Finding medium-term housing in for long-term travel
I've read articles from time to time about "digital nomads" and people traveling on a very long-term basis, but I've never been able to figure out how to handle housing.
My girlfriend and I can work remotely and so the idea is to spend 1-3 months in a country, then move on to spend another 1-3 months in other country, and so on. 40-50 hours a week working, free time out and about. This is a way of life for the next year or so, not a vacation or an expense-account business trip, so we don't want to spend all year in small hotel rooms, renting a room in someone else's place, or cheaply-furnished studio apartments, which is what the digital nomad type seems to do... we want a decent kitchen to be able to cook something more elaborate than ramen, and size/comfort/quietness approaching the standard of living we could have staying at home.
The problem I seem to run into with 1-3 months is that, unless you rent for 6-12 months, you're looking at nightly rates. $120 per night is fine for an airbnb when you're traveling for a week, but for a month that comes out to $3,600 for a place that isn't comfortable enough to stay in for more than a week or two--that starts adding up over the months. airbnb rooms don't discount their nightly rates much for monthly stays and in any case it's hard to find availability for 30-90 nights in a row.
For what it's worth we tend to like second-tier cities (or preferably the kind of town your grandmother lives in, but I've already written those off as wishful thinking). Geographically we're all over the place on different continents.
So how do people do it?