgrades makes logical sense.  Is from the ground up the logical order?  Perhaps.  I do know that the best way to understand how and where to invest in repairs and upgrades is with time, discovery & just getting to know the property better.  Experiencing all the seasons, literally & metaphorically.  I began by gathering as much info as I could on the home, its history and the local area.  Being a quality, well built home, designed and constructed in the early 80s is often a mystery to solve – one electrical box at a time.