Summer cottage - ROI weak, but ROH (Return on Happiness) at its peak?

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I bought a summer cottage almost exactly 25 years ago. I had fished a lot on that particular lake, camped on its islands, and dreamed of a little cabin. Well, one spring morning in 2001, I saw a small classified ad in the newspaper for a tiny, modest cottage on an island about a kilometer from the mainland. I called, and a couple of hours later, I was on the island with the owner. I thought about it over the weekend, and then the deal was done. I haven’t regretted it.

Indeed, it is a cottage in the most modest sense of the word; no electricity, carried-in water, a floor area of only 26 m², built in the 60s, and I am the third owner. It has a small kitchen with a gas stove and a small living room with a dining table and benches, a sofa bed, and best of all: the largest model of the Porin Matti (a traditional Finnish wood-burning stove). It heats up quickly with a small amount of wood and retains heat well. The cottage is insulated in the walls and roof, but there is no insulation in the floor. We even spent New Year’s there once in 25-degree-below-zero frost. We managed fine by piling snow against the stone foundation. Heating started in the morning, and the biggest problem was getting the moisture out. It hasn’t become a habit because heating in the winter is so laborious, and we have sometimes used rental cottages during the winter instead.

By the shore, there is a sauna with a plank floor and gaps between the boards, so you can actually see daylight through them. The steam (löyly) is magnificent because the air circulation is so good.

Back when I bought the cottage, there was a study regarding running electricity to the island. Fortunately, that plan was abandoned. If the possibility of electricity were offered today, I wouldn’t take it. We enjoy the asceticism and the candlelight on autumn evenings. There are four other cottages on the island, but none of them are visible or audible from our shore. There is also no fear of surprise guests suddenly appearing in the yard.

Among the good points, I can mention that the car journey to the shore is 25 km, followed by about five minutes by boat.

The worst part is that the cottage is located on a rented plot. This costs a little over €800 a year. And because there is no electricity, a couple of days at a time is the longest we stay there. Food keeps in a cooler bag in a small root cellar for the weekend. After a couple of nights, it’s nice to return home again.

The cottage isn’t completely without power. With a solar panel and battery, we can charge phones and a cordless saw.

My wife and I are already over sixty, so at some point, island cottage life with all the hauling of supplies and maintenance might become too strenuous. Then it will be time to sell the cottage and move on to rental cabins.

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23

This was a very smart decision in terms of costs, as at least here in the Savo region, electricity contracts for sparsely populated areas are quite expensive. We pay much more in fixed monthly fees alone than the actual cost of the electricity consumed on an annual basis. This is because winter use is very minimal and the cabin is heated with wood. In the summer, electricity is only used for lights, the refrigerator, the microwave, and the stove.

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My recommendation is that before buying or building, you should think with the whole family about what is expected from the cottage.

Finns’ expectations vary from a hidden forest cabin to a remotely controlled villa furnished and equipped like a home. Both extremes and many other options in between are good, as long as it suits the vacationers’ lifestyle. If the journey is too long, you won’t go. If there is no internet, the kids won’t be interested and you won’t be able to do remote work yourself.

A tinkerer would get frustrated at our cottage where a caretaker handles maintenance and snow removal. Someone seeking relaxed free time and a base for skiing, paddling, and mountain biking trips will be annoyed if they have to spend effective “game time” weeding the yard, painting the shed, or changing a faucet. A cook will be annoyed if the cottage has a worse kitchen and grill than at home. And so on.

The financial sacrifice can also be viewed in several ways. Like other properties, a cottage must be maintained, but this can be done yourself or delegated to others with money. The former saves money by doing it yourself (see: purpose of the cottage), while the latter may be more predictable, at least if delegation happens in the form of a housing company’s maintenance fee.

For us, renting out the cottage has been an existing option that can be activated if necessary. Our neighbor rents theirs out; so far, we have kept our own toothbrushes ready in their mugs waiting. This is also worth considering before buying, as location matters greatly for rental potential. A fell cottage by a lake, next to machine-groomed ski tracks and MTB trails near ski lifts, is easily rentable if you don’t have time to use it yourself.

P.S. For once, I have an avatar suitable for the discussion.
(Cassette and derailleur of a Canyon Neuron full-suspension bike)

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Vote for your preferred style of summer cottage, you can select up to 3 options:

  • Wilderness cabin without electricity or running water
  • Wilderness cabin with electricity and/or running water
  • Electricity, water, remote management, and induction stove with convection oven
  • Electricity, water, remote management, and induction stove with convection oven + neighbors
  • A waterfront is a must
  • A dry land cottage is also fine
  • What for? I already have a city apartment.
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26

I think “grandma’s cottage” (mummonmökki) would be a good option for your survey on summer cottage styles; many people have them (including myself, as my cottage used to be my great-grandmother’s home).

It has electricity and well water, and it is a fully year-round leisure residence.

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I agree, a granny smith/guest cottage would have been a good addition. I just can’t edit the poll anymore since the deadline has already passed.

Based on the voting results, I’m apparently a total outlier. We have electricity, running water, remote management, an induction stove, machine-groomed ski tracks, and a MTB trail maintained by Metsähallitus (State Forest Administration), plus neighbors. :grin:

And they are good neighbors too! :+1:

That last point can flip to a thumbs up or a thumbs down depending on how well you see eye-to-eye with the neighbors.

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About 20 years ago, I came across a really affordable way to become a cabin owner:

In the Oulu region, the city had granted “lodging permits” in the 1980s to various organizations for a roughly 1.5-hectare island off the coast of Oulu, where five different communal cabins were eventually built.

A base—converted from a Road Administration barrack into a gabled cabin—was for sale for 2,000 euros. The lodging permit could be transferred by establishing a boat club for the operations. The permit costs a few dozen euros a year. We got a building permit for a sauna and acquired a hundred-year-old smoke sauna frame, about 3x3 meters, which was transported to the island by snowmobile. We bought a large continuous-heating stove from a training center that held a substantial amount of stones. In total, the sauna cost about 1,400 euros; we assembled it on top of natural stones. The steam (löyly) is excellent!

The island is naturally beautiful, and the cabins are right on the shore. There are now four of us members in the club.

Since a couple of the partners have aged, we’ve been quietly trying to sell the cabin to acquaintances at cost price—around 3,500 euros. Times change, and very few people are interested in that kind of club activity anymore. It hasn’t sold, surprisingly enough. I don’t visit the island much anymore either since I have my own cottage now.

In its time, that cabin was nice for practicing cabin ownership. And working on things together was fun. Occasional seafaring started to get a bit nerve-wracking/scary. On the sea, wave heights can catch you by surprise. In itself, the 7 km route is quite well-sheltered by islands, and the scenery is great.

But it certainly is much easier when you can drive a car right up to the steps of your own cottage.

P.S. One of the biggest challenges on a sea island has been keeping the boat intact on a rocky shore. Fluctuations in sea levels are surprisingly large. With a crosswind, you need a bit of speed when departing and arriving so the wind doesn’t carry you off, which can be tricky if there’s also a swell. In midsummer, there are spots on the route where aquatic plants tangle around the propeller into a clump. If the commuter boat is kept at a pier in the marina all summer, you have to go check on it even if you aren’t using it. Then, when you finally do visit, you’re supposed to do some maintenance work at the same time (well, you should…).

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29

An easy and affordable way to store food is an LPG-powered (nestekaasu) refrigerator. We use one at our off-grid cabin and it has proven to be very effective. The fridge also has a freezer compartment, so even summer ice creams stay frozen. One gas cylinder lasts for several weeks, even though the gas is also used for cooking on a gas stove.

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In my opinion, “leisure home” is a better term than “summer cottage,” and a residence should be for year-round use—ideally with a hill nearby and freezing temperatures in the winter​:laughing: That way, the investment gets a higher utilization rate.

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A friend of mine was building a cabin (mökki) back in the day and had looked into the difference between a cabin and a villa/leisure residence. The difference lies in the toilet. If there is no indoor flush toilet, it is a cabin; if there is one, the dwelling is a villa, a holiday home, or a leisure residence.

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I personally sold my own inherited summer cottage as soon as I possibly could. The modest little cottage was difficult to sell, even though the driving distance to the Parliament House was about 45 minutes. I haggled on the price just to get rid of the nuisance.

