Owning two homes

It's challenging enough maintaining one home; how do you manage two homes?  More specifically the costs to owning two homes?

One way we're "saving money" is to take some of our current (and older) furniture up to the cabin, and replacing it with new (or new to us) furniture for the house.  I feel very self-conscious about spending money, and would prefer to have my husband's input on some of these decisions, but when I ask him, I don't get much of a response, and he leaves it up to me.  So, should I then feel guilty over spending the money for making our house more livable and family friendly?

I stopped at Home Goods yesterday.  Ended up picking up a few things for the cabin: a set of steak knives (because I don't like the cheap ones we bought at Wal-Mart), a colander/strainer, a spoon/spatula, and a over the door/drawer hook for kitchen towels.

One question that comes to mind is: Do we need TWO of EVERYTHING???  There's got to be things that we have at home, that we don't have to have at the cabin, right?  And, there could/should be things that we have at the cabin, but not at home, right?

If we're only up there for a weekend, it's easy to say we can "do without," but we're getting ready to spend two weeks up there....do we keep that same mentality when you're up there for a longer period of time?

Heritage Road is our cabin, but it's still a year-round home.  We haven't made a final decision on whether or not we'll close up the cabin for the winter.  I imagine the fun times we could have up there in the winter -- snowshoeing, skiing, snowball fights, snowmobiling(??!!!?), etc... -- but winter maintenance could be a problem, especially with big snowfalls.  Somebody else would have to snowblow/shovel/plow our driveway when we're not there.  And then there's the cost of heating the cabin while we're not there.  Obviously, that decision doesn't have to be made right now, but it's something to think about.