Vacation Rental Blog - Seattle Duck House

I will add more later, but I wanted to show off my new project: Baby Name Clusters.

Talking on the phone with potential guests, it seems that folks are always trying to visualize the layout of the house. So, I spent a few minutes tonight sketching the floorplan (using my specialized software: MS Word). It is not quite to scale, but hopefully my potential guests will have a chance to visualize the house better and be able to make an informed decision about whether or not it will suit them.

Here’s my floorplan:

Over the past few months I have built and floated a gorgeous new dock! I will post some photos soon. I started last December by assembling the 8×20 frame (pre-drilling all the holes and mocking it up) in the garage:

(photo to be here)

Then, I dis-assembled it and a co-worker and my father-in-law and I hauled it down to the lake in pieces (on a cold winter day). We re-assembled it on the beach. First we put a set of 4 Ace floats on the rocky beach and attached the major 4×6 framing. The we pushed it into the water and attached the middle set of floats, then pushed some more and attached the remaining floats:

(photo to be here)

Then, I cut and installed some of the Geodeck decking. Over the next couple months I added the rest of the decking and build a 4′x12′ ramp, built using 2×8s and more decking. Just yesterday I re-positioned everything in the water and finished the decking on the ramp. I have a temporary anchor and still need to figure out a good way to keep it from floating away.

This sure beats the original dock we had which was fixed pier, rotting, tilted and very, very slippery in the winter.

This will be a great place to get into our canoe or swim from (after I add a dock ladder) or just sit and relax in the water.

Over the winter holidays, one of our guests drew a really nice picture in our guestbook:

Here is what they said:

Brian and family,

Our family loved the Duck House. We gathered here for Xmas with our Seattle Family and friends from Phoenix, Cleveland and California.

It was so comfortable and cozy. Thank you for all of the little details that made being away from home so easy. The kitchen is set up great and so is the rest of the house.

We were thrilled to have snow on Xmas day. It was beautiful watching here on the lake. We loved walking here in the area. Our 2 grandsons (6 months and 4 months) had a great time. Our youngest daughter even got engaged at the Space Needle while we were here! Many things to celebrate!
We will recommend your place to many and hope to be back someday.

Thanks again.

And here is what one of the kids wrote:

Brian-

Thank you so much. We had a great stay at the Duck House. It was a great place to stay with our family. It was well equipped, and the view was very enjoyable.

The directions and places to visit were very helpful.

Thanks again!

That is very rewarding that we have made a home where people can meet and really have a great time! You can read more comments in the full guestbook.

We have a physical guestbook located in the house, and I have finally typed in all of our guests’ comments. I have posted them as a page in this blog, and also using the VRBO associated guestbook (which is not very pretty, but people use it a lot when browsing via VRBO). I’m honored by the comments, and I’m glad that everybody is enjoying the place!

Parent Map is a local print publication that I see all over the place around Seattle.  It is published monthly and has lots of great stories, events and ads.  I have been working with their staff to create an ad and have it run in the August issue.  We made a slightly different ad to show up in the bi-annual publication called: Baby Map.  Here are the ads:

So, its been 6 weeks and we’ve had about 6 different groups of people come through the house.  Thankfully, everybody seems to really like the house, the lake and the location (so close to Seattle).  Its nice to see that all our effort in getting this place up and running is resulting in happy people.  I have thoroughly enjoyed talking to all the new people and hearing the stories for why they are visiting Seattle.  Weddings, births, visiting family, last-minute trips to escape the heat… people generally seem to travel for happy reasons.  (Well, I suppose a lot of travel is for business, but I haven’t broken into that market yet).  Anyway, its fun to help people have a good time and feel comfortable and at home while they travel.

Three sets of guests have come and gone at the Duck House. There has been plenty of glowing praise for the house and the peaceful and beautiful location. But, I usually try hard to get some suggestions after their stay so that I can make it better for the next guests. So far, I have forgotten a few things: no foil, no veggie peeler, ran out of TP (woops), confusion about how to check-out, missing trash can outside. These seem like relatively minor things that I can take note of and fix after they leave.

