Perhaps, almost worth reiterating again....
Putting money into any boat (or car or plane or RV or......) will seldom be justified by viewing it as an "investment". Probably never.
Or, putting masses of your labor and chunks of your money into landscaping your back yard into a lovely garden with multiple gurgling water features. Or, etc.
Once we secure the "basics", we all look for large or small additions to our lives that give us pleasure and satisfaction.
I have an older cousin with an old garage/shop that has contained several 40's cars that he likes and intends to completely restore, "someday." It's looking like his children will inherit and have to figure out what to do with those. To me this is a bit illogical, but not to him.
Or another friend that restored a classic GMC motor home. He and his wife have been land-cruising once a year with it for well over a decade. I have no idea how much time he has in it, but it's a lot. He has also restored a vintage sailboat !
So, we restorers
never get our money back. Ain't Happening. But, you sensed that from the git go.
And we were never all that well-planned or noble about our big ol' boat rebuild either, We were on track, like most owners, to ride the depreciation slope slowly down and continue to use it as it aged less and less gracefully for another decade.
Then the pandemic came along. We saw that for a year (at least...) we were not going anywhere much. So we decided to rebuild/manufacture the new high-end $300K Fast Cruiser that we could no-way ever afford to buy.
Oh, when sold someday ---- our boat will bring a decent price relative to the mass of fully-depreciated boats that comprise 99.9% of the used market. But most of our money will be sacrificed on the alter of satisfaction and ego.
Heck, a friend of mine has a new ($$$) Beneteau 35, with an inventory ($$$) of racing sails and gear upgrades. No logical, to us, but they just Love that boat.
Returning to "the door we came in thru".... Like some other high end designs from the 70's and 80's, an Ericson 35-3 will always reward a family with a combination of speed, quality, comfort, and pride that has been seldom seem in the market since. You can replicate it, but it will take several hundred thou to get close.
Plan B for us might have been, maybe, perhaps, to use our year to build out a Factory Five 427 Cobra replica for about the same $. Way cool T-Rex of a sports car, but not
nearly as useful for a middle aged couple as a "new" boat that we can vacation on for a month at a time.
As someone said once, "that's my story and I'm sticking to it"
