I have to say that I am so glad that I forced myself to keep this blog up along our journey. It's easy to get wrapped up in the work and progress, get lazy and just skip the documenting. I've said before it was more of a personal journal than anything, to one day look back and remember the process and appreciate all of the work and time that went in to turning our idea into a reality. I didn't make entries often, which I'm also glad of because it makes going back through the process much more succinct. So if you're interested at all in the fun filled, action packed journey we took to turn 40 acres of untouched woods into a popular tiny house vacation retreat I highly recommend you start at the beginning of this blog. It won't take you long to get through it and it's quite entertaining if I do say so myself. In reality though, there isn't an end to this journal. This entire story up to today is only just the beginning. We have big plans for 2021 that we will begin documenting soon! Meanwhile, here's the wrap up to chapter one, The Cottage:
My last entry was back in August. It's so cool to see how covid affected (or didn't affect) the process through 2020. And now here it is at the end of the year, having lived through such a crazy time it's hard to tell how our future plans will lay out. New president, new economy. But one thing is certain. Since we put the cabin up for rent, it has been consistently gang busters!
We went live on Airbnb and VRBO back in September. We initially thought that if we could rent it one weekend a month we'd be happy. It has been WAY more than that. In fact, we haven't had less than 3 bookings per month since we started. We have had to adjust to scheduling our own time there, in between guests. And there's not a lot of time to choose from! This is our calendar of bookings in December alone:
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| The light and dark purple indicates a guest is staying. |
Needless to say, we book a tad more than one weekend a month!
Rentals have become so popular that we had to hire a housekeeper to clean and reset for us. We met a terrific lady who lives in Hugo that we just love. She and her crew do an amazing job and we're so lucky to have her. We still go up at least once per month to check on maintenance issues or repairs. We usually end up staying a night or two also.
We ended up booking a couple of days for ourselves through the week this month to go hunting and if you've read the blog you know I've been looking for a specific large black feral hog for a year now. Well, I finally got him! My friend John and I were in the box blind we built.
He had already harvested a deer and I was looking for this hog. It was cold and raining. The rain was loud on the tin roof of the blind. With about twenty minutes of shooting light left John spotted him. He was coming out of the woods behind the feeder. He slowly made his way toward us down a thick game trail when he suddenly stopped. Spooked, he turned back into the woods, but he didn't run. I knew he'd be back. And so for the next ten minutes I waited, looking through the scope into the woods barely being able to make out some movement through the brush. Then he stepped out onto the trail again. It was getting dark and through all of the limbs and brush I could only see a silhouette of a pig facing me. John was in my ear saying "Take him! Take him! I can't believe you don't have a shot! Take him!" With my crosshairs in between the ears of the black silhouette, through the trees and brush I squeezed the trigger. The whole blind lit up with a flash and the pig fell straight down, dead in his tracks. John couldn't believe it, happy and jumping up and down in his chair. It was a great shot! After a few minutes we walked over to inspect him and he was big. He had nice tusks and best of all due to the rain he was clean.
We had walked out to the blind because the rain had made the ATV trails muddy. So we walked back to the cabin and grabbed a four wheeler and went back out to grab my harvest. Michelle helped me load him onto John's four wheeler and we road back to camp. It was now dark and very cold. I hung him up in a tree on my gambrel and saw he weighed 150 pounds. While I gutted him it began to snow. It was already near freezing and would freeze overnight so after I removed his entrails we let him hang overnight.
The next morning I skinned and butchered him and saw we would end up with about 60 lbs of meat. It was a fantastic hunt and we ended up drinking whiskey, visiting our neighbor friends and having a ball the rest of the trip.
When we got home, Michelle and I began processing the hog. We made bulk breakfast sausage out of the belly, unseasoned ground pork and beer bratwurst out of one shoulder, cut two loins and two tenderloins and then just wrapped both hams, the other shoulder and both slabs of ribs for later processing. It's the most delicious sausage we've ever had!
How much better could our little cabin in the woods get?!
So far, our guests seem to be enjoying it as much as we do. We have a perfect 5 stars on VRBO and a 4.8 stars on Airbnb. All of our feedback has been extremely positive. We even have repeat guests already!
I have mentioned previously about our next project named The Hideaway. It is underway! It will be a second cabin that sleeps 4. We already have water ran to it and the septic plumbing in nearly complete. The Hideaway sets back in the woods about 100 yards from the cottage and has it's own driveway, parking and will have its own outdoor BBQ area and firepit as well. We plan on renting it out too, although it will also serve as our personal hideaway to stay even while the cottage is occupied.
I look forward so much to continuing documenting the progress of the Hideaway and hope you enjoying sharing in it with us!
Click Here to View the Cottage on Airbnb
Click Here to View the Cottage on VRBO
