We started dreaming about our own family vacation home many years ago about the time we began our own small family with the birth of our first daughter. My husband and I would look at the real estate market on just about every trip we took and consider what it would take to invest in property in all the places we loved. It seemed it would always be just a dream- life was too busy to add anything while we were so busy raising our growing family. Our primary investment was in our children, not in property, and we were content with that.
I remember the first time my in-laws rented a cabin in the north Georgia mountains for my husband's entire family, including his siblings and their then only two infant grandchildren. It was a great trip! In the following ten years, they added 8 more grandchildren and we enjoyed many cabin vacations, but the size of our "cabin" had become so large that we could only swing it every few years. The favorite places were in the Smoky mountains and Appalachians.
Our time spent with my husband's family was so memorable that about six years ago my own siblings and mom decided to start the tradition of vacationing together on occasion. We also had seven to nine school-aged children on that side of the family to accommodate. Needless to say, finding spacious homes for us all was time consuming. We now had both sides of the family to plan for, and my sweet husband became very adept at becoming our travel agent.
When we moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in 2014 and were living in the shadow of the Smoky Mountains, coastal places grew to be more appealing as a change of pace. My husband grew up in the Florida Panhandle and I attended college there so we naturally chose to visit beaches on the beautiful Emerald coast (we've never found an Atlantic Beach that compares!). We visited Blue Mountain Beach, Navarre, Pensacola and Destin to search out the best options. They were all our favorites! Now that our kids were older, we began talking in earnest about investing in our own vacation rental to keep the tradition alive once the kids moved out and started their own families.
Choosing the location was key. Several years ago we found a place we enjoyed visiting that best fit most of our family near Pensacola on the Bay called Bayfront Lodge. Carol is such a great host! Her house is also available on Airbnb and we highly recommend it! It is a magical place that we all enjoyed so much that we decided it was finally time to invest in our own vacation home on the same body of water. We started looking for properties in 2018, but didn't feel like the timing was right until the summer of 2020 when we found a beautiful deep lot with mature live oaks and magnolias for the right price. It took 6 months and lots of prayers to close and get all the assurance that we could build what we wanted on that property. Our dream had finally started to become reality!
Cousin time at Bayfront Lodge 2020
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Next blog post: Designing our dream vacation home!
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