Every year a certain kind of traveler lands in the North Country with a problem no booking site solves cleanly. A thirteen-week contract at the hospital. A construction job that runs through October. A house that closed three weeks before the new one does. Too long for a hotel room, too short for a lease — and in a rural county, the rental listings you’d flip through in a city mostly don’t exist.
We built our extended-stay units for exactly this gap. Full kitchen, living room, private entrance, free laundry, one weekly number that covers everything. This is a straight explanation of what they are, what they cost, and what living in Lancaster for a season is actually like.
The 13-week problem
Coös County’s long-term rental market is thin. That’s not a knock on the region; it’s arithmetic. Small towns, low turnover, and most of what does list wants a 6- or 12-month commitment — unfurnished, utilities in your name, deposit up front. If you’re a travel nurse on a standard 13-week assignment, that math never works. You’d be furnishing an apartment for a stay measured in weeks, then paying to break a lease or eating months of rent on a place you’ve already left.
Short-term furnished rentals exist up here, but they’re scattered, seasonal, and priced for vacationers — foliage weeks and snowmobile season push nightly rates up right when you need them to hold steady. What’s mostly missing is the thing between “hotel room with a mini-fridge” and “sign a year lease.” That’s the thing this post is about.
What the extended-stay units include
Red Fox Inn has 27 rooms; the extended-stay units are the apartment-style ones — ground level and upstairs. Both are set up the same way:
- A full kitchen — real stove and oven, fridge, microwave. Not a kitchenette, not a hot plate. You can cook a week of actual dinners.
- A living room, separate from where you sleep. After a 12-hour shift, that separation matters more than any square-footage number suggests.
- A private entrance with parking at your door. We’re a motor lodge, so your car, work truck, or trailer sits a few steps from the couch.
- Free on-site laundry. No quarters, no laundromat runs on your one day off.
- Everything included: all utilities, fiber-optic Wi-Fi, a flat-screen TV with upgraded cable, and heat and AC you control yourself.
Rates start at $129 a night or $799 a week. Staying a month or longer? That one’s a phone call — tell us your dates and we’ll quote the whole stay. The ground-level unit books directly; the upper unit is call-to-book at (603) 788-4921.
One honest note on the kitchens: call before you arrive and we’ll tell you exactly what’s stocked, so you know whether to pack your good skillet. Serious cooks always have one pan they trust. Bring it.
The math against a lease
Here’s the comparison, played straight.
A lease means first month, security deposit, sometimes last month too. It means buying or hauling furniture, putting electric and internet in your name, waiting on an installer, and — if you’re on assignment — hoping your contract doesn’t end, extend, or relocate while you’re still on the hook. Even a modest unfurnished apartment carries a few thousand dollars in move-in costs before you’ve slept in it once.
An extended-stay unit is one number. $799 a week covers rent, heat, electric, internet, cable, laundry, and furniture, with no setup days lost. When the contract ends, you check out. If it extends, you stay. The 72-hour cancellation window in our policies is the entire fine print.
And the honest other side: if you know you’ll be in Lancaster for years and you want a whole house with a yard, a long-term rental wins on pure monthly cost — that’s what leases are for. The extended-stay unit wins everywhere flexibility has value: any stay under six months, any stay with an uncertain end date, any stay where your time is worth more than a furniture run to Littleton.
For travel nurses: 1.25 miles from Weeks Memorial
Weeks Memorial Hospital is 1.25 miles from our parking lot — about a four-minute drive. You can leave at 6:40 for a 7:00 shift.
Details that matter on a hospital schedule: heat and AC are individually controlled, so day-sleepers coming off nights aren’t at the mercy of a building thermostat. Quiet hours run 10 PM to 7 AM and we mean them. Parking is at your own door — no garage, no hike across a dark lot at midnight. The entire property is non-smoking.
On money: most agencies pay a weekly housing stipend, and $799 is one clean number to weigh against yours — no utilities to add on top, no lease to break if the assignment changes. We’ve kept it simple on purpose. If your agency needs documentation for reimbursement, call and we’ll sort it out.
For contractors and crews on North Country jobs
The same units work for the other half of our long-stay guests: line crews, builders, surveyors, project managers. The motor-lodge format means the work truck and trailer park at your door, not under a clearance bar. Free laundry handles work clothes without eating your evening. The lobby pours complimentary Wayfarer coffee from 7:30 AM with a continental breakfast, so early starts are covered even before you’ve stocked the kitchen.
Bringing a crew? We offer a group discount on five or more rooms on a single invoice — the extended-stay units for whoever’s here the whole job, standard rooms for rotating crew. One bill, one phone number.
What a weekday in Lancaster actually looks like
Lancaster is the county seat of Coös County — a real working downtown, not a resort strip. From the inn, the week runs mostly on foot:
- Groceries: there’s a grocery store in town, minutes away, plus Polish Princess Bakery up Main Street for bread and pierogi. Open early.
- Pool: Colonel Town Recreation is a couple of blocks from your door — a town pool without a commute, the kind of rec spot most places lost decades ago.
- Breakfast: The Granite Grind for a sit-down breakfast; the lobby coffee if you’re moving fast.
- Dinner on foot: Scorpio’s Pizza & Sports Bar, Smokin’ T’s BBQ, and Copper Pig Brewery — in the basement of an old bank beside the Israel River — are all walkable. So is the restored Rialto Theatre, which runs movies with beer and wine.
- A proper night out (soon): The Den, our speakeasy-style cocktail bar, is under renovation and reopening soon — classic cocktails and jazz weekends, a fifteen-second commute from your door.
Weekends are the reward for taking a North Country contract. Weeks State Park is five minutes away, the Mt. Waumbek trailhead — a 4,000-footer — about fifteen, and Santa’s Village fifteen in the other direction. We keep a running list in our guide to things to do in Lancaster, and if your job runs through winter, read up on snowmobiling out of Coös County — the trail network leaves from practically everywhere.
The fine print, upfront
- No pets. Service animals are always welcome per the ADA, but we can’t take pets — better to tell you now than at check-in.
- 100% non-smoking, everywhere, including the units.
- Check-in from 3 PM, checkout by 11 AM, and you’ll need to be 21+ with photo ID.
- Quiet hours 10 PM–7 AM — a feature, not a rule, when half your neighbors work early shifts.
- New Hampshire’s 9% rooms tax applies — though there’s no sales tax on anything else you buy all season.
Setting it up
There are only two of these units in a 27-room inn, and assignment seasons fill them. If your start date is on the calendar, the time to hold one is now, not the week you arrive. Tell us your start date and how long the contract runs; if it extends, we’ll do everything we can to keep you in place.
Check availability for the ground-level unit, or call (603) 788-4921 to ask about the upper unit and longer stays. Ten minutes on the phone beats a month of apartment hunting. We’ll take it from there.
