Vacation Homeowner How-To Archives

Vacation Homeowner How-To

All of the posts under the "Vacation Homeowner How-To" category.

Vacation Rental Owner Advice: Top Tips

Some of our most popular posts have been those giving vacation rental owner advice. For people dreaming of starting their own vacation rental, tips on budgeting, furnishing, and running that rental can be worth their weight in gold!

We don’t have all the answers, but we’ve shared some! Check out these articles to get started:

Planning Your Vacation Rental

Budgeting for your Vacation Rental : Make sure you’ve considered even the expenses we didn’t initially think of! Learn from our mistakes.

Choosi Vacation Rental Owner Advice - Sadler House ng Vacation Rental Furnishings : Sensible and beautiful can be one and the same. Learn to choose the right palette and the right furniture to please guests and protect your wallet.

Decorating your Vacation Rental : Once the basics are in place, the fun stuff begins! Linens, furniture, and more.

Designing a Bunk Room : Guess what? You can really screw this up! Get our tips and avoid the close calls we had while choosing the furniture for this very popular space.

Running Your Vacation Rental

Cleaning Secrets for your Vacation Rental : If you’re not cleaning your own house, how does that work? Read our best tips for keeping your cleanings on track and your guests delighted.

Vacation Rental Maintenance Checklist: Sometimes you need more than a routine turnover cleaning! Read about what we do during our visits and, minimally, on an annual basis.

Creating Your Own Furnishings

Industrial Coffee Table : Our most popular post to date! Build your own beautiful coffee table using plumbing parts.

Tray Table Hack : We use these transformed tray tables throughout the house and they have performed like champs!

Custom Coasters : Encourage guests not to leave rings your fabulous tables (you can try!) These are adorable and easy to make.

Make Useful Vacation Rental Signs

Coastal Non-Smoking Sign

WiFi Password (Cabins)

WiFi Password (Beach House)

We hope this vacation rental owner advice will help you as you pursue your own dream home.

Please consider following us on Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook and you’ll always get our latest! Better yet, come and stay with us! Book directly.

Sadler House November 30, 2017 Leave A Comment Permalink

Vacation Rental Maintenance Checklist

Every spring break, while Virginia is bursting into bloom and people are getting out their shorts, we pile into the car with boxes of supplies and luggage and start the 12 hour drive to Maine. When we get there, it’s often raining and there’s almost always snow on the ground. It’s not exactly the average person’s dream spring break getaway, but it’s our chance to do vacation rental maintenance on our home, which has seen many guests since our last visit at the end of the previous summer.

Why do we insist on spending a week at our vacation rental each year during what is commonly referred to as “Mud Season?”

Well, beyond the fact that we love seeing friends we’ve missed since August and visiting restaurants we haven’t gotten to eat in since last summer, there’s checking up on our house. While we certainly could hire our wonderful cleaning service to do a deep cleaning, there are some things only the owner can really take care of. Namely, you’ve got to walk in with the eyes of someone who left the house months before, and start spotting things that are not quite right. Read more →

Sadler House May 17, 2017 Leave A Comment Permalink

Wi-Fi Password Sign For Cabins – Free Printable

I have never been the camping type, despite my long stint with the Girl Scouts. Sure, I did my share of slogging through the woods and sleeping in tents, but I’d really prefer a well-furnished cabin than a campsite by the lake. I’m a grown-up now and I get to decide!
WiFi Password Sign - Free Printable

Some would say it’s not a vacation if you take your computer. My husband, however, actually left on a ski trip once with two laptops and no clothing in his luggage, so you can see what side of the argument we are on.

Still, many luxury vacation rentals happen to channel the pleasures of cabins in the woods without sacrificing the modern conveniences. If yours is just such a cabin, I’ve got the wi-fi pun for you!

Wi-Fi Password Sign for Cabins

Download and print this just so you can make your guests laugh – and they will be laughing (instead of crabby and crying) because they will be able to access your wi-fi. I’m sure the Girl Scouts have some sort of “Connectivity Skills” badge, anyway.

