In early 2018 my wife and I started to get serious about purchasing a small lake cabin in northern Minnesota or Northwestern Wisconsin. We established a budget, had a general idea of what we thought we wanted and set off to find the perfect place. Luckly our realtor is family so finding someone to travel multiple hours in every direction and put up with our nonsense for 50+ listings wasn't that hard to find.
Over two years we scoured the north woods for that perfect fixer upper cabin. Unfortunately, that's when the reality of our dreams began to waver. We realized how little we understood about getting into the cabin market.
In the beginning we thought, make a budget, see a few places, select one and be off and running, WRONG! I mean sure if you have endless budget, no intent to do some work yourself and don't care about the health of the lake you're in good shape. Otherwise STOP! This is when we realized that 99.9% of the cabins in our budget had some kind of deal killing issue. Typically, the lake was in extremely poor health from overuse or pollution. The cabin was often a mix of DIY from generations of varying construction abilities or the location just plain stunk!. Regardless, over and over we found our budget wasn't going to include everything we wanted.
Eventually we took a step back to see what other options we might have. The initial dream was finding a small place we could fix up on a nice lake within 2.5 hours of home. The reality was that our budget allowed for a lot on a not-so-great lake with a decent cabin or a tear-down cabin on a nice lake, zero chance we would find both. 
After a full reboot, endless research, and winter of planning we came on the decision to find a lot and build our own place from the ground up. This will be fun right? Big GULP!
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