I have mentioned in a previous post, that we purchased a house which had been used as a vacation home for the first 30 years of it’s existence. I occurred to me that most of the problems with this house stemmed from that situation alone.

In engineering, we call it entropy. That is, when something moves from an ordered state to a disordered state. It occurs in all things both natural and man made. A vacation home or a second home is quite different from a full time residence. For one thing, usually things that need repair at a vacation home are a lower priority. I know at our cottage, we take care of the emergency things (electrical shocks in the showers, for example) but other things are addressed on a “funds available” basis. There are several things at the Canada cottage that I would like to fix, the dining room that is slowly sliding down into the gully, or that mysterious bulge in the living room ceiling, and perhaps one day we will. We only spend about a month a year up there, so there are likely many unknown problems.

I can understand how things get prioritized. This house was treated in the same manner. I was working in the basement while we were renovating and I discovered a high water mark on the basement wall, about 3 feet above the concrete floor. That meant the well pump, the hot water heater, and the furnace were all submerged at one point. Who knows for how long.

Things work better if they are used rather than sitting idle. Idle machinery rusts, bearings become uneven, grease seals get hard, then crack and break, wood decays, shingles deteriorate, water leaks in, etc. These are the things that I would look for if I were buying another vacation home:

• Roofing shingles, in good shape?
• Trees and bushes kept trimmed back from house
• Signs of water in the basement
• Termites, Carpenter Ants, Carpenter Bees, or evidence thereof
• Sagging floors, ceilings or roofs
• Rusty plumbing pipes, brown water, etc.
• Access available to the attic, basement and all crawl spaces
• Buried oil tanks (this is a big one)

Most of these will be picked up by a good structural inspection. I would find the best structural inspector possible, don’t trust your real estate agent to find one for you.

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