Today was the first urgent problem: the WiFi was broken. This was after their second night, and I got an email asking about extending the stay and noting the WiFi problem. I called her back quickly and rushed to the house with my laptop and a spare router. The router at the house was a really fancy Actiontec DSL modem and wireless router combo unit that I bought at a local garage sale a few weeks ago for $10. I showed up and none of the correct lights were on, so I rebooted it and it seemed to connect to the internet, but the “wireless” light was still off. So, I had to go into the configuration and turn it on and rename the network from the default. This was puzzling, since I had already set up the wireless and the previous guest used it extensively. I’m not sure why it was off, but hopefully that won’t happen again.

Very exciting post, for sure. It just seems important to note the first house call.

Whew… That was a ton of work. My exhauster painter (yes, just 1 painter) spent about 50 hours scraping the old flaky paint off house until practically nothing was left. He started about May 8th with 8 hours of power washing. Then, after a couple days on other jobs he came back in earnest and started scraping and priming. It seems this house was only painted twice in the last 75 years, so it was in pretty bad shape. Some siding needed to be replaced due to rotting, but 95% of it was quite good. Also, the design of the roof made for some extra abuse on the siding.

All in all, Mark spent 140 hours cleaning, scraping, priming, masking and spraying the house. We also found a nice guy to help out with some extra labor for two days. Furthermore, my father-in-law and I put in a couple days work at the end, in order to get everything done by Thursday night (May 31).  We still need to do about half the trim, but it looks fine for now.

When it was done, it took probably 200 hours of labor and $1500 of paint, supplies and equipment rental. Thanks, Home Depot (only 2 miles away). They always seem to have everything we need. Their airless sprayer (rented) worked great, and I kept having to buy more paint, late into the evening. Dark red (Behr: “Sly Fox”) needs a lot of paint to get good coverage. We used a total of 23 gallons.

Mark did a great job. He is a very experienced painter and really knows his stuff - he has painted industrial jobs, auto body and residential. He keeps a slightly shifted schedule than what I am used to, but he cares deeply about the jobs he finds and sometimes works 12 or more hours in a day if conditions are right. I found him on craigslist, advertising himself as the “$100 a day painter.” He painted (and prepped) all the interior rooms as well. Let me know if you want his contact info.

Our first guests showed up the day after we finished painting, and we (me and my in-laws) worked hard on Friday to clean up the house, inside and out, so it didn’t even look like the construction zone it was the day before.

Check out these before and after photos:

Before:

After:

I thought it might be nice for people to be able to call me.  I surely didn’t want to post my home or mobile phone online, so I searched around for a toll-free number which would just record voice mail or something.  I didn’t really realize the great options there are for this type of product.  You can buy a toll-free number and record your own greeting, let it save voice mail, have it forward to different phones at different times of the day, get multiple mailbox extensions, save faxes, make outgoing calls… There are just a ton of features.

The company I settled on is Ring Central, since they seemed to have a really good web interface for managing all this stuff, and it only cost $10-$15/month for their basic plan which includes about 100 minutes (1 minute charged per 1 minute of talking… I guess that some companies charge 2 minutes for each minute talking since they are really connecting 2 long distance calls to make it all work).  My number is 888-636-2305, in case you want to call.

After 2 weeks of using their service, I can say that I have been very impressed.  Firstly, I am surprised at how many people want to call and talk to me instead of just sending an email.  I personally prefer to send email when contacting someone, but I guess I do feel better when I see a toll-free number listed for somebody.  It does kind of make me want to call them.  But, their service is very nice and fast and seemingly reliable.  I can customize the greetings and call forwarding in almost any imaginable way.

I’m sure the technology itself isn’t too amazing, but I’m glad that they have been able to bring it to the masses for such a reasonable price.