How do people find the time to use a second home?

[LivesinLondon2000]

So DHs parents have a second home in the Cotswolds which they no longer use as they are getting elderly and don’t like travelling anymore. They want to sell to free up the money and would like us to buy it. We could potentially just about afford it but just wonder realistically how often we would use it.
We work in London Monday -Friday, our DC are at school here and have loads of sports/social things most weekends and would be very reluctant to come with us I think.
But yet I hear of so many people - both friends and celebs/people on Instagram - who pack up every Friday night after school and head to their second home in the countryside. They make it sound so idyllic (e.g. Marina Fogle’s second home in Oxfordshire where her kids have ponies etc but live in London during the week for school).
How on Earth do people with kids enjoy this or make it work?
I just keep thinking of maintenance on another house (can’t even manage one 😂) and whinging kids who don’t want to come and also the terrible traffic on a Friday night and Sunday evenings.
And that’s before we even get into the ethics of having a second home

My parents have a second home in America, they spend 4/5 months there a year. My father runs his own business so can work from wherever and my step mum works as a locum. When they aren’t in America they spend their weekends at their boat leaving before the traffic on Friday. The key seems to be no children and complete flexibility in work.

They are wealthy and often have a stay at home parent who organises it all so that the earning parent gets home from work, gets in the car, and just goes.

Then you have time. You have time for many things when you have a unemployed parent to facilitate it all.

Or just cash to pay someone else such as a housekeeper or assistant.

Buy it and rent it out. Property looks a better bet than savings and other investments at the moment

The families that I know who do it successfully have a SAH parent and older teens, so the teens don't need to come, or will be going on their own with their friends. They are also extremely wealthy and have cleaners for each home. Oh and the ability of the working parent to WFH for at least the odd day.

It's clearly not for you. All the people I know who do it, love it. Go often, close by. minimal maintenance, leave a set of clothing there. It's kitted out with everything they need. Take some food, get a takeaway and have a food shop delivered. Easy.
We have a caravan, sister in law has a holiday static caravan near Norwich, another one has house near west wittering. 3 people have small cottages as second homes in Dorset. It all works for them.

But it's probably not for you. Sell it.

Marina Fogle lives in Hampshire now and her dc are at a local prep school.

Yes agree re nanny, cleaner etc,
some London prep schools have an early finish on Fridays so the dc can get to the country and the parents have class birthday parties mid week etc. The dc then go to boarding schools near the country home when older.
It's a different world!

I think it works for those with older kids, when they don’t try to be there very much. That means it sits empty lots of the time or is let some of the time or loaned to friends.

Those I know with kids past about 8 go far less as weekend commitments means the kids want to be at home and able to do things with school friends or clubs and activities. They tend to go for a block of time over the summer - maybe 3 or 4 weeks (even that is tricky as kids get older) and do a week at Christmas and Easter and maybe a few days at other points. However, it’s definitely not going off each weekend. Accepting that’s how it has to work is painful for some people who want to be there all the time, especially for those finding it hard to reconcile the cost or feeling it’s a bit wasted.

Other people I know share the property with family - so it gets the use but no-one needs to go so often. And people at different phases of family life seem to use it different amounts.

The worst ones seem to be those that are hours and hours away and where it’s all done on a shoestring and no services paid for, so when the people are there, they spend all the time cleaning, gardening and doing maintenance. It is a luxury product and you need help budget to be able to enjoy it properly.

We both work from home so will be spending 5-7 days every 3 weeks at our second home - no kids

They are 3.5 hours apart

We inherited IL’s apartment in a coastal city 5(!) hours’ drive away and it just didn’t work. Too much cleaning, not enough long weekends and the feeling we had to go there instead of a “real” holiday to justify the cost.
We sold it and bought a university flat for DC1 and three rent-paying friends.

The OP mentioned ethics.

My parents have one, but they are semi-retired, plus they run an annual event where it is so they are out there for quite a lot of the year (usually a month around the event, 2 months over summer and a few visits for relaxation or to do with admin for their festival), plus they have 3 kids and 5 grandchildren, so between us it gets quite a lot of use.

I think they are better without children involved. The 2 people I know with one:
1 has no children, him and his wife often take a day off and travel up after work on a Thursday or on a BH get up early and go to work (about 90 minutes drive). They are there most weekends and when they retire they will move into it.
2 had a holiday flat on south coast and lived in London. Was also used by grown up children and when she was widowed she moved into it, children have followed to the area.

I think if long term it’s not an area you want to be in it’s pointless. My friend owns a farm and the house opposite is a second home which is only used for a few weeks a year, it’s huge as well. It’s a waste.

@hockeygrass
Ah ok - I follow Marina Fogle on Instagram and she doesn’t really mention where her pictures are taken. They’re just lovely outdoorsy pics of her kids having fun with their pony club etc. Very sweet.
It was someone else who told me she has a second house in Oxfordshire as they live nearby. That was last year though so they’ve maybe moved since then. But it was just representative of what a lot of (probably more well off than us!) families in London manage to do.
Definitely completely different if you live somewhere fulltime or yes maybe also if your kids are boarding.
I think for us though overall keeping this house as a second home is not going to work. Too much maintenance and we don’t have the time for it. We may well still buy it as an investment but I think would rent it out long term.

@Oblomov22
yes a static caravan with low maintenance and somewhere close - now that I could do 😊

I have a second home.

It lives in the cupboard under the stairs, and then when it suits me / us/ the weather looks good / we fancy visiting a particular place we pack up the car for a cheap break.

No maintenance, cleaning, no extra stamp duty, council tax or worries about Capital Gains.

That’s camping!

I have a friend who has three homes. They’re on a bit of a different planet to the rest of us and as she doesn’t work, it’s less
disruptive for her.

I find her talk of constant movement tiring. To her it’s a no brainer but I can’t see how it’s relaxing to pack up every weekend and drive a few hundred miles to the country home.

it does seem she spends more time there than the rest of the family. So she goes up first and comes home last.

I couldn’t be bothered with the cleaning and bills.

We have a cleaner in both homes, a Hive thing for winter and two of everything. Absolutely everything. We even sometimes leave the car in the country and just get the train down Sunday night and back Thursday night and WFH on Friday.

The cleaner in the country is brilliant though. She takes in a food shop on Thursday, puts wine in the fridge, irons and changes bedding, empties the dishwasher and puts the hot water on for us. She fills the log baskets, puts the bins out, gets freezer meals out to defrost and lets me know if there’s anything that needs looking at for maintenance like a slipped tile or fallen tree during the big storms.

When we first moved I spent hours packing up bedding, saucepans and towels and stuff and loading the boot and getting in to a cold dark house at 9pm on Friday night, stuck in massive traffic jams and realising we’d forgotten the frying pan and the spatula or the toothbrush or didn’t have enough pillow cases and now we have it perfect. We also have the grass cut on Thursdays in the summer by a local teen.

second homes have decimated villages and small towns all over the country, ruining lives for people in so many areas due to loss of communities and the inability to afford to live there, if that helps...

I love the idea in theory, but in practice, I just see a load of work. For me, they're in the same category as beautiful, ornate, massive gardens: amazing to enjoy, but so, so much effort to maintain - and I'm not sure it's worth the hassle.

It could work if you bought it and then rented it out, hiring a local cleaner and maintenance people when needed - although you'd then have to pack all of your private stuff away into a big lockable cupboard every time and would have to plan when you wanted to go well in advance, to make sure you didn't accidentally have guests booked in at the same time.

I think very rich people make it work by retaining/employing staff in each house - they do nothing mundane themselves in their main home, so all a second home involves (for them) is the travelling (probably with a chauffeur/helicopter pilot).

Even then, they often just pay all of that money to own them, but never visit, purely for bragging rights. I remember reading years ago about an Arab sheikh who paid £100,000 a year to rent/lease a prime parking space in an underground car park in Knightsbridge, as well as a top of the range Rolls Royce to park in it. It was later discovered that he hadn't visited the UK in over 20 years. What's the betting that he had the exact same set-up in Paris, New York, Sydney, Tokyo, Rio etc. - but then, if you're so rich that doing so would cost you the equivalent of 20p a year to an 'ordinary' person, it's probably just a little bit of harmless fun and something to boast chat about at dinner parties, as far as they're concerned.

I work term time only so go in the holidays and some weekends in between.
I can’t wait for half term, though, I’m going in the Sunday rather than straight away on the Friday.
My dh can work from home, so he brings his work with him so he’s with us at least the evenings.

It works if the DC board during the week. Although at that point really the weekend home is the primary home, and the weekday home is the “pad in the city” that the adults use in the working week rather than hotels.

Thank you. This thread is making me feel sick.

I spend the weekend doing washing, errands, generally getting ready for the week ahead. If I was decamping relatively often somewhere else we would never have any clean clothes!

There are a lot of second homes in my village, and I'd say the vast majority are used pretty minimally. Obviously there are exceptions, but maybe 3-4 weeks a year would be really quite typical. Rest of the time they sit empty.

It seems like people buy them either when they have small dc or when they have just retired, come lots for a couple of years, and then either dc get older & less interested / it becomes boring always going the same place on holiday / etc etc

Main exceptions are semi-retired people who spend a lot of time here and then move permanently & give up their first home when they retire fully. Plus the two Conservative MPs with second homes on my street who seem to be here for the entirety of the long private school holidays (not sure I'd be that chuffed if I was one of their constituents).

I don’t think I’d bother at your time of life. My uncle has a beach house about 1.5 hours from his home, but he’s 70 and retired so has plenty of time for all the maintenance and can easily afford it. He also has four adult kids and grandkids, who stay there and contribute too. So it’s well used all year round and everyone wants to be there. Good for them and the local area benefits because it’s almost constantly occupied.