Realities...

This weekend, when I visited my site, I took my wife and kids along. Although my wife has been to the property before (it has been in my family's posession for about 35 years), it was her first visit in over 10 years.


There are a couple of reasons my wife hasn't visited the property in a long time. First, we live about 3 hours away, in a suburb of Fort Worth. Second, my wife is a flight attendant and normally works weekends. Since we've had kids, we just never had or made the time to visit together.

Frankly, my wife isn't completely on board with me making a major investment of time and money on a site that is so far from home. One concern she has is that absentee owner's homes are subject to vandalism and burglary in the area. She has a valid concern - my Dad built a conventional, stick built, cabin on the property shortly after he bought it, and it gets broken into every five years or so.

So what to do? My wife agrees that it is a beautiful property and a good site if you don't consider the distance and insecurity. One notion is to keep construction costs as low as possible - no frills - to lessen the potential loss. There is no way to prevent loss - if someone wants to break in, there is nothing to stop them (nearest neighbor about a mile and a half away). More later as I think this through.