A lot has changed since I wrote my last blog post of the tour of our cabin in the woods. For a few different reasons, we decided to tear down the tiny cabin in our back yard, and rebuild it on a waterfront property as a vacation rental in Merrickville, Ontario. It was a very painful and tough decision, with a lot of back and forth and uncertainty. But a few years later we are finally coming out on the other side. Let me give you a summary of what has happened the last few years, starting from the beginning of our cabin build.
Why did we build a cabin in our backyard?
In December 2019 we had just finished renovating our rental property in Morrisburg, and had it rented out. At that time, my plan was to work part time at my real job and invest in real estate on the side. But then in March 2020 the world changed. Real estate prices rose significantly in our area, and we could no longer afford to buy another rental property.
Our rental property that we renovated in 2019
We own 30 acres of land, and we had often talked about building a cabin for our own use. So we thought it would be a fun pandemic project to build a cabin on our property and then rent it out on Airbnb. We have a fair bit of construction experience and knew what we were doing. (You can see some of our our construction experience here). And we decided to take a risk by not getting a building permit and just start planning and building the cabin. Tony and I knew it was a risk, but it was a risk we were willing to take.
We started building the cabin in the fall of 2020, and it was completed by the spring of 2021. That summer the cabin in our backyard was booked solid with people looking to get out of the city. Here is the category archives with all our progress building our backyard cabin:
The Issue that led us to reconsider
By the spring of 2022 we had already started getting all kinds of bookings. However, one day the township showed up at our doorstep. They told me that a neighbor had complained twice about the cabin in our backyard. We live in the middle of the country, with no neighbors in sight. The cabin was set back so far from the road that you couldn’t see it unless you really tried.
To this day, we don’t know which neighbor complained, or why. But this led to us having to shut down the rental operation in our backyard. When we built the cabin we knew we were taking a risk. We didn’t expect to be shut down so quickly or by someone that lived close to us. Either way, we had a huge problem to solve. I cancelled all the bookings and then we started making plans to get ourselves out of the pickle.
Why did we decide to tear down the cabin?
We had invested a fair bit of money in the cabin in our backyard, and had a five year plan to pay it off. After one year, we hadn’t yet reached that goal. Keeping it where it was, as a glorified storage shed for our own personal use, wasn’t an option financially. It just didn’t make sense. Renovating the cabin to meet the building code also didn’t make sense. That would have turned it into a 20 year return on investment and we just didn’t feel that would make financial sense either.
We tried to sell the cabin “as is” and hope that someone could move it to their own location, but no takers. It was too tall, too big, and too heavy to move easily. We spent weeks thinking over our options of what could possibly work. Then we started looking at empty lots and the possibility of rebuilding. We had invested money into the cabin, why not invest a little more, move it to another location, and build some actual equity?
This is exactly what we did. Sounds crazy, right? Stay tuned for part two where I share the lot we found, and some of the hurdles we had to go through getting the lot ready for building and taking apart the cabin piece by piece.
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