Click here to download the sign. You can either scrawl in your password with a Sharpie or use a free photo editor like Picmonkey to easily add your password using type. Anything goes, as long as people stay calm and log on!

Do you happen to need a wi-fi password sign for a beach house? Try this one! We also have a coastal-themed “No Smoking” sign.

Sadler House February 8, 2016 1 Comment Permalink

Wi-Fi Password Sign – Free Printable

Okay, so I’m old enough to remember saying “Surf the web.” Is that so wrong? I happen to have noticed that most of our guests (with the exclusion of the children) are also “of a certain internet lingo age.” Therefore, you must all forgive me for having a little fun with Ye Olde Wi-Fi Password sign.

Free Coastal WiFi Password Sign If admitting you remember AOL isn’t too embarrassing, and you like a good coastal joke, feel free to print as many of these as you want and hang them in your vacation rental for your guests to enjoy.

Hey – nobody is laughing at you when they urgently need the Wi-Fi is all I’m saying.

Free Coastal Wi-Fi Password Printable

You can either print these and use a Sharpie to scrawl the password on them (all laid back-like) or you can just pop over to picmonkey.com, open this file, and use their type function to superimpose your password in our image so that it looks a little slicker. Then save the file again and print it. I found this is perfect when printed on letter size photo paper and trimmed to 8×10 size.

Click here to begin.

Surf’s up, even if your AOL is down…

Hey – any chance you need a coastal-themed No Smoking sign? Check out ours!

Sadler House February 3, 2016 Leave A Comment Permalink

Vacation Rental Decor You’ll Love

Vacation rental decor has evolved.

Remember when you used to browse the listings and be faced with one house after another, all furnished with somebody’s cast-off recliner and mismatched sheets? Those houses are still out there, but there’s no reason for you to stay in one of them when there are so many owners using their great taste and creativity to create wonderful settings for your vacations.

Vacation Rental Decor for Everyone

We all drool over the homes in the design magazines and populate our Pinterest boards with their zillion dollar dream rooms. But is staying in an adorable or inspiring or luxurious setting just a dream for most of us? Isn’t that stunning decor by designers and for designers?

Not anymore.

In my time as a vacation home owner, I have met so many wonderful people who have inspiring vacation rentals in the perfect places. I asked a few of them if they’d be willing to share just one of their favorite rooms with me and explain how (and why) they put the space together that way. The best part is, these are homes you can go and rent, yourself! See how these extraordinary ordinary people are bringing the style to the homes that host your trip.

Vermont Chalet
California Beach Cottage
Texas Beach House
Maine Coastal New Englander Read more →

Sadler House January 18, 2016 3 Comments Permalink

Vacation Home Expenses: Budgeting for Your Dream

I didn’t grow up with people who had vacation homes, so it seemed pretty ballsy to our friends and family when my husband and I started planning to buy our dream home in Maine. Naturally, a major concern was whether or not we could afford it. With all the time it took us to save the downpayment, I had years to crunch the numbers on our future vacation home expenses from here to Sunday. I figured out how much mortgage, tax, and insurance were likely to drain us monthly. I estimated how much more we’d need to add to our emergency savings. I did the figuring about how much it would help us if we could rent the house weekly to other vacationers.

Oh, I did the math.

Vacation Home Dreams Meet Real World Expenses

In 2013, we realized our dream of buying Sadler House, and I signed a thousand papers with very sweaty hands. With some self-control, we managed to buy a home that was within the budget I had allocated to us. We crossed our fingers and moved forward.

We’ve owned and rented this beloved home now for more than two years, and I have learned about expenses that even my copious calculations didn’t previously anticipate. All in all, we’ve been very happy with our decision. Based on my experience, however, I thought I could spare some future owners a little grief by sharing a list of expenses to consider when they budget for their own dream vacation homes.