There is still one undivided estate left, consisting of fields + a farmhouse, which is used as a communal cottage. I agree with Lohis that I would never enter into a joint cottage venture with my own money. But since that estate still generates enough rental and capital income every year to keep things running without anyone needing to put in their own money, it works quite nicely. The income is enough for heating, maintenance, snow plowing & lawn mowing as outsourced services, insurance, etc., and we are never there at the same time as the relatives. Someday that estate will have to be dissolved, though. For now, it’s quite nice to spend 3-4 weekends a year there, and the drive to the Helsinki metropolitan area is short, under an hour.

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A friend of mine bought a cottage and wanted the road there to be plowed. I wondered a bit what one would even do at a cottage in the winter. But now that I have my own cottage, it’s surprisingly easy to enjoy being there even in winter. You can heat up the lakeside sauna and the hot tub just the same. I ended up getting a snowmobile so I can haul wood from a local farmer’s forest. Spending Christmas at the cottage is the absolute best. And New Year’s, and Midsummer, and Easter… Late winter is a magnificent time when the sun starts to warm things up and the migratory birds arrive. It’s good for the cottage to be within a reasonable distance, with snow plowing all the way to the door and maintainance heating! Then it’s nice to go there year-round. In winter, it’s wonderful to light a fire in the oven and just sit there daydreaming in front of it. Sometimes we’ve watched the northern lights from the hot tub. The starry sky is much clearer in the countryside, too.

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We bought a cottage in the autumn of 2020 and the price was definitely not high. 2 hectares of pine heath, 150 m of private sandy beach on a large local lake, but in a suitably remote location. The price reduction was due to the previous owner not thinning the shoreline trees for 10 years. Black alder turns a beach into quite a thicket, and the realtor’s photos gave the impression of a dilapidated plot and cottage. Visiting the site created an unreal feeling—how has this not been sold in six months? A second visit with the other current owners and we moved to close the deal. I was so excited that I only noticed a third sandy beach on the plot after the purchase was finalized.

A downside could be considered the shallow sandy shore, which means a dock would need to be over 20m long to be able to dive into the lake from the end. That doesn’t bother me since we haven’t bothered getting a dock, and I don’t really understand anymore why every cottage has to have one. You can just walk in to swim at our place. We also have a raft serving the purpose of a dock. The raft can be easily moved according to water level fluctuations or even from one side of the beach to the other. For the boat, there is a boat ramp where it rests during its downtime.

A correctly chosen cottage is not an unpleasant labor camp; a poorly chosen one can be. For me, cottaging represents a contrast to everyday living, and I don’t crave special amenities. The amenities we do have include electricity, a well, a hot tub, and a small piece of our own forest.

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35

It’s fun listening to these experiences. It seems like a large portion of people live in the city, as they value the kinds of things you get by living in the countryside, which means you don’t need a cottage to enjoy those experiences.

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My spouse and I bought a villa 5 years ago and moved there from the city on intuition. It has certainly been quite a journey. The holiday home market has changed considerably as well; the socio-economic profile has clearly risen since we moved. I warmly recommend a property with permanent residency rights if you’re looking to move at some point. It also increases demand.

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That’s probably true. But often it feels like a change of scenery is a significant factor for relaxation. I grew up on a farm by a lake. I didn’t think it was anything special back then when it was just everyday life. In fact, my parents sometimes wondered if they should build a cabin. And my ex-spouse’s parents have a house on an island (accessible by a causeway) in the Kotka region near the sea, yet they still have a cabin on an island 10 km away out at sea. But to each their own. I like having a city house with a 5 km bike ride to work, and then being able to drive 45 minutes to the cabin when I’m off. Living in the deep countryside would be quite okay, but for example, during a snowy winter, just getting to the main road by car could cause a bit of stress. Basic tasks like that require real effort there. And with municipal mergers, services can end up quite far away. But it’s nice if some people manage and have the energy to stay in Finland’s emptying heartlands!

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Yeah, whatever works for each person is fine by me. We had two options: either live in the countryside, or have a city apartment in Tampere plus a winter-habitable cottage. The latter option would have required 2-3x the budget. We’ve been happy with this solution where the detached house also serves as a substitute for a summer cottage. There’s no urge to go anywhere else to relax, like there was back when we lived in an apartment/row house. This way, we also had more “units of freedom” left over to invest.

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