We’re shuffling home to cold Minnesota today from our new vacation place in sunny Celebration FL. We’re heading from a place you can walk through a tropical paradise – sunny & 80-degrees – to a snowy landscape with temperatures in the teens overnight.

We’ve been gone a full 74 days, so we’re excited to get home. Everyone is asking us when we will be back in Florida, but we don’t really know.

We’ve only spent 18 nights in our condo since we closed. Most of our days since closing were filled with outfitting the empty condo with furniture, appliances, handyman projects, and everything else that is needed to run a household – from pillows to soap dispensers.

It was hard to assess what level of quality we should invest in purchases for a vacation place. We thought we could just buy ‘basic’ stuff – telling ourselves that we’re only going to be using these things 3-4 months a year.

Still, once we went shopping, we ended up outfitting the condo with more expensive furnishings & appliances – more similar to what we have at home in MN. Once you’ve gotten used to a certain lifestyle, it’s hard to dial it back a few decades. Since we’ll only be using these things part-time, they should definitely last.

We’re a bit below our budget for equipping the condo. I think we’ll come in at an amount equal to about 10% of our purchase price when we’re all done. The furniture stores took about half of the budget, with our handyman, Lowe’s, Best Buy Appliances, Amazon, and Target splitting most of the other half.

At this point, we don’t really plan to bring a lot stuff down to FL the next time we come here. While it often seems we have too much clutter, we don’t have a lot of duplicate items (except, famously, slippers).

In fact, even as we started packing this weekend, we realized we don’t have much to bring back. Most things we packed for our trip in January now have a place to stay in FL. We love to be a position to just jump on a flight with nothing more than a backpack.

After Easter, we’ll sit down with a calendar and plot our Minnesota / Florida plans for the next 12 months. I think it’s going to be complicated. At minimum, we do want to bring a vehicle down along with a couple bikes. It’s going to take a while to adjust to having stuff in two different states.

So off we go on our two-state shuffle. Hopefully we’ll see our new furnishings again soon!

Any advice for balancing a primary home & vacation home?

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