First, the obvious. Read more →

Sadler House January 14, 2016 2 Comments Permalink

Tic Tac Toe Keepsake

In order to give guests the optimal experience at your vacation rental, it’s important to pay attention to those little extras. Years ago, before we had our own place, we stayed at a vacation rental in the area of Luray, Virginia. When we arrived, the owner had left us a basket of goodies, including a pound cake she had baked, herself. Between that and the generous stack of white towels, we were immediately predisposed to enjoy our stay. We felt very welcome. Tic Tac Toe Keepsake - DIY

Now that we are sharing Sadler House with guests, we try to carry on our own gift basket tradition. We aren’t living next door, so we can’t bake each guest a fresh pound cake. Instead, I’ve tried to come up with fun little crafts that our guests will find both charming and useful. We hope that these little touches and a welcome card will make show our guests how thankful we are to be hosting them.

Recently, I was scrolling through Pinterest and I came to a stop at this craft by Megan at the blog Balancing Home. The product was an adorable little tic tac toe set that was made from rocks and carried in a teeny burlap bag.

While I was reading the post, I started pondering how I might incorporate this craft into my gift baskets. I resolved to find some sort of rocks and burlap bags on my next trip to the craft store and give it a go.

Well, we all know you rarely find exactly what you’re looking for, right? Instead of the natural burlap bags, I happened upon a stack of sea foam green ones on clearance in the cake decorating aisle, of all places. I got a bunch of them for 50 cents each. The color reminded me a bit of a Tiffany box, and I hatched a plan to make my tic tac toe kit a little fancier. Here’s what I did, and I hope you love the results as much as I do! Read more →

Sadler House November 2, 2015 2 Comments Permalink

Decorating Your Vacation Rental: 5 Important Tips

Decorating their vacation rental is something most owners have done in Decorating A Vacation Rental - Sadler House their minds, even before they had houses to decorate. I know this from the many people who pin my posts to their boards entitled “Beach House” or “Lake House” or “My Future Vacation Rental.” Planning is a crucial part of the process, if only because it keeps you going when everyone around you tells you that you are nuts.

When the paint colors have been chosen and the house is nearly ready for occupants, it’s important to reevaluate your previous plans and make sure they fit the house you actually bought and the people who are actually going to be viewing your listing. It’s also important to consider tedious practical matters like maintenance.

Never fear! Decorating your vacation home will still be as much fun as you’d hoped. Just keep these five guidelines front and center for a home that will attract your guests as well as delighting you. Read more →

Sadler House September 2, 2015 5 Comments Permalink

5 Tips for a Dreamy Bunk Room

If there’s anything people on Pinterest are crazy for, it’s a bunk room.

But, seriously, why not? Bunk rooms are loved by kids and they can be enormously practical – especially in vacation homes where families are rooming together and flexible sleeping arrangements are needed. I’ve seen countless bunk bed photos pinned to boards with titles like “Our future vacation home,” and I was no different before we furnished Sadler House. When we bought our home, we identified the second largest bedroom as our own future bunk room and immediately started planning.

What followed was a series of lessons-learned that should be heeded by any future bunk room decorator, because there were some logistical issues we never anticipated. As a veteran of the bunk room decorating wars, I share these pearls of wisdom so that you may avoid the mistakes we nearly made! Read more →

Sadler House May 18, 2015 5 Comments Permalink

Choosing Vacation Rental Furnishings: 5 Tips

All vacation home owners have been dreaming of their homes or apartments since long before they got the keys. If you are one of those people, chances are, whatever place you are able to afford will not be guest-ready the day you close on it. More likely than not, you will have a limited budget to work with, and dreams that are bigger than your resources.

As you start preparing your house for renters, you’re also at the beginning of an unavoidable battle between lavishing all your love and too much money on your new home and being realistic about the parade of guests you’re hoping to bring through your place. As the new love of your life, your vacation home will become a pet project that you have to keep under control. Always remember, with the many guests you’re hoping to host, it will not be the best place for you to put your “forever” furnishings and treasures…just yet.

Don’t despair! Choosing vacation rental furnishings and the foundation colors of your home can be fun, satisfying and practical. Although every home and situation is different, as a recent veteran of this war between wishes and needs, I want to share a few lessons I’ve learned, to help you get through this important time in planning the basic foundation for your vacation rental success. Read more →

Sadler House April 20, 2015 19 Comments Permalink