Almost exactly four years ago, we bought a house in Neskowin. As of December 27, 2016, it belongs to someone else.

This is part of our 100 Things in 2016 challenge. Here’s the full list.

Becky and I both grew up with stable summer-vacation destinations on the Oregon coast. Hers included Gleneden Beach, and my memories all seem to revolve around Honeyman State Park. The original idea for buying a house was to give that same memory anchor to our kids, so they’d have a place they remember fondly from their childhood.

But in the end it was too much. We bought a bigger house than we had planned, expecting to make up the difference by turning it into a vacation rental. We tried three different management companies but that never panned out; the house lost money every single year we owned it. There’s also the stress of managing a property, knowing that the house is being abused by strangers who don’t know that you spent 12 hours making sure every puzzle was complete and in its own box. Becky poured a lot of herself into making this a great place to stay, but her “reward” was to have to fix everything whenever we stayed there.

All this, plus the financial reality of Will’s stay at Sandhill, made us realize it was time to say goodbye. So we sold it the same way we bought it – completely furnished minus wall decorations. We had scoured Groupon and LivingSocial for discount canvas-print deals, and covered the walls with Becky’s photography when we first got the place, and we brought all that stuff home with us.

We learned a lot from this experiment, chiefly that a house that big just isn’t right for us. We’ll be back to Neskowin someday, hopefully in a house that we don’t have to rent out to afford.