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Blog post 11, the San Juan Backcountry Lodge is operating!
The Lodge had it’s first guests on June 19th!! Since that time we’ve been booked 80% of the time, which is incredible for a new property. From the first time I walked the property, to the first guests into the Lodge, took 4 years!!!! That seems like a long time to me, but there are…
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Reservations have begun!
After 3 years of planning, approvals, funding, building, we have reservations on the books! Actually, one of them is a wedding, which I wasn’t even advertising for. It was always our plan to do events also, and we oversized the water system, septic and electrical system for that reason, I just didn’t realize the demand,…
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San Juan Backcountry Lodge is now available to book on Vrbo and through the website!
First, I’ll give an update on the actual build, then advertising. The sheetrock is done, walls are painted, the deck and siding are over half done and we’re just about done with the flooring. After the flooring, we’ll move onto tile in the showers, cabinets, finish plumbing and electrical, etc… We’ve done all of this…
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San Juan Backcountry Lodge is dried in!!
This whole summer/fall, the big push has been to get the property dried in before the snow fell, because if we didn’t, we’d be trying to put a roof and solar panels on a steep roof that’s frozen. It would’ve been really dangerous and nearly impossible. I’m happy to report that it’s started to snow,…
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Current Challenges: Advertising and Off Grid Power
Well, Adam (my brother if you’re new here) is framing the Lodge incredibly fast. In mid June we arrived, and we’re now framing the roof. My job was getting the permits, county approvals and then the financing. That’s all done, so I’ve moved on to spinning up the advertising which includes the website, social media,…
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The foundation is done. We poured 60 yards of concrete, at 10,400ft, without a cement truck!!
We’re currently done with the foundation. To date, we have poured 60 yards of concrete without a cement truck, that’s 240,000 lbs of concrete, or 120 tons, at 10,400ft. And we did that in about a month. For the floor we poured another 10 yards with a cement truck. After doing the footings and walls…
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Bank Hell Part 2
As a recap, I’m telling the reader about the hell we had to go through to get a bank to loan us money on this project……. So that Agricultural bank that said they would give us a loan, told us that the loan would need to be a vacation home loan because they don’t do…
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Bank HELL!!!
While we were working on getting approval from the County to build, we had started talking to banks about giving us a construction loan. On previous projects in Utah, banks had loaned us 80% loan to value to build. And the value amount had been based on the appraised value of the finished build. These…
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The road thus far part 3, the San Juan County Approval Process
Once we thought we understood San Juan County’s main concern regarding the dangers around winter access, we decided to start the actual approval process. We were confident that somehow, someway we could get an approval because there were already lots of backcountry lodges in operation. One in particular, called the Opus Hut, requires that guests…
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The road thus far part 2, figuring out how to get San Juan County to approve the San Juan Backcountry Lodge!!
Before I got on board, Adam had spoken with a few people in Silverton about the process of getting approval to build on our property. They started to tell us about how, in the past, the county commissioners had rejected lots of projects like ours because they really didn’t want vacation rentals outside of the…
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