Let's Talk About Buying A Lake House Up North (.com)
This is a collaborative brainstorming tool for folks who are considering shared ownership of a lake house up north. We're exploring what it might look like to purchase a property together. It is not a commitment to put down money now, or in the future. It's a request to think carefully about how this could work, and to dream a little, and to hopefully have fun doing so.
Buying a shared property can be a little fraught, so it helps to get clear on expectations, values, and decision-making processes upfront. This is effectively starting a specific kind of intentional community: a group of family members who explicitly agree on how to share costs, maintain the property, make decisions, schedule lake house usage, and handle conflicts before they arise.
It's not about communes or robes or chanting, but about being thoughtful and explicit about how we want to collaborate. This kind of exploration is going to take a while—likely years—but if we want to have done something, we've got to start doing it.
I thought about putting together a skeleton brainstorming document with something like ten subjects that each might have five or six topics — it might be seven pages long even without any actual content. I figured most people would open it and immediately close it again. Instead, this simple purpose-built tool organizes our brainstorming in a way that's easier to navigate and contribute to.
Taking inspiration from Diana Leafe Christian's "Creating a Life Together", one of the most important things is getting everybody aligned. That's what we're trying to do here — and hopefully discover that we're dreaming about some of the